Strangely, I found myself watching this very show last night. I was initially shocked (maybe naively so), but then got down to watching this girl’s reality. I actually felt the show did a great job of portraying the family dysfunction, the fear of being forced to labor alone, the conflict of learning to mother when living with your own controlling mother, the added physical and financial burdens. It also did a good job of showing the love between mother and infant, the beauty of a baby in the midst of the craziness. I have a mixed response to how this will affect young women today…it seems putting something on TV is the final frontier to making it “okay.” On the other hand, if it makes it okay for young women to keep their babies rather than abort them, that’s a good thing, right? I still wish this could be contrasted with the school friend who got through school without getting pregnant, went on to college unencumbered, and in general lived a very different life. You’re right, this show makes a great argument for keeping a baby once pregnant, but clearly the producers aren’t interested in having the conversation about why even having to answer the abortion question is a tragedy in and of itself.

I think like you said, it seems to be showing a fairly realistic picture, but I think it’d be even more real, and far more hard hitting if you showed the babies and parents 10-15 years down the track as well. But understandably, they probably wouldn’t want to go that far, and would lose the MVT ‘now’ or relevency picture in the process if they did anyway.

So yeah. I don’t think the ‘victim’ portrayal is positive, it fact I think it could do a lot more damage then the good done through the program to be honest. Teaching teens that single mothers are just ‘unfortunate’ encourages the whole concept as ‘normal’ which just engrains it even further into society.

So overall I think it would be unhelpful because it’s still not showing the full or true picture. But some aspects of it might help by giving people a bit more of a concept of the reality of teen pregnancy.