May I present Girl-drive.com’s first guest blogger Julie Block (remember when I linked to her post-feminist manifesto and declared that she should be a famous writer? Well, she’s starting here). Julie, who is 23, originally from Evanston, Ill. and a student at Cornell where she writes for the Cornell Daily Sun, will be posting approximately twice a month about feminism and pop culture issues. Here, Julie continues the pregnancy/TV convo by ruminating on Lifetime’s new movie, The Pregnancy Pact.
Also: I’m going to be adding more guest-bloggers as the year goes on. If you have something to say about young women or young feminism, and want to guest-blog here, shoot me an email at nona@girl-drive.com!
“Oooh, look at the baby!” Or, rather, “Look at the babies having babies!” That was all I could think when I watched Lifetime’s The Pregnancy Pact — a made-for-TV movie based on the case of a rumored pact made by a group of teenage girls in Gloucester, Mass to get pregnant at the same time. I’m not just being facetious; the girls are all so young, you can’t help but hear that diatribe. But “look at the babies having babies,” has been running through my head a lot lately — not just this week, nor this month, but the whole TV season.
Teen pregnancy is on the rise for the first time in the last decade, according to a recently published study by The Guttmacher Institute. According to the study, teen pregnancy rose 3%: In other words, 4% more teens gave birth in 2006 than 2005, and 1% more had abortions. The study breaks down the study racially and on the state level, although they don’t have results past 2005 yet. (It would have been especially interesting to see the breakdown by economic status.) They also don’t have results past 2006 — needed to prove if the change is just, in CNN’s words, “a blip or a trend.” However, the study does say, preliminarily, that there’s evidence for a higher increase in 2007.
I could wax on and on about what in the world happened in 2006 (I was this close to blaming Diablo Cody or Judd Apatow, until I remembered I was a year off), but that would be too easy, a cross between a Chuck Klosterman-like reach for mythical connections and a post-modern witch-hunt. Instead, I’ll talk about the only thing I ever feel knowledgeable enough to talk about: television.
TV, that behemoth known for its “supposed” way of holding up a mirror to cultural phenomena, has made teen pregnancy a fairly central focus this season. These days, I can’t change the channel without seeing adults (or at least those adult-children prancing around on shows like Grey’s Anatomy) sitting in a bar, woefully staring into a beer and lamenting how it is that their immature selves have suddenly gotten so old as to not only have to raise their teenage children, but now grandchildren as well. If it’s not morose 30-something grandparents, then it’s teenage girls looking into the intimidating plastic lens of a pregnancy test with two pink lines and wondering how in the world it happened. Remember that anti-smoking commercial that came out a few years back? The young (white, affluent) parents stand worried in the doorway of the bathroom, the wife showing her husband the pregnancy positive stick. The tag line reads: They’re about to come the youngest —PAUSE for dramatic effect, as the camera pulls into the bathroom, revealing a freaked-out teen, still squatting on the toilet — grandparents on their block. Basically, TV this past season has decided to create a bunch of fictional young, usually affluent (although not always white) grandparents to keep the PSA grandparents company.
First, the obvious: Juno, Knocked Up, The Pregnancy Pact, Secret Life of the American Teenage, MTV’s 16 and Pregnant and its sequel, Teen Mom, Glee, Desperate Housewives, and Grey’s Anatomy. As if that weren’t enough, on Private Practice, a show I only watched this one time, Pete and Naomi find out their 15-year-old-daughter is also pregnant. While Pete retires to the bar, staring forlornly into a bottle and declaring he has no say in the matter, Naomi tries to force her daughter to have an abortion, even if she thinks she’ll go to hell for it. Daughter opts out of pregnancy.
And that’s only part one. Moving on, we still have: Friday Night Lights, Lost, 90210, Life Unexpected, the Jamie Lynn pregnancy, Sarah Palin’s daughter, and, the most freakish of all …. Stephanie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn, in which (spoilers!) Bella gets married at 18, becomes pregnant with a half-vampire baby that starts killing her, and refuses to terminate the pregnancy. After the damn thing breaks her spine, she has the baby via a vampiric-C section, and then is turned into a vampire herself. Everyone lives happily ever after. I can’t wait until that movie comes out.
I wish that were all, but there are probably many more I’m not aware of. Teen pregnancy, young mommies, and other such things are not new to network TV, by any means; in fact, most television shows with teenage characters have had a pregnancy scare at one time or another: once upon a PSA, the FCC allowed shows to skip out on a requisite PSA if they did a “very special episode” showing the repercussions of unsafe sex.
What’s changed is that now televised pregnancy “scares” have turned into full-on pregnancies, often with the young mothers deciding to carry the babies to full term, and often raising their kids, usually to an unrealistically upbeat soundtrack. But while the birthrate is up on TV as well, that 1% abortion rate is not only not reflected, it rarely seems to come up at all. (You can’t say “abortion” on Fox.) In fact, I can only think of two instances where abortion is mentioned by name: First, on Friday Night Lights, and then last week on Private Practice, when Naomi comes off as a tyrannical mother for trying to force her daughter to have an abortion. It’s an interesting and troubling twist on the usual question of personal agency, and while I found it a worthy episode, I do have to wonder why, on a network surrounded by very young baby mamas who keep babies, the only discussion about abortion is framed in an evil, agency-stealing light. (On a side note, ABC and ABC Family have the greatest teen pregnancy storyline per capita, and are owned by Disney — not really known for its unconventional or diverse values. A lack of abortion-related story lines seems disturbingly apt when even pro-choice legislators are supporting limiting access to abortion in the proposed healthcare bill.
There’s been a fair amount of kudos given to The Pregnancy Pact, and programs like it, for at least talking about a wholly taboo topic. And I have to say, I didn’t hate the movie — it didn’t make teen pregnancy look like rays of sunshine. And yet with all this air time of teen pregnancy, I wish the discussion surrounding it were more well-rounded: a little more potential abortion discussion, a little more adoption, and definitely a little more “Did no one tell you what a condom is?!” From Secret Life to Grey’s Anatomy, it seems like TV writers these days just think that teenagers are too stupid to understand what birth control is, or think they’re too impermeable to suffer any consequences from their actions.
The data may reflect this … data that, just like The Pregnancy Pact, is used by both sides as ammunition for blame. While the study itself cites Bush-era abstinence-only education as a reason behind higher birthrates, conservative parent groups are just as openly, and loudly, blaming “Planned Parenthood-style sex education” for the magic 2006 button that sent everything swinging in the wrong direction. Kate Harding does a good job explaining this], and I have to agree, since I’d really, really love to blame these teen pregnancy rates, and any pregnancy pact, real or fake, on Stephenie Meyer. Women and their bodies are often the terrain ideological wars and culture battles are fought over; pregnant teenagers aren’t exempt from the objectification.
And while I do agree, like some, that at least the situation is getting air time, I’m hesitant to get behind this particularly baby train just yet. Glamorizing pregnancy or making it seem at all easier than it is in any way can’t be a responsible decision; nor does not having any characters make decisions past keeping the baby. Forgive me for getting my pro-choice all over your boob tube, but just once, just once, I’d like to see more than one of these teenage girls making the tough but understandable decision to have an abortion; for a high school principal to back the decision of the high school nurse to give out condoms; for a religious parent to suggest their daughter get’s an abortion without being completely villanized. ABC, I’m looking at you. After all, if (as the studies show) watching sexy TV leads to teens having sex, whose to say that watching babies have babies on TV doesn’t lead to babies having babies in real life?
–Julie Block, guest blogger
8 responses so far ↓
1 Charlie // Feb 1, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Probably predictably, for those of you who know me, I have something to say about this article.
1. Secret life on ABC does show teenagers having (lots of) protected sex. Condoms are shown, talked about etc. Abortion was also discussed and offered by a parent as a viable option.
2. Forcing someone to have an abortion is villianous and is not prochoice. This is a real issue lots of teenagers face.
3. Being prochoice means believing that people have a choice to parent, whether are not you think they are “babies”, wealthy enough or white enough to become parents.
4. Teenagers have Always had babies and always will. They are reproductively capable and are sexual beings.
5. “Adults” have more accidental pregnancies than teens; just ask your parents. But there is no uproar there.
I think this article has the tone that abortion is somehow a worthier decision/ harder decision for a teenager to make. As a prochoice teen parent that seems sort of silly to me.
Why does the author think more teenagers should give their children up for adoption? To fuel the white middle classes hunger for infants? Because they are arbitrarily incapable of parenting?
I agree that abortion should be discussed more and be more accessible but I disagree that it is automatically the “more correct” choice for a teen to make. There is no “correct choice” unless you are talking about an individuals decision of what to do with their body.
I an glad there is finally a diverse and more nuanced representation of teen parenthood in the media. And also, why is it such a sin to show a minor parent being happy/succesful?
Just some thoughts.
Charlie Rose
Previously 16 and pregnant, student, activist and mama extraordinaire.
Member and former site producer of girlmom.com
2 pt // Feb 1, 2010 at 2:41 pm
I think what Julie is objecting to isn’t so much the fact that more pregnant teens need to give up their children to adoption or make the choice for abortion. Instead it’s the fact that there is an extreme lack of the diversity in choices shown in the realm to television and in particular scripted shows on major networks. How these networks deal with this particular issue of teen pregnancy is generally quite narrowly scoped and unbalanced.
If life then is somehow imitating “art”, or whatever we are calling television now-a-days, as Julie asserts, it is essential that teens are able to see a variety of ways to deal with this issue on the idiot box, if only to realize the extent of the choices they have in this situation.
