Teen Pregnancy, Hollywood Style

It could have been Immaculate Conception. In the premiere episode of the new drama "The Secret Life of the American Teenager," 15-year-old Amy comes home from band practice and is shocked--the pregnancy test is positive! That two-second tryst at band camp, as she describes it to her friends, "was definitely not like what you see in the movies." They share the same confusion: how did a good girl end up in this situation? The obvious answer (Amy had unprotected sex) never quite surfaces; it's brushed off in a whirlwind of mystification. By the end of the episode, band-camp guy has taken a backseat to Amy's new love interest. As the plot pushes forward, it never once looks back at whether Amy considered contraceptives or talked to her parents about condoms. Amy is pregnant, and that is where this story starts.

Amy's tale is familiar terrain in the media landscape. Teen pregnancy has become a hot plot device lately, showing up in two new television shows--ABC Family's "Secret Life" and NBC's "Baby Borrowers." The standard plot: teen gets pregnant, teen is horrified and teen tells her family. Audiences saw it in last year's box-office smash "Juno," where an unintended pregnancy becomes a heart-warming adoption. In real life, the same storyline has been running through OK! Magazine's coverage of Jamie Lynn Spears's pregnancy. "I can't say it was something I was planning to do right now," the 16-year-old Nickelodeon star confessed to OK! last December. "But now that it's in my lap and that it's something I have to deal with, I'm looking forward to being the best mom I can be." Now 17 and with a newborn at home, Spears is already sharing her wisdom on parenting: "Being a mom is the best feeling in the world!"

Many teen moms and the adults who deal with them are glad to see a conversation about teen pregnancy out in the open. But they say that big parts of the story are being glossed over: how that baby bump came to be in the first place, and just how hard it'll be for a teen to raise a child. In "Juno," the word condom is used twice; the Jamie Lynn interviews skirt the issue altogether. Even "The Secret Life" (a show originally pitched with the title "The Sex Life of the American Teenager") only makes a few passing references to condoms, mostly students asking the guidance counselor about the ones kept in his office. In none of these shows are the girls asked whether they used contraception, nor is there mention of STD testing, which would seem a logical step after unprotected sex. "It's the missing three C's: there's little commitment, no mention of contraception and rarely do we see negative consequences," says Jane Brown, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina who runs the Teen Media Project. "What's missing in the media's sexual script is what happens before and after. Why are these kids getting pregnant and what happens afterward?"

To recap, the reality that's not covered: teens are having sex (the average age of first intercourse is 16.9 for boys and 17.4 for girls, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute) and some are getting pregnant (almost 750,000 each year, also from Guttmacher). One third of those women will have an abortion; two thirds will carry their baby to term. Teen moms are less likely to finish high school and more likely to remain a single parent, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Teens are also contracting sexually transmitted diseases in alarmingly high numbers--a quarter of teenage females have at least one.

"Juno" and "Secret Life" and other movies and TV shows like them could open doors to all of those issues. And research suggests that is actually what teens want: three quarters say they would like the media to talk more about the consequences of sex, according to a 2007 study by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

But these topics can be risky for Hollywood producers and purveyors of celebrity magazines. Producers and writers may want to avoid the political controversy over abstinence education. There's also the entertainment value at stake--lectures on condoms don't exactly sell blockbuster films. But there's also a more basic reason: talking about high-school students having sex, using condoms or contracting STDs still makes many people a little bit squeamish and embarrassed. Although the vast majority of parents say they talk to their kids about delaying sex and contraceptive use, most are still uncomfortable with the subject. Eighty-two percent of parents and two thirds of teens say that they don't know exactly what to say, how to say it or when to start the conversation, according to the study by the National Campaign.