Teen Pregnancy, Hollywood Style

"It seems like we keep removing taboos related to sex, and this year it was pregnancy," says Nancy Brown, who teaches a course on adolescent health and sexuality at Stanford University and writes a blog on the same subject. "And I hope next year it's sexually transmitted infections. Because that's something we still don't talk about." She gets frustrated when she watches movies pass up perfectly good opportunities to add a line or two about contraceptives or STDs. Like when Juno's dad, after he learns that his daughter is pregnant, tells her, "I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when." Brown suggests, "What would be a lot better there is, 'I wish I had talked to you about birth control when you were 12,' or 'I thought I raised you to use a condom'."

Condoms aren't the only things that teens and adolescent-health experts see missing from the plot. There's that third C that Jane Brown mentioned: consequences. While Juno and Jamie Lynn are celebrated as heroines, the teen moms NEWSWEEK spoke with recount a different reaction from their communities--being stigmatized and ostracized, one to the point where she dropped out of high school. "I guess I was too scared to be pregnant and in high school, it didn't really seem OK," says one teen, who ended up leaving her Atlanta-area private school.

Meghan Mellecker, a 15-year-old from outside Iowa City, had the support of her parents but trouble with her small town of 700. "There were a lot of people who looked down on it," she says. Her mom, Melody Hobert-Mellecker, says she quit a job at the family's church under pressure from congregants. "I had people calling the bishop's office asking how I could be a moral leader when I couldn't even be a good moral mother," she recalls. Ever since Meghan's daughter, Sophie, was born, Hobert-Mellecker says things have improved. But she watches as her daughter struggles with balancing being a parent and being a teen. "One thing that I see this summer, which is her first with Sophie, is how different it is from her friends," says Hobert-Mellecker. "They sleep in, hang out, stay up late. Meghan gets out of bed early every morning and it's hard for her to say to her friends, 'I can't hang out with you'."

Balancing parenting and work is hard enough for moms in their 30s; it's near impossible for 19-year-old Candi Johnson. She wants to go back to school (she dropped out of a GED program two months into her pregnancy) and wants to get a job, but is also responsible for her 18-month-old son, Shymir. Like the majority of teen moms, the father isn't in the picture, so she largely relies on her mother and grandmother for financial support. "Pampers cost $20, a little bottle of milk is $7," says Johnson, who lives in Queens, N.Y. "I want to be the best mom that I can, but it's hard, because I don't have the money or the education to give him everything that he wants." She doesn't see the financial strains or work-parenting balance mentioned at all in OK! Magazine. "She has all that money, she can pay for nannies, she can give her baby whatever she wants. It's so fake," says Johnson. "For me, its fun but hard. It's the best thing in the world but at the same time it's the worst thing in the world."

Amidst all the teen pregnancy media, researchers do see some encouraging signs. NBC's "Baby Borrowers" (slogan: "It's not TV, it's birth control"), gives real teens a taste of parenting; it attracted nearly 8 million viewers to its debut, about three times the viewership of "Secret Life." And while the storyline on TV may be incomplete, it does give parents a starting point to open their own discussion (47 percent of teens say their parents are the most influential in their decisions about sex, according to the National Campaign Study.) Jane Brown, at the Teen Media Project, remembers striking up a conversation with her 17-year-old daughter as they walked out of "Juno." "She thought, 'Isn't that romantic, she's left with the boyfriend, adoption looks easy'," Brown says. "We talked about how adoption can be a traumatic event, the fact that there was no contraception and why not, and that it's rare for the guys to actually stay." Brown just hopes she's not the only one talking.

© 2008