"(It's not my) Baby"

Justin Bieber sure has been singing the “(It’s not my)baby, baby, baby” blues this week. In case you haven't hear J Biebs supposed 20-year-old baby mama is suing the pop star for impregnating and abandoning her and the three-month-old child. Sadly, while the world is facing debt, poverty, and war, this story is the one getting major media attention. While being 16 and being pregnant is a terrifying situation, thanks to the media teen pregnancy has been distorted into just another hot topic and craze for teenagers. The shock and disgust that arose when the 2008 Massachusetts pregnancy pact broke headlines has since transformed into a national obsession in this pandemic. Teen pregnancy has become “the new black” and the trend doesn’t seem to be shifting. If there is going to be a solution to this problem it is going to have to begin, not with the media, but by mandating that all public schools teach an all-encompassing sex education curriculum.

The generation affected by teenage pregnancy is perhaps the most engaged with media than all other generations and the media is the one seriously distorting this issue. Since the 2008 scandal, programs such as 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom came onto the air to profit from the hype. Soon after these shows arose ABC Family and Lifetime also capitalized on the trend by creating The Secret Life of the American Teenager and The Pregnancy Pact and now today, the madness of this genre has been taken to the stage in a new play called Milk Like Sugar. Regardless of the media’s intentions, the duration and popularity of these programs has created a catastrophic epidemic amongst teenagers today. While the camera tries to show (through both scripted and non scripted programming) the hardships that pregnant teens and their families go through, the fame, how ever bad the publicity may be, is enchanting to many unknowns.

The play Milk Like Sugar features a group of 16-year-old girls who according to New York Times contributor Charles Isherwood in his article Teenage Motherhood is Serious, Especially with Baby Bling at Play, claims the young girls are “a delight to watch”. When one of the girls becomes pregnant she is excited because this means that she will now have “optimal means of securing some slick designer stuff for the baby”. Isherwood, unlike the girls in the play, or the playwright for that matter, understands that teenage pregnancy is a serious problem. Furthermore Isherwood states that teen pregnancies “aren’t the result of careful planning, but its opposite, pure carelessness.”

While Isherwood claims that teenagers are careless, I believe the root of this problem lies in education, or the lack there of. On November 1^st. 2011 the Guttmacher Institute released the most up to date statistics on sex education in the United States. Their findings are as follows: only 21 states and the District of Columbia mandate sex education. 20 of those states and the District of Columbia mandate both sex education and HIV education. Further, 29 states and the District of Columbia mandate that, when provided, sex and HIV education meet these certain requirements: 13 states require that the instruction be medically accurate, 27 states and the District of Columbia require that the information be appropriate for students’ age, 9 states require material to be appropriate for a students’ cultural background, and finally, 2 states prohibit the program from promoting religion. The Guttmacher Institute also states that in 35 states and the District of Columbia parents have the right to remove their children from instruction, and in 22 of these states and the District of Columbia require that parents be notified before sex education or HIV education is provided.

But to some people, young pregnancy is engrained into their culture mindset. As seen in Milk Like Sugar only one character is able to “use her intelligence as a ladder to escape the world of poverty and limits she was born into” but this is not the case for the others, and unfortunately many teenagers in the real world suffer from the same problems. This very notion is the reason why shows like 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom promote the wrong mindset. The women on the show try to balance pregnancy with schoolwork and usually fail because they can’t afford both or because they don’t have the time or the energy. Instead, the young women on the show fight with their parents and the boyfriends and are barely surviving. For instance, Teen Mom Jenelle Evans has been arrested twice and busted for drug use. But, her story has been seen on the cover of People, Star, and Us Weekly multiple times which gives teenagers in the same position as her the wrong idea. In reality, yes Jenelle is “famous” but she is famous for being a train wreck and her child is ultimately the one suffering. Even shows such as The Secret Life of the American Teenager, which features a more well off socioeconomic group, sends the wrong message. The lead character Amy gets pregnant at 15 and the series follows her trying to raise her baby while hooking up with different high school guys and getting into girl drama. While Amy is able to stay in school, the lack of difficulty she is able to do so with glosses over the matter of teen pregnancy and romanticizes it.

No shows on television at the moment truly illustrate the seriousness of teen pregnancy and the repercussions that come along with it. Whether girls are searching for fame and a way to make money or trying to emulate a fictional character from ABC Family, teen pregnancy isn’t going to decrease without the help of nation wide, all-encompassing sex education. While J Biebs will probably continue to be accused of fathering someone’s baby, if both young men and women are given proper sex education through school and through programs that could go out into the streets, the next generation would become more educated and more sensible when trying to protect themselves against unplanned pregnancy.