3 Julie Block // Feb 3, 2010 at 2:44 pm
I’m sorry I’m only responding to you now; I was working on another story and didn’t want to give you a half-baked reply. First, in response to all of your points:
1) I haven’t really seen that much of Secret Life, so I’m sure they did deal with condoms and abortion in detail, and I just missed those episodes.
2) I agree with you that forcing someone to have an abortion is … well I hesitate to qualify actions between a hero/villain dichotomy, but it is certainly wrong and a complete removal of agency, which is why I think it was such a complex and interesting episode. The point I was trying to make, however, is that of the few times recently on TV that an older-than-teenage adult, authority figure has encouraged their child/student to have an abortion / one of the teenagers almost has an abortion, the context of the story puts the adult’s choice and action, and therefore themselves in a villainous light. The other recent storyline that I can think of, Friday Night Lights, where the teenage girl herself chooses abortion, the adult/authority figure involved makes it very clear in her handling of the situation and the way she discusses it, that the girl’s decision to have an abortion is rare and not normal, therefore abnormal, therefore marginal. In other words, the way that abortion is dealt with on TV/film usually marginalizes it in a place where either the woman/people in question who are considering it are either a) villanized (Naomi), b) abnormal/different, or c) consider it but then reject their decision (Juno, for instance, and I think maybe what you may be referring to in Secret Life – again, I haven’t seen too much of it). In other words, it’s clearly represented as the minority choice, if not the wrong one.
4) Teenagers did have babies and always will, true. I agree with the reproductive capability/sexuality, that’s why, in my own personal beliefs, birth control options and abortion should be a fully available and explained option to women and men, regardless of age. That doesn’t say that a person has to choose to use either, but for quite a lot of people, those options are either not readily available, aren’t explained, or are cast in an abnormal right, so that those who might choose to not have children, may not have that option.
5) People have accidental pregnancies all the time. I don’t know if adults have them more than teenagers, but I wouldn’t be surprised – on top of that, I think there are a lot of adults who aren’t ready or weren’t considering having kids yet, either.
Ok, so. I wasn’t trying to argue that I think abortion is the better, or harder choice. I do think that abortion is often portrayed on the media as being a really difficult choice (a lot of scenes where a pregnant woman goes to the abortion clinic, and then changes her mind; again, Juno springs to mind here), but I think that choosing to have the baby, keep the baby and not put it up for adoption, is probably just as hard if not a harder choice. And I actually wasn’t saying that more babies should be put up for adoption, or even that only white, middle class families should have kids. I emphasized the economic status and race of the people involved in most of these decisions because I think it often is telling of what the writer is thinking. Why, for instance, do they have Naomi, African American, fairly well off, and adamantly pro-choice herself, so against her daughter having a baby? Why is one of the mom’s of the pregnant girls in the pregnancy class, who they always show as pissed off (and who had her daughter as a teenager herself) portrayed as being much poorer? I think the way that sex and sexuality and pregnancy, and even teen pregnancy, carries these unspoken ideas and connotations that connect these things to class and to race a lot, and so it’s interesting and I think, important, to see who is being shown doing what, and why.
Obviously, not every teenager who chooses to have a baby is going to be unsuccessful in doing so; I don’t know your story or anything about you, obviously, but from what you’re saying it seems like you have been, and probably are a better mom then a lot of so-called adults who have parenthood thrust upon them, or even wanted that. That said, I don’t think saying that for most teenagers, raising children is going to be more difficult is an arbitrary claim. The ability to make enough money to support oneself and one’s child, the fact that (and you might disagree with this) teenagers in our society aren’t considered adults and often don’t have the same rights, and, in my opinion, often life experience are all factors in this. Then there’s just, to me, all the sacrifices a 15, or 16, or 17 year old would likely have to make in her own life to raise a kid. Again, that’s not to say it can’t be done – I have friends at school who have toddlers – and have managed to do it. (Whether they’re happy or not about it is a different story, but that’s obviously them.)
I’ll be honest – I am concerned about teenage pregnancy. What I’m concerned about is the knowledge and messages that are available to young women. So if a girl’s sex education in high school sucks, or she’s not paying attention anyway (because face it, a lot of teens just don’t really pay attention), or it’s abstinence only education, and then the other education, the one more likely to sink in, is what she sees on TV, then I’m concerned about the messages, and that those messages aren’t nuanced enough.
Personally, for me, I think abortion is a better choice, but the whole point about the “pro-choice” slogan is the choice factor. What I would choose wouldn’t necessarily be what I would choose for others; what’s more, if I had gotten pregnant when I was a teenager, I may not have gone the abortion route.
