Adolescents ought to have the right to make autonomous medical choices

Thanks, Zaradi.== Framework ==Con's case rests upon the misconception that self-ownership is somehow mutually exclusive with being "socially embedded". I agree that humans are social creatures and have to rely on other people to fulfill their emotional & material needs, but that has no bearing on whether or not they have ownership over their own bodies. Con seems to be conflating self-ownership with some strange individualistic state of self-sufficiency which entails complete independence from society, but in reality, self-ownership is strictly limited to physical bodily autonomy -- the right to exclusive control over one's own person. It is certainly possible to simultaneously recognize both our self-ownership and our social dependency, as they have literally nothing to do with each other... one is a fundamental moral characteristic of human beings, whereas the other is just a behavioral characteristic. Given that, when factors involving social dependency (e.g. "community norms") conflict with our right to bodily autonomy, it is obvious that autonomy should prevail.A. My ethical justification portrayed self-ownership and the right to bodily autonomy as *absolute*. Con did not address that justification at all, instead just introducing an alternative framework centered around societal norms which had no such degree of absoluteness. Obviously, when faced with two conflicting standards, if only one of them is absolute and the other is not, then we have to grant preference to the absolute standard. Thus, we place greater value on autonomy. B. But even more damning than its lack of absoluteness is how ill-warranted Con's framework is. Community norms do not necessarily carry any moral significance. Just because we have a psychological tendency to "define our identity" through the lens of society and its norms doesn't mean that those norms can claim any sort of moral authority over us. Autonomy isn't merely an issue of "identity" or "conception" -- it is a fundamental, objectively-existent characteristic of human beings, as I demonstrated last round. Reject Con's framework because it fails to connect its premises to its conclusions. C. Not only was the existence of a right to bodily autonomy necessary for Con to write his case (re: performative contradiction argument), but the existence of morality itself is contingent upon autonomy. If human beings have no autonomy over themselves, they are reduced to deterministic robots with nothing to distinguish them from the rest of the inanimate & amoral universe -- there is nothing to indicate that they are "morally significant" in relation to reality. Nihilism is not an option for Con (because his own case assumes morality), and therefore neither is denying the right to bodily autonomy.For those reasons, prefer my framework to Con's. Rational human beings have a right to bodily autonomy regardless of societal norms. Regarding parental rights, ignore Con's appeals to the 14th amendment and Supreme Court -- they are non-topical because the resolution isn't US-specific. Con puts forth four other arguments, but none of them actually justify parental rights. Why should we place any moral value on the affection or personal standards of the parents? We are given no reasons. Family might be a "socially valuable structure", but that doesn't imply that it's a "morally valuable structure". There is no reason to accept that parental rights even *exist*, much less that they outweigh the individual right to bodily autonomy. == Rationality ==With the paramount ethical value of the right to bodily autonomy established, now I only have to demonstrate that adolescents possess sufficient rationality to be granted such a right. Last round, I showed that the majority of professional medical research on the subject reveals no significant difference between the decision-making capacity of adults and adolescents. Con provides some sources asserting otherwise, but the quality of those sources are dismal. One of them is just a paper on bioethics which says "research shows..." without citing any actual research,. The only other source says that "appraisal of adolescents" capacity is difficult", but that doesn't actually prove what Con was saying (that adolescents *aren't* rational). Obviously, cognitive maturity varies from person to person, but my sources show that in general, adolescents have been demonstrated to be competent decision-makers.The resolution is negated.