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I liked Juno too

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But this is ridiculous:

As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there’s been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town. School officials started looking into the matter as early as October after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, “some girls seemed more upset when they weren’t pregnant than when they were,” Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. “We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy,” the principal says, shaking his head.

I’ve heard about this before; girls so desperate for real love they are ready to do just about anything, including jeopardizing their future by having a child WAY too early. Yes, I said jeopardizing.

Look: I’m pro-life (or at least, anti-abortion), which means I prefer women and girls keep their babies even if it means giving them up for adoption. It’s not the babies’ fault their moms goofed, and once they’re conceived and growing, they’re human and as such they deserve a chance. But I would NEVER go so far as suggest a woman or a girl have a baby before she’s ready for that kind of commitment. That’s just crazy.

And here as in so many other cases, I blame the parents. What a wretched job some of them do – come on, people, can’t you see your children are crying for love and attention? Are you too wrapped up in your own selfish concerns to notice?

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Tanya adds: One thing that left me torn here was how the high school was handling the rising teen pregnancy rate.

The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers. Sex-ed classes end freshman year at Gloucester, where teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC. “We’re proud to help the mothers stay in school,” says Sue Todd, CEO of Pathways for Children, which runs the day-care center.”

I’m all for these programs, and yet maybe not. Not to the degree where it would encourage young girls to get pregnant, facing single motherhood, and while still in high school no less.

The flip side of this scenario is kicking girls out of high school if they are pregnant. That’s how poorly they handled it in my day, not so long ago.

Some balance in this area would be essential. Maybe we could start at the University level, since very little is done to accommodate motherhood on Canadian campuses. There’s a great pro-active project for all the campus pro-life groups out there.

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Rebecca adds: I share your reservations, Tanya. On the one hand, kicking pregnant girls out of school, or otherwise making it less likely that they’ll finish high school and move on, hardly serves their children, who are already a reality by the time schools find out teens are pregnant. On the other, lessening a taboo lowers the social cost of an act, and the lower the cost, the more people engage in it.

How about a separate school for teenage mothers (and fathers, for that matter, if they are still school age and involved with raising their children)? Such a school could provide daycare on site, to help get young mothers to finish high school (and keep nursing if they do, which is pretty much impossible if the children spend the workweek far from their mothers), and could also provide some guidance about parenting, infant nutrition, and so on. But it would differentiate these young mothers from their classmates, which isn’t entirely a bad thing: like it or not, by becoming mothers, they have left a portion of their childhood behind, and it serves nobody to pretend this isn’t so. And it would perhaps lead fewer of their peers to think that teen motherhood is easy or desireable.

So, um, was there some kind of ceremony?

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Win for original screenplay

I have been rather busy lately with the launch of a new television show and haven’t had a chance to write much. Or do anything else, for that matter. (And you do know, don’t you, how fast a pile of laundry can grow when left unattended?) I didn’t catch the Oscars last night, but I now see Juno won for best writing, which is awesome. I saw the film a few weeks ago and was both charmed and delighted a) by the movie’s plot; and b) by its non-preachiness. I was worried it’d be a movie about abortion, which I didn’t really want to see. But it’s not. It’s a wonderfully clever little love story in which a pregnant teenager decides to carry her baby to term. Well done.

How can it be right, if it feels so wrong? Part II

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I haven’t seen Juno, but I want to, especially after watching the Academy Awards. So this morning I was drawn to a Canadian mommy-blogger who posted on it here.   

Juno resonated with the blogger (who calls herself, I hope ironically, Her Bad Mother) because of her decision years ago to abort an unwanted baby. The entry is inspired by her gratitude to her own mother, who supported her through the abortion despite her own obvious grief. It’s a moving and disturbing column, worth reading in its entirety, but here are some excerpts.

On the abortion itself:

Then, then, she made all arrangements and we made the long drive, together, to the place where I had to walk a terrible mile alone, but she was there, again, on the other side and that night we curled up together on a dusty bed in a motel together, somewhere some distance from home and cried and contemplated our ghosts…

On appreciating her mother for helping her to have an abortion:

I didn’t understand the depth or breadth or weight of my mother’s sacrifice until I became a mother myself, and the ghosts gathered ’round me, and whispered to me of love and loss and regret and unregret and gripped my heart in their tiny hands and squeezed until I cried. I didn’t understand until I’d suffered a loss not of my own devising, until I’d prayed for the life of this child, this oh-so-badly-wanted child. I didn’t understand until I became a mother, for real, for aching-heartfelt-feargripped-real, just how great a thing she had done.”

This blog entry speaks to me of three victims: The unwanted child, the heartbroken grandmother, and the blogger herself, whose grief years later shines through in her writing. What a culture we’ve created, in which a young woman suffers “a loss of her own devising” and is convinced she did the right thing. What a strange standard by which to judge motherhood, that helping your daughter abort your grandchild, while doing permanent damage to herself, is considered worthy of gratitude and praise.

The Oscars tonight

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Juno‘s up for a couple of Oscars. Flogging a dead horse, here’s yet another analysis of how/why/I just don’t get it could the characters in Knocked Up and Juno not have an abortion? 

Both women are intelligent, independent, savvy, and urbane. One is an ambitious career woman, the other a wisecracking high schooler. So, how is it that neither really considers abortion as a viable alternative to carrying a fetus to term?

Um, here’s the answer for ya: Because they are intelligent, independent, savvy and urbane. Seriously.

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Véronique adds: My favorite part was:

In the contexts of both films, all roads for our pregnant women lead to the abortion clinic. This is not an ideological analysis, it is rational one, it is what both of these characters, as they have been written, would do.

