by Kaitlin Highstreet
News Editor
     Juno, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, Jamie Lynn Spears. Bristol Palin.  Teen pregnancy has heavily impacted all facets of pop culture.  In recent years, not only has the depiction of teenage pregnancy become more frequent, but also the information shown by movies, celebrities and television shows has become less accurate.  The media is portraying young pregnancy as a positive phenomenon.
    
    In Juno, the main character, a pregnant teen, reaches a much happier conclusion than most teens in her situation. Contrary to the happy adoption that ends the movie, many teen parents struggle to return to a normal life after the baby is born. Only forty percent of women who become mothers before age eighteen get their high school diplomas.  Even fewer, less than two percent, have a college degree by the age of thirty. In Juno, the main character has a baby, gives it up for a simple adoption, and returns to her life as it was before. This is unrealistic and oversimplifies teen pregnancy. The movie does not accurately portray the problems faced by a teen mother, especially life after birth.

     Not only are teen pregnancy and adoption oversimplified, motherhood is as well. In The Secret Life of the American Teenager, the main character, Amy Juergens, chooses to keep her baby and raise him herself. The character’s relationships with friends and family suffer somewhat, but this fails to accurately portray the real struggles a teen mother experiences. Although it shows Juergens struggling to get affordable daycare for her son, she has the support of her family and friends. Unlike Amy Juergens, and celebrities Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin, almost one-half of all teen mothers rely on welfare within five years of having their first child.

    Despite some statistics, teen birth rates are increasing in over half the country. From 1990 until 2004, pregnancy rates were decreasing; however, since 2004 the rates have been climbing. California faced a three percent increase between 2005 and 2006, reaching 39.9 teen pregnancies per 1000 people. This significant boost can be partly attributed to the simplification of the media’s portrayal of young motherhood. By portraying the day-to-day struggles of a pregnant teenage girl as a plotline striving toward a happy ending, the media puts aside honesty in favor of box-office sales. The glorification and simplification of teen pregnancy is a practice that needs to be stopped, if only for the sake of future generations.

Source: USA Today, The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy