Pop Culture Pregnancies, Teen Edition

By Katha Pollitt, The Nation. Posted January 7, 2008.

Teens getting pregnant: bad. Teens having babies: good. If this makes no sense to you, wake up and smell the Enfamil. It's 2008! The hot movie is Juno, a funnyquirkybittersweet indie about a pregnant high school hipster who gives her baby up for adoption. The hot celebrity is Jamie Lynn Spears, 16-year-old sister of Britney and star of Nickelodeon's Zoey 101, who's pregnant and having the baby because she wants to "do what's right." The teen birthrate, after falling for fourteen years, is up 3 percent, a phenomenon perhaps not unrelated to the fact that abstinence-only sex ed, although demonstrably ineffective at preventing sexual activity and linked to higher rates of unprotected sex, is the only sex ed taught in 35 percent of our schools. (Although maybe teens are having babies for the same reasons grown women are -- the birthrate for adults is up, too.)

Written by a woman, Diablo Cody, Juno has been called the woman's answer to Knocked Up, Judd Apatow's hugely successful tribute to accidental fatherhood. Apatow's men are sweet, wisecracking slackers, boys who just want to have fun -- porn, pot, fantasy baseball; the women are tightly wound taskmistresses, life's wet blankets. (I thought this dynamic was pretty obvious, but when Knocked Up star Katherine Heigl observed in Vanity Fair that the movie was "a little sexist," all hell broke loose. How ungrateful! Didn't she know actresses are supposed to be seen and not heard?) In Juno, the pregnant girl is the central figure, a witty oddball who drives all the action, beginning with the sex; neither the boy nor her father and stepmother, a well-meaning but rather oblivious pair, much affect her decisions. Thus, Juno goes for an abortion alone, without even telling her parents she's pregnant. In real life, this would most likely have been impossible, because nearly all states in the Midwest (where the movie is set) have parental notification or consent laws. But it's a big advance in realism over Knocked Up or Waitress, last year's other celebration of unplanned pregnancy as the key to getting your life together, neither of which so much as mentioned the A-word. Juno flees the clinic waiting room, grossed out by a punk receptionist who offers her some boysenberry-flavored condoms ("they make [my boyfriend's] junk smell like pie") and given pause by a pro-life protester classmate who tells her her fetus already has fingernails. She decides to give the baby to a deserving couple, and remarkably her parents go along with this.

Juno is a witty, moving but not sentimental film that made both women I saw it with cry. Juno herself is a prickly, winsome, complex and original person: she wears work shirts, plays the guitar and has a luminous intelligence and a pixielike nonsexy beauty, and that is a way young girls are almost never portrayed in films. Still, and maybe this is why I remained dry-eyed, I couldn't get over my sense that, hard as the movie worked to be a story about particular individuals, not a sermon, it was basically saying that for a high school junior to go through pregnancy and childbirth to give a baby to an infertile couple is both noble and cool, of a piece with loving indie rock and scorning cheerleaders; it's fetal fingernails versus boysenberry condoms. To its credit, the film doesn't demonize teen sex; still, a teen who saw this movie would definitely feel like a moral failure for choosing abortion. Do we really want young girls to feel like they have to play babysanta? The mother in me winced at Juno, that wisp of a child-woman, going through the ordeal of pregnancy and childbirth.

See more stories tagged with: abortion, reproductive rights, reproductive justice

Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation.

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