Changing the script on teen pregnancy
Posted 35 weeks 23 hours ago byOh, the kids today and their upright, pro-life ways! Ellen Goodman does not like the spate of popular films such as "Knocked Up" and "Juno" that actually extol the virtue of having babies.
Goodman worries that young girls are getting the wrong message from these movies. "Sitting behind those tweens -- girls somewhere between preschool and pubescence -- I wondered what was being absorbed through their PG-13 pores. Need I remind you of the news that teenage pregnancy rates have gone up for the first time since 1991? It's expected that 750,000 teenage girls will get pregnant this year. With, by the way, some help from boys." Sure.
But what would the right message be? Get thee to the abortionist?
Goodman is right, of course, that the economic burden of teen and out-of-wedlock births is quite high. Obviously, a star like Jamie Lynn Spears can have her baby without too much trouble (news of her unemployment notwithstanding). But what about those poor girls? Well, there are remedies -- notably, as "Juno" suggests, adoption -- about which Goodman is dismissive at best.
But I had to laugh at Goodman's conclusion: "Once again, adults are being called to teach against the cultural tide," Goodman writes. "Think of it as a casting call for designated fuddy-duddies.
It's a funny thing when the old "fuddy-duddies" are urging abortion and the kids are actually trying to take responsibility for their lives and their choices.
Thoughts
I saw "Juno" tonight
Submitted on January 5th, 2008 by Joeland you know what? I'm not going to use it as the crux of an abortion discussion with you.
Why?
Because that's not what the movie is about.
Yup. There's a scene early in the movie where Juno goes into an abortion clinic, but flees the scene. But I imagine partisans on both sides of the issue can find their own fodder in that scene, or in the movie.
And it doesn't matter in the slightest.
Because the movie isn't an abortion movie. It's a pregnancy movie, a genre that has a long, long history, and it probably goes without saying that every pregnancy movie -- at least, the comedies -- is going to end with a birth. There has been only one abortion comedy that I know of (Citizen Ruth) and that's probably as far as the genre can go.
But that doesn't matter so much. What matters, for my purposes, is this: Not everything is about abortion.
Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of emotion on both sides of the issue. The debate's been going on for decades, and I don't imagine it's going away very soon -- no matter what happens in the U.S. Supreme Court.
But not everything is about abortion. And those folks who try to judge or twist every pop cultural reference to pregnancy and birth into some kind of coded statement for or against abortion are tedious, to say the least.