'29 and on Welfare'
Are these the messages we really want to send...even as "adorable" as it all is?
My carping here may seem petty and of little consequence, given what’s going on in the world, but let’s assume that the WW3 hashtags aren’t prophetic and we must actually grapple with best practices for running a society going forward. I have a few thoughts on one minor aspect of that endeavor.
The wife, of late, has developed a fascination for the show 16 and Pregnant, discontinued in 2014 after a buzzy six-year run but seemingly ubiquitous in reruns, and later joined by MTV’s ongoing Teen Mom franchise. (I have students who’ve mentioned that they and/or that their younger female siblings never miss an episode of the latter show.) I happened to be eating breakfast at the cocktail table in the living room during this morning’s installment, so I became a passive consumer of its plot-line and themes. In fairness, the show took viewers through the litany of challenges the pregnant teen faced, what with dad out of the picture (drugs; good choice in a partner), school falling increasingly by the wayside, money in short supply, et cetera. Clearly this baby was an epic disruption to the hoped-for trajectory of the girl’s life. Still, she and her mom and sister were smiling through the doubts, looking dreamily forward to the blessed event.
So the girl finally has the baby, and a beautiful child it is. Just perfect. And in the very next scene—the very next scene—the new mom is sitting by herself on her mother’s well-worn sofa (you can hear the baby cooing softy out of shot, likely in grandma’s arms), and the girl says, a bit shyly but with obvious glee, “I’m dating again.”
She’s dating again??
At which I said to the screen—I actually spoke this, aloud, and forgive me—“Could you maybe let your stitches heal and give the damn thing a rest for awhile and focus on raising that tiny human I hear in the background?”
And could she give us taxpayers a rest, too, inasmuch as we’re the ones who’ll likely end up subsidizing her ill-conceived (pun intended) progeny. Had producers decided to spin off the show, after all, I have no doubt I would’ve seen this girl starring in segments of 17 and Pregnant, then 18 and Pregnant, and on and on in perpetuity. 29 and Pregnant, someday. And if you think I’m being churlish, here’s an eye-opening stat for you: In 2020, about 15 percent of all births among girls age 15-19 were at least the second birth, according to data compiled by the CDC. Widening the lens, more kids than ever live with single moms of all ages.
And we celebrate this, people! Sure, 16 and Pregnant has its cautionary themes, but the overall tone is supportive and, yes, celebratory. Isn’t this just adorable?
(On a side note, celebrating abnormality if not outright deviancy is one of our chief societal enterprises nowadays. We’ve reorganized our values around it. Schools dumb down curricula and eliminate advanced classes lest underachievers feel bad; female athletes are forced to compete with and undress alongside biological males who’ve decided they’re girls; cities refuse to lock up felons and also maintain safe-injection sites for the convenience of IV drug users; restaurants with homeless encampments outside force diners to sit at defecation-view tables… I could go on…)
So God forbid we slut-shame pregnant 16-year-olds. Stigmatizing this kind of stuff is misogynistic, you see.
I beg to differ. While teen pregnancy has been in decline, shows like 16&P/Mom set the tone for our cultural attitudes toward single-motherhood, which is epidemic. So maybe slut-shaming and stigmatizing are just what the OB/GYN ordered here. Maybe shame-a-tizing can help keep young people in line, preventing them from making life-altering mistakes either at the time or years later.
Working in academia, I hear the word normalize on an hourly basis; the term has become hackneyed. Be that as it may, for the first time in my life I must ask, why are we normalizing this? And remember, normalizing sexual activity among young people isn’t per se a matter of coming out and saying, “Go ahead, kids, do it all you want, it’s fun and perfectly fine”… It’s just that the more we glamorize sex, the more we talk in graphic detail about it and build TV shows around kids who’ve manifestly “done it,” the more sex seems to adolescents like a perfectly acceptable pastime.
So we have Teen Vogue famously schooling tweens in the ins and outs of anal (which, by the way, isn’t as effective a means of contraception as you’d think), and we have books for fifth-graders talking about blowjobs and the proper handling of a clitoris. Make no mistake, the latter is an art that every man should learn, as millions of unsatisfied women will attest—but 11-year-olds?
Hell, I have it on good authority that the brain trust behind 16 and Pregnant were at one point planning a spinoff: 12 and Practicing Head on the DoorDash Guy.
One doesn’t want to get bogged down in religiosity here—the secular reasons for not wanting kids to be sexually active are persuasive enough—but here’s a pastor going off on a school board over a book titled, conveniently for our purposes, It’s Perfectly Normal. Why are we so intent on sending this message to kids whose thoughts should be focused around homework and youth soccer and (call me a dinosaur if you will) character-building chores? At least master basic algebra before you start fucking.
Moreover, for every teenager who ends up as a “cute” story on 16 & Pregnant, how many end up on an examining table in Planned Parenthood with a doctor forcibly extracting from their body the helpless little being who had no business being there in the first place? (Answer: quite a few.)
The show itself may no longer be filmed, but the mindset persists in modern American culture: that birth is a wonderful, beautiful thing. Brides-to-be on other shows like Say Yes to the Dress often have a newborn or an older kid or two to include in the ceremony. All the celebs have babies whenever they feel like it (married, single, whatever), GMA reports gleefully on their baby-bumps, magazines and web sites run features with headlines like this (and please tell me the girl on the right is another child and not the mom….how joyous and intoxicating it all is!
No it isn’t, dammit. The child may be wonderful and beautiful, but the circumstances surrounding a birth matter. When it comes to kids having kids, the stats on what typically becomes of these misbegotten children (and their moms) are pretty far from “cute.”
Not everything is an equally valid alternative lifestyle.
Liberals and progressives seem to love breeding disempowered people who will justify the eternal growth of government.