One every minute
I have been without a television for nearly a year and a half now, and while my immunity to its powers is pretty impressive (not counting the recent Saturday during which I watched the entirety of “True Blood” season 3 on a friend’s laptop), my incredulity at what increasingly counts as television is growing. Take “One Born Every Minute”, for instance. I recently watched an episode of this Lifetime network show, which is filmed on an obstetrics ward in a very busy birthing hospital. That’s right: a reality show about babies being delivered, blood and shit included.
Now, I’m not a person who panics about reality TV destroying our culture. People who panic over those sorts of things tend to also be the sort of people who panic over things like same-sex marriage dismantling social institutions or Facebook taking over the world. And from a dramatic perspective, a birthing hospital offers just the right mix of furious activity interlaced with plenty of down time for intense emotional reactions (husbands getting all choked up about throwing the ball around with Junior someday: check). There are wacky families and swollen bellies attached to women with unreasonable demands, like more pain medicine or some crackers after not being allowed to eat anything for 12 hours. And there is always one moment of genuine panic: a breach, an emergency C-section–something that reminds you just how close to death women are in bringing life into the world. (Cut to Pampers commercial.)
So, OK, whatever, you want a television crew in the delivery room with you? Fine. My discomfiture with the show (and this is all based on the single episode I’ve seen) was with the network’s decision to broadcast a particular birthing story: the teen parents. The 17-year-old mother-to-be, who prior to being knocked up by her skinhead boyfriend had never kissed/dated/engaged in remotely knock-up-able activities of any sort, was the very picture of sullen adolescence forcing bravado in the company of actual adults, in an actually serious adult situation. I remember the feeling well, even though I haven’t been a teenager for a very long time now. Even the girl’s eyebrow tweezing job screams, “I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING!”, offset by her dyed black hair and ever-present smartphone (says Dad: “We got a bill for 65,000 texts one month”). Speaking of the phone, Teen Mom periodically updates her Facebook status by misspelling posts like, “dialated to 5 centimeters!”, much to the amusement/chagrin of the nurses, family members, Baby Daddy, camera crew.
The baby is born without ado–turns out, 17-year-old girls can really push–and there is plenty of screen time with Dad (Teen Mom’s dad) getting all choked up while he talks about his little girl not being a little girl anymore and blah, blah, blah. On a positive note, it’s great to see two very supportive families–both Baby Daddy’s and Teen Mom’s–involved and pledging to help out the young, soon-to-be-married couple. Yay, nice parents. In fact, the parents’ behavior seems out of step with the skinhead/Texty McTexterson combo. I got the feeling that the two teens were the bad kids in church youth group, the ones who listened to the shadier kind of Christian emo, painted their nails black, who had once been spotted smoking cigarettes in the parking lot of Shop N’ Save. In a weird way, it was like the arrival of a baby had called their bluff: “Oh, you think you’re bad? Well, now you get to wake up at 4am every day to change my shitty diaper.” The parents’ bewildered reactions to Teen Mom’s baby dyke-worthy haircut and “Twilight” poster just seemed kind of adorable to me, although I wanted to hate them for not slapping this idiot on the Pill as soon as Skinhead started hanging around after Sunday school.
I was left with the distinct feeling that teen pregnancy had just been tacitly condoned. Is it irresponsible of the network to show a positive teen pregnancy story, when teen pregnancies are, at the least, a negative? Perhaps since teen pregnancy is a reality, albeit unfortunate, the show was right to reflect that reality. Perhaps since this session of Congress has done nothing but introduce legislation further restricting women’s control over their bodily functions (I spent most of February frantically signing petitions on behalf of Planned Parenthood, for fuck’s sake), the fact that all mention of abortion or even birth control was completely absent from the discussion of Teen Mom’s little oopsie seemed more significant than it probably was. Still: watching that show as a 17-year-old, I might have thought, “Aw, teen pregnancy ain’t so bad. Look how happy everyone is.” (Fortunately, a foreward-thinking gynecologist slapped ME on the Pill at age 15.)
The point? I don’t know what the point should be. Maybe Lifetime shouldn’t broadcast birthing stories unless the mother is 18, would that make me feel better? Maybe Lifetime and shows like “16 and Pregnant” are doing a public service by showing teenagers the stretch-marked consequences of condom-less sex? Teenagers are savvy consumers of pop culture, so trusting them with filtering out glowing messages of 17-year-old motherhood is probably the best course of action. (Although teenagers DO like “Twilight”, so….) I guess, as usual, my complaint is with the adults. Birth control? We didn’t talk with our daughter about it. Sex? We told her to wait til marriage. Holy shit, she’s pregnant? That’s OK, we’d rather her drop out of high school and get Medicaid to support her new bundle of joy so she’s nice and impoverished when Baby Daddy gets bored and moves on to the next virgin in the church youth group.
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