So much for choice.

I’ve wanted this since at least last math class

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juno.jpg

I’m not going to review Juno, as it has been in the theatres for weeks. It’s a fun movie, well worth seeing. But my favourite line comes not three minutes in: “I’ve wanted this for a long time,” says an extremely young male voice, as Juno makes her move. You’ve wanted to have sex for a long time? Really? Like ever since your large slurpee this afternoon, right after training for track and field?

On a different note, having seen the movie, I now understand why the pro-choice crowd doesn’t like it. They’ve complained it is unrealistic. I’ll believe that when the complaints roll in over Gray’s Anatomy. Is anyone’s doctor that good looking? No, I’d say they don’t like it because Juno draws a straight line from sex, to pregnancy, to a baby.  In that regard it is very–what’s the word I’m looking for–realistic.

Madness takes its toll

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[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdu7xoHU9DA]

I know I enjoy a good walk down memory lane so whilst you are enjoying this clip from the 1973 cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show, let me discuss today’s news. Today Judith Timson in The Globe and Mail writes an article called The unthinkable shmashmortion: When did abortion become a dirty word again? It’s another article despairing that Hollywood has not put enough effort into glamorizing “women’s choices” (read abortion) and has made movies like Juno and Knocked Up, showing other options. To quote:

When I was a teenager in the mid-sixties, an unwanted pregnancy was a nightmare. One girl I knew who did not want to tell her parents travelled secretly to a small town to visit a semi-competent abortionist. Another 17-year-old friend had an abortion performed on her family’s kitchen table by two women who injected a saline solution into her as her wealthy mother stood by. She delivered a fetus into the frilly wastebasket in her bedroom.

She also touches on the gritty 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a film about an abortion in communist Romania, which had Timson “protectively pressing my legs together, thinking back to those comparatively benign but still bad old days in Canada.”

Someone send this woman a history book: Comparing communist Romania with Canada in any fashion is hopelessly naive and historically untenable. Did I say “hopelessly naive”? Back to the topic at hand.

Abortion has not become a dirty word “again.” It was always a dirty word. She’s cheering the normalization of death that never happened, the women’s right that never materialized, because whether into a wastebasket or a sterilized hospital dish, women, girls, none of us, are comfortable with delivering our unborn children–dead.

Timson says she feels like she’s living in a time warp. How to put this delicately-that’s because she is. Her own 1970s time warp. Since then, time has shown the supposed liberation of abortion to be nothing more than science fiction–a cast of eccentric characters dancing over graves. The modern and hip know how abysmal the whole affair is.

Will wonders never cease?

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This blogger with Canoe.ca talks about Juno, the new movie whereby a pregnant teenager has the baby in stark contrast to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a movie I grew up with.

He says:

All I can say to that is that “choice” implies making a decision based on a set of options…

Options. I can recall thinking in my teens and even 20s that I’d rather be dead than unexpectedly pregnant. I meant it. In hindsight, that wasn’t the most mature response, but there you have it. Would have been great to have some mentors putting things in long term perspective.

But a movie that shows there is life for the mother, forget about the baby, after an unplanned pregnancy, is a good thing. And another good thing is to have a Canoe blogger writing about it.

Even if he is a man, and should therefore, by conventional wisdom, sit silently and quietly reflect on how abortion has nothing to do with him.

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Raji adds:

Another Juno article in the NYT on January 13: “Sex and the Teenage Girl”

I liked her comments, especially “….Nor is an abortion psychologically or physically simple…”

Newsflash: Hollywood is not a good teacher

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For the love of the saints-do I need to write this? Hollywood movies are not a good tool of instruction for your kids.  Today Ellen Goodman of the Washington Post Writers Group notices this, and bemoans a spate of movies she says are unrealistic, and uncomplicated. What? Hollywood, unrealistic?  Shocking.

We are in the midst of an entire wave of movies about unexpectedly pregnant women-from Knocked Up to Waitress to Bella-all deciding to have their babies and all wrapped up in nice neat bows,” she writes.

Now, ignore the fact that these movies are truly the exception to the norm-the usual Hollywood storyline is more American Beauty than Bella-and ignore the fact that she clearly has not seen Waitress-the lead actress there allows her baby to lead her away from “Husband Wrong” to singleness, not Mr. Right, as she claims-ignore all that, and I’d still say I can’t believe Goodman is actually complaining that parents are being called to, well, parent.

Once again, adults are being called to teach against the cultural tide,” she writes, angrily bemoaning the fact that “when Spears told the world she was pregnant, it was described as a ‘teachable moment…’  

If I ever have daughters, I’m just going to sit them down in front of Enchanted and The Sound of Music on repeat. That way, when a wicked witch kicks them out of Fairy Tale Land, they’ll have the real life survival skills to cope with New York City in their poofy prom dresses at night. Alternatively, when Mother Superior kicks them out of the Abbey, they’ll fall right into the arms of a dashing sea captain, who will leave his fiancée (she goes back to Vienna, where she belongs) and change from a taciturn, angry man into a warm and loving husband.

That’s my plan, anyway. 

And on a different, more serious note, these movies reflect the reality that most of us are uncomfortable with abortion–and plans to socially engineer that discomfort away make us more uncomfortable, not less. Hence Hollywood-movieland may from time to time address the topic in a way that is profoundly unrealistic.

But turn that frown upside down, Ellen! The vast majority of girls and women who find themselves in a crisis pregnancy really are living sad and complicated lives. And they go to the abortion clinic so that we as a society don’t need to grapple with their problems and can go on living our enchanted lives.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuGdi_4v020]

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