I feel like I keep coming back to television’s depictions of teen pregnancy over and over again. It is a narrative that seriously shows up everywhere. Of the few teen dramas I can think of that don’t have characters who become pregnant, series like My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks were simply too short (but both Winnie Holzman and Paul Feig have written about how, given the chance at a second season, they each would have impregnated one of the main female characters), and others at least broach the subject, presenting the worry of a pregnancy scare. It’s honestly a topic that just keeps showing up, so there always seems to be more to say about it.
Yesterday alone, in the course of my habitual television watching, I came across no less than three teen pregnancy narratives! I caught up on the latest episodes of Parenthood, in which Drew’s girlfriend Amy announces she is pregnant, and subsequently has an abortion. I’ve been catching up on the most recent season of Degrassi, yesterday watching Alli worry about being pregnant after missing a couple of her birth control pills. And the old episode of the usually-un-teen-related-comedy-detective-show, Psych, that I watched happened to feature a 19-year-old couple (with child) in a Romeo and Juliet type situation.
Of these three stories, I had very little patience for Alli’s. She spends the majority of 40 minutes as an indecisive, worried, and paranoid wreck. She fights with her boyfriend about all the hurdles that a pregnancy might create (before finding out if she actually is pregnant). Her boyfriend also completely over-reacts, claiming she’s trying to get rid of him, by thinking about aborting his baby, without knowing if she’s even carrying his baby. And all this is framed by a ticking clock, as she simultaneously waits for the results of her pregnancy test, and is offered a limited-time scholarship to MIT that would force her to fast track her way out of high school a year early. It was over-dramatic, ridiculous, and I really just wanted to skip to the end.
It’s funny, because of all the pregnancy/scare stories on television, this one is the closest to anything I have personally experienced in real life. I have skipped a birth control pill and worried that I could have been ovulating at some point. It’s a legitimate angle on a narrative that has been told and retold to death. But it’s not a high-stress version of a pregnancy scare. It’s a simple matter of worry, get a test, find out the truth, move on with your life. So, I simply can’t relate to the seriously contrived context that Degrassi creates, amping up the fear, paranoia, and emotional reactions that Alli and Dave bring to this situation. Over the years, Degrassi has had a lot of chances to talk about teen pregnancy, and they’ve done it well, at times, in the past, but they really do seem to be running out of original ideas. It’s not that surprising that this recent example just fell kind of flat.
It probably doesn’t help that I have seen so many of these stories in the past that there was no question in my mind that she was not, in fact, pregnant. See, pregnancy has a way of sneaking up on people. They don’t suspect it until it crashes their party. I can’t think of a single situation in which a girl thinks she might be pregnant, talks about what would happen if she was, worries about it, gets a test and finds out she is, truly, with child. That never happens.* After all, the whole point of putting a character through the hypothetical ringer is to discuss the possibilities, problems and complications of teen pregnancy, even if she doesn’t turn out to be pregnant.
In the other cases, when a character finds out she is pregnant, those conversations happen again, this time for real, because they actually have to. It’s a difference that just occurred to me, watching Alli’s awkward what-if-ing conforming to a now obvious “pregnancy scare” trope. It’s a played out trope at that, which seems to have entered the realm of an unfortunate cliché, particularly in contrast to (Parenthood‘s) Amy’s quiet, sad up-front-ness, as she confronts the stark reality that has arrived. Girls really do get pregnant a lot on TV. Maybe it’s time to leave the big emotional narratives to them, and re-write those scares into the minor worry blips that they are.
*OK, I lied, that actually happens in the very first episode of Degrassi High to Erica, but honestly, never have I seen it since.
