Prime Time Prognosis: Fertile

Juno. Jamie Lynn. And now, teen pregnancy comes to prime time.

We’ve been here before, notably when Murphy Brown’s single motherhood ignited the election-year brouhaha regarding “cultural elites”. Knocked Up didn't quite elicit the same response, but then came Juno, whose smash critical and box office success was said to glorify teen pregnancy, which is somewhat analogous to believing that Nabakov’s erudition on display in Lolita served to glorify pedophilia.

Now, it’s no accident that Murphy, Juno, Alison and Amy are all white and live in rather stable socio-economic environments, although that may have more to do with target audiences than any residual ethno-cultural biases. However, there has been ample documentation beyond the Moynihan Report and the welfare rolls that there are pervasive beliefs regarding out-of wedlock conception and the consequent atomization of the nuclear family as unquestionable social progress. There is also more than ample documentation that the belief is put into practice far more often outside the demographics of Juno and The Secret Life of the American Teenager, never mind Knocked Up or Murphy Brown.

Murphy Brown and Alison Scott's characters' obviously have the wherewithal to care for their progeny; consequently, any notions of crisis regarding their pregnacies are rather tempered. In Juno's and Amy's cases, the pregnancies are unquestioningly treated as crises but the protagonists are never overtly stigmatized. This would be treated as problematic by both doctrinaire progressives (“cultural elites”?) who would assert that crises surrounding teen pregnancy are socially manufactured, and social conservatives who would decry any portrayal of any out-of-wedlock (and certainly teenage) pregnancy without the attachment of moral stigma.

Can this terrain be navigated in popular culture? This may be the first time someone has tried with any modicum of repeated success. Maybe a new, more effective model of related social services will result.