14 year old Girl that killed her newborn baby

[antigone382]

57. Yes, the fourteen-year-old likely deserves some recognition of her fear and perceived powerlessness.

The brain--and our capacity for moral reasoning--does not fully mature until age 25. This girl was obviously kept severely unaware of the options available to her. I would (and have) feel the same way about a fourteen-year-old boy who committed a similar crime. I universally and unequivocally oppose treating teenagers as adults in the legal sense.

Children--even teenagers--are not adults. They are neither capable of the same kind of ethical understandings as adults, nor fully in control of their lives--and safe from acts of violence against them at the hands of those in authority over them--as adults.

No one denies that the act was horrific and that the newborn suffered immensely at the hands of its mother. But I am not ready to write off a young teenager as a sociopath beyond redemption, without at least some examination of what she might justifiably have perceived as very real threats at the hands of her mother or other authority figures.