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But I Play One on TV: Teen Pregnancy, Hysteria, and the Media
In recent years, teen pregnancy has rocketed from an issue seeped in secrecy and shame to
a media sensation. Entire entertainment empires have been constructed around it, filled with
books, movies, and television shows devoted to showcasing girls both fictional and real
struggling with teen pregnancy and subsequent motherhood. News stories and articles detail the
affects of teen pregnancy on social and economic levels. Teen pregnancy seems not only
ubiquitous, but in some circles, inescapable. In his book The Culture of Fear, sociology professor
Barry Glassner argues that teen pregnancy does just that it only seems to be a large issue, and
more to the point, it is manufactured to appear that way. He argues that, like many other issues
that are brought to the public consciousness and then expanded, the magnitude of teen pregnancy
has been blown out of proportion by those who have something to gain from it. Teen pregnancy is
an issue that has all at once become an entertainment powerhouse, a political mechanism, and an
economic concern. It has gained great power as a public issue, and like any other power, it has
been manipulated.
Glassner ruminates on the phenomenon caused by media exposure of teen pregnancy; that
is, that it is viewed as more ubiquitous than it truly is. He tells of television shows that doctored
the women they featured and edited the way they were presented in order to incite panic in
viewers. The roots of this behavior go much further back than current-day shows like Sixteen and
Pregnant and Teen Mom; in fact, Glassner cites it as beginning in the 1990s. Teen mothers
were portrayed as much more ominous and plentiful than they actually were, he argues.
Although only about one-third of teen mothers were younger than eighteen, and fewer than one
in fifty were fourteen or younger, you would not have known it from the media. He cites an

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episode of the Ricki Lake Show that aired in 1996, which carried the title Im Only 13 But Im
Gonna Make a Baby and starred two professed pregnant thirteen-year-olds. The girls were subject
to jeers and heckling from the audience, their mothers, and Ricki Lake herself and were
ultimately revealed to have not been pregnant at all. Glassner accuses Ricki Lake and her
producers as having come up with a pregnant topic but no pregnant thirteen-year-olds. In the
eyes of Ricki Lake and her entourage, however, the accuracy of the show mattered less than the
results it produced.
The trend of throwing teen pregnancy in the spotlight, turning it into a spectacle to be
ogled at by television viewers, continues today with shows such as Sixteen and Pregnant.
According to its host channel MTV, the show follows a 5 7 month period in the life of a
teenager as she navigates the bumpy terrain of adolescence, growing pains, rebellion, and coming
of age; all while dealing with being pregnant. The show typically features one girl per episode,
detailing the myriad struggles she endures in the time immediately before, during, and
immediately after the birth of her baby. An episode of the show typically attracts between 2 and 4
million viewers; during the coverage of the summer Olympics last year, the show beat Olympics
coverage in terms of women viewership under age 34. More viewers leads to more advertisers
seeking placement during the Sixteen and Pregnant time slot, which equates to more money for
MTV.
With the amount of focus cast on teen pregnancy in order to make it entertaining, it only
stands to reason that politicians have capitalized on the issue as well. During the presidential
election of 2008, much attention was paid to then-vice-presidential-candidate Sarah Palin and her
pregnant teenage daughter Bristol. In a scathing article written for The Washington Post, journalist

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Ruth Marcus accuses the Palin family of using Bristols pregnancy as leverage for not only Sarah
Palins election, but also for Bristol herself. [Sarah] Palins failed candidacy and her ascendance to
the ranks of political celebrity were, it turns out, the best thing that could have happened to Bristol
PalinBristols out-of-wedlock pregnancy was not an embarrassment. It was a marketing
opportunity, she insists. With plentiful evidence to support this claim Bristols appearance on
television shows such Dancing With the Stars and The Secret Life of the American Teenager,
her partnerships with various pro-abstinence organizations, and more it is easy to see that her
pregnancy was not a burden. It was a boon, but only because she and those around her knew how
to make it such.
Media attention has also pointed an enormous lens at the economic cost of teen
motherhood as it pertains to society as a whole. Unsurprisingly, these statistics have been seized by
those who have something to gain from their foreboding nature. In The Culture of Fear, a policy
analyst named Stephen Caldas is cited as saying the lower education levels of mothers who began
childbearing as teenagers translates into lower work force productivity and diminished wages,
resulting in a weaker, less competitive economy. He draws evidence from reports by the Wall
Street Journal, reports which estimate teen motherhoods cost to taxpayers to be about $21.5
billion annually. The articles are rife with journalists commenting on [the] heavy burden on
families and communities (Caldas). The high cost, which has consistently been reported as
climbing, is attributed in part to the amount of teen mothers themselves, but also due to the sheer
scope of the programs said figures embody food stamps, housing subsidies, medical benefits, and
more.

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This, of course, makes teen pregnancy an easy target for politicians to capitalize on in order
to rally support for their personal causes, or to create personal gains. In 2007, an article by R.F.
Blader delivered a scathing dissertation of the Bush campaigns attempts to politicize teen
pregnancy. If any evidence were needed to confirm the base nature of political debate in America,
the increase in teen birth ratesprovided an opportunity, he wrote. The Bush administration
initially transformed this debate into a discussion of the intrinsic value of virginity; the vestiges of
this criticism continued to distort interpretation of the 3 percent increase. The Bush
administration used teen pregnancy as a vehicle to promote their abstinence-only agenda, by
instilling fear of teen pregnancy and its resultant harms in the population they governed. These
tactics worked, because as Blader put it, fear is a productive means of social control.
Some would argue, however, that the scare tactics employed against the perceived teen
pregnancy crisis are necessary, and not altogether unfounded. According to Peter Katels article on
child poverty, for conservatives skeptical of government anti-poverty projects, child poverty is
above all a behavioral issue a reflection of the growing tendency to have children out of
wedlock. In other words, there is a section of our population that believes the very real problem
of children growing up poor stems from parents deciding to have children while young and single.
Katel explains that single motherhood is a sharply rising trend, informing readers that unwed
mothersaccounted for 40 percent of U.S. births in 2008. That rate has risen steadily over two
decades. It was 26 percent in 1988 and 33 percent in 1998. What this citation does not account
for, however, is the fact that in the interim years the teen pregnancy rate fell quite drastically.
Plotting a societal trend only works when the plot points are close together; when they are spaced
ten years apart, they leap over the years in the middle that contain some vital information. In this

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case, they blatantly ignore the years in which the teen birth rate declined rather than grew.
Glassner argues that the teenage birth rate reached its highest level in the 1950s, not the current
erabetween 1991 and 1996 the rate declined by nearly 12 percent.
Some teenagers find themselves thrust into the spotlight due to teen pregnancy becoming
a spectacle for entertainment, such as the stars of Sixteen and Pregnant. Others use it as a way to
gain political power, either through celebrity or through highlighting it as an economic issue.
Though teen pregnancy is a very real problem with very real consequences for those who
experience it, the media attention paid to it has made it seem far more ubiquitous and far more
glamorous than it truly is.

Works Cited
Blader, R.F. The Politics of Teen Pregnancy. CounterPunch. Web.
Glassner, Barry. The Culture of Fear. [Kindle file.] Print.
Katel, Peter. Child Poverty. CQResearcher. Web.
Marcus, Ruth. Bristol Palins Marketing Moment. The Washington Post. Web.

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