Teen Pregnancy Rules An Entire Decade Of TV
Whether it be full shows revolving around teen pregnancy or merely an important plot point, early 2000s TV could not let go of the idea of getting their underage female characters knocked up. No matter which channel you pledged loyalty to it was impossible to escape its grips.
As a part of Gen Z, I spent my formative years watching early 2000’s TV. While most of my content came from Disney Channel, upon receiving a laptop I was granted the beautiful responsibility of unrestricted internet access. With streaming services like Hulu and Netflix on the come up, and the popularity of uploading show clips on YouTube, I was able to break beyond the children’s network boundary.
Teen Pregnancy Shows Popped Up Overnight
One of my “cool” friends was allowed to watch teen shows before I was; they were usually rated PG-13 and always revolved around high school. At sleepovers, we would stay up all night binging the newest creations from ABC Family or MTV and wondered if this was really what our future young adulthood would look like. However, there was one aspect we crossed our fingers to never happen, a trope that occurred in every single one of our favorite shows: the inevitable teen pregnancy, TV style.
Response To A Nationwide Spike
The US experienced a spike in the teenage pregnancy rate from 2005-2010, reversing the steady decline that had been occurring since 1991, with some placing the blame squarely on reality TV. Looking at data collected from 2006, 7 percent of girls from ages 15-19 would experience teen pregnancy; in ages 18-19, that percentage would jump up to 12 percent. To put it in perspective, in an average high school with a student population of 850, there would be nearly 60 students who would experience pregnancy.
It was a divisive topic, and many declared it an “epidemic” that needed curing. Western media soon jumped on the “end teen pregnancy now!” train and reflected the themes in the content they produced for TV. ABC Family and MTV are the two production companies most notorious for including this trope in their shows, famously seen in fictitious titles like Make It or Break It, Glee, and Secret Life of an American Teenager, or reality series like 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom.
Teen Pregnancy Reality Shows Brought Down The Rate
Many adults believed that these shows, marketed to young adults, would glorify teen pregnancy and further exacerbate an already growing problem by broadcasting it straight to the living room TV. However, reality series like MTV’s 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom gave the opposite impression to their younger viewers.
In a study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, they reported seeing a 5.7 percent reduction in teen pregnancy in the 18 months after the TV premiere of 16 and Pregnant. Many attribute this to the sheer transparency of the show, filled with scenes of young moms struggling to maintain their education and social life with a newborn attached to their hip.
Scripted Shows Were Slow To Catch On
When teenage pregnancy was shown in scripted TV series like ABC Family’s Make It or Break It, romanticization was far from the producers’ goals. One of the main characters, Emily, the underdog gymnast who had to fight for her spot on the team, finds out she is pregnant right before a big competition.
She later decides to keep the baby, quitting gymnastics and leaving behind her dream of the Olympics to move to the country and raise her child with her Aunt. Even though this choice was made because Emily’s actress was pregnant herself and had to leave the show, ABC Family still wanted their perspective on teen pregnancy to be known.
Pregnancy Isn’t A Career-Ender
Looking back now, many critique the early 2000s media for their handling of teen pregnancy on TV. Many outlets, in fear of being criticized for “glorifying” these situations, went the complete opposite way and portrayed it as a death sentence. For many young girls, it seemed that all goals and dreams went down the drain when those two lines popped up on their test sticks.
These shows would deliberately exclude talks of abortion, leaving the impression that these girls’ only option was to sequester themselves away and have the child. They also rarely mentioned birth control or other methods of contraception, furthering the stigma that there was no way to have safe sex and that abstinence was the way to prevent your future from falling apart.
So while, yes, these pieces of media created a small decline in our nation’s teen pregnancy crisis, they also significantly misinformed their female TV viewers and failed to show them anything beyond a plot device used as a career-ender.
Stop Avoiding Uncomfortable Conversations
In the early 2000s, the media obsession with teen pregnancy played out on TV because our nation was having an obsession with teen pregnancy. However, it seems like the at-risk demographic these pieces of media were tailored to were treated as a second thought. Resources for their success were deliberately left out to cater to a plot device, and intimate moments were exploited for shock value.
Hopefully, for the next generation of young girls, we start getting it right and stop avoiding uncomfortable conversations, like birth control, for the sake of viewership.
