Picket Fence Post

When the story about the pregnant Gloucester High School girls (all 16 and under) was being wildly hyped up across the media universe recently, I kept mum about it here at the Picket Fence Post. I had no initial desire to leap into the fray on that particular issue.

Then the July 4th weekend parade in a Boston suburb came along. It crudely lampooned the girls – the minors – the kids who’d gotten pregnant and had no real idea of how drastically their lives were about to change. And some folks in the media and elsewhere said it was important to ridicule these girls so as to dissuade future teens from getting (or desiring to get) pregnant, because, as we all know, it was reported that some of the Gloucester girls wanted to get pregnant.

That’s when I felt compelled to chime in, seeing as though the girls were being called every sexual slur in the book, while the boys/men who got them pregnant (they haven’t been identified other than one 24-year-old homeless man whose name hasn’t been released) somehow escaped all manner of excoriating commentary. The vulnerable girls, with their swollen pregnant bellies, make for much better targets it seems. So I wrote this piece on Mommy Track’d about the media’s and public’s treatment of the girls and of other single women who get pregnant.

And, although I didn’t mention it in the column, pundits repeatedly suggested that a “Juno effect” was at work here, referencing the popular film about a 16-year-old girl from a stable, two-parent household who accidentally got pregnant during her sole sexual interlude then gave the baby up for adoption. So I watched Juno again with The Spouse to see if it could be considered an inducement to teen girls to get pregnant. We agreed that it in no way made the teenaged character seem cool because she was pregnant and didn’t make teen pregnancy seem easy (she was ostracized, she missed her school’s big dance, she was scorned by most adults), though The Spouse did add that he thought she “bounced back” from the pregnancy well, better than most girls, he suggested. I think this moving, quirky film got a bad rap in the post-Gloucester news cycles.

Image credit: Fox Searchlight via Media Bistro.