When I was growing up, pregnant teenagers went to a place called the Florence Crittenden home and had their babies in utter quiet and as much secrecy as possible. The babies were then adopted out and the girls returned to school with their missing months attributed to some vague illness. No one, not even the Catholic school girl I was at the time, was fooled.
It’s nice to be beyond those days of utter shame and secrecy when the teenager got little to no support for the emotional devastation the situation created.
But I do think we’ve perhaps gone a bit too far in the other direction. We have Bristol Palin dancing on the stars when her only accomplishment to date is being a teenage mom. How does this make her a star?
And we have a TV show about teenage moms that purports to show how hard it is to be one while casually filming domestic violence without ever intervening. And this teen mom is also considered a star.
Getting pregnant in your teens does not take talent. In fact, in this day and age of birth control pills, condom advertisements on TV and reproductive information available everywhere, the only thing getting pregnant as a teenager takes is tremendous ignorance. And now we celebrate that ignorance by giving these sad little girls TV shows.
What is wrong with us?