And Charlie, I think you’re right; lots of people forget that and try to force their ideologies just as much as someone who is anti-abortion might. But I think that teenage sex and sexuality, and then, pregnancy, birth control, abortion and adoption, is so, so hugely misrepresented and skewed in the media, and I think that leads to huge problems in awareness and agency. For some, abortion may be the wrong answer, but for some, it may be the right answer. (I’ve read your site, girl-mom.com, and I think it’s pretty cool; quite a few of your posters decided that abortion was the right choice for them, and they were very clear and articulate about why.)
But for those of whom it may be the right answer, the visual message they turn to often represents abortion – for teenagers especially, because I feel like for adults on sitcoms, abortion is much more casual and “acceptable” an action – again as 1) against the norm, 2) wrong, on a religious, moral/ethical, or emotional choice and 3) makes it seem like abortion can and will only result in depression and regret.
What’s unfortunate to me, is that, for as many of young women there are like you, I know of many women and men who are my age or younger, who didn’t have abortions, didn’t put their kids up for adoption, and regret their decisions for various reasons – they can’t support their kids the way they wished to, they can’t have the life they wanted, they just didn’t want a kid to begin with – and I think, and I hope you’d agree with me, that that’s a huge problem for both those kids/babies themselves, and, forgive me, those other kids – late teen and early twenty-something adults who are, in some ways, still children.
Again, that’s not to say that all teenagers are incapable or shouldn’t have babies; I just can’t seem to figure out why it’s so prevalent on TV; and if it’s going to be, then I’m concerned that, as the above poster stated, there aren’t a variety of options explored to the same extent of unbias.
Anyway, I don’t usually comment on my own writing because I think it’s taking advantage of journalistic “authority” or what have you, but I did want to respond to your post, and I hope I did it in a way that may have explained myself better.
4 Teen Pregnancy Rates Up: Is Abstinence or Birth Control The Answer? : Healthy Life // Feb 3, 2010 at 10:30 pm
[...] Girl Drive – Julie talks about the impact television shows are having on teen [...]
5 TeenMama // Feb 8, 2010 at 7:58 pm
While I absolutely agree that the lack of diversity in representation of reasonable choices to a teen pregnancy is bad, I don’t agree with you that it’s irresponsible to make teen pregnancy out to be something other than a life-ender. A tremendous amount of the life-ender qualities of teen parenthood are a part of a self-fulfilling process in which “It’s hard to be a teen parent!” leads to “Let’s make it harder to be a teen parent!” and on and on and on.
Well, yeah, it’s hard to be a teen parent. A lot of what makes it hard is the fact that pretty much everyone thinks it’s so goddamn awful. Of course it’s hard to be a parent before you’ve established yourself in the world, but the constant shaming of young mothers makes it harder to then establish oneself in the world.
For instance, I’m applying to colleges right now. Going to college with a child will undoubtedly be a challenge, but what infuriates me is that I know the admissions committees are going to be discussing whether or not teen parenthood is such a massive mistake that they shouldn’t accept me. If they decide it’s a mistake, then it will be much closer to having been one. If they don’t, it won’t. It’s maddening that so much of the quality of my life is determined not by my choices but by people’s reactions to their own internalized fear of my choices.
6 Ben // Feb 9, 2010 at 12:43 am
Julie–smart article, and I really enjoyed it, but I have to say that I read the Friday Night Lights episode a little differently. When the pregnant girl (I can’t remember the character’s name) goes to talk to the Principal, I read the Principal’s response less as being that she thought the girl was “marginal” as it was that she, the Principal, was personally uncomfortable providing information about abortion providers but did so anyway because she felt she was professionally and even (I think) ethically obligated to present the girl with her choices. On some level, I think it was just good acting–the actress who plays the principal suggested a vexed and complicated array of emotions in response to a vexed and complicated issue while simultaneously suggesting her sense of her professional obligation to try to repress her own emotions when counseling someone. I actually thought it was an emotionally resonant scene of a sort that a lot of the other recent teen pregnancy melodramas (notably Juno) haven’t achieved.
And I guess the newest episode happened after your post, but it is interesting that the characters who support the girl’s decision to abort (Tim Riggins, her mom, the football player kid she slept with) are presented as cool and rational, while the pro-lifers are presented as lunatics. Honestly, I kinda suspect that when those episodes air on NBC, there might be a bit of a hullaballoo from pro-life groups feeling like they’re being portrayed as a bunch of ignorant, opportunistic, meddling rednecks.
7 Where are the girls in gross-out comedy? // Mar 24, 2010 at 2:52 pm
[...] This is guest blogger Julie’s second guest post. Have a great idea for a guest series? Email me at [...]
8 Guest post: An interview with Liz Tigelaar // May 19, 2010 at 9:52 am
[...] note: A while back, I wrote a post (my first, in fact) concerning the multiple teen pregnancy-related storylines on TV. Around that same time a [...]
Leave a Comment