Prime-time TV deals with teen baby boom

Television teens have birthed a prime-time baby boom.

Recent seasons have delivered shows that range from MTV's gritty "16 and Pregnant" to ABC Family's "The Secret Life of the American Teenager."

This spring, a former cheerleader and president of her high school chastity club performed a musical birth on Fox's "Glee," accompanied by the classic rock song "Bohemian Rhapsody."

Although television once shied away from showing even married ladies in the family way, the aversion has given way to portrayals of pregnant teenagers that range from nuanced to, well, gleeful.

"The media is a great reflection of where we are as a culture," said Will Neville of the Washington, D.C., nonprofit agency Advocates for Youth. "Certainly, when it comes to pregnancy, you are starting to see more and more TV shows that incorporate it. You are starting to see less of a stigma for the teen."

On a recent episode, fans of "Friday Night Lights" watched as the show took on one of America's remaining TV taboos: abortion.

In the episode, a troubled high school beauty takes a hard look at her life and her accidental pregnancy and decides that she "can't take care of a baby." The show follows the character, Becky, as she seeks help from friends and adults, confronts her mother with the news, struggles to make a decision and visits an abortion clinic with her mother.

"I think it is rare for shows, no matter what the age of the woman who is pregnant, to deal seriously with the question," Neville said. "In almost all cases, writers write themselves out of that political land mine."

Even "Sex and the City," a show once known for its dedication to pushing sexual boundaries for women, balked when a character headed into a doctor's office to end a pregnancy.

Abortion plot lines are rare.

Among the first was "Maude" in 1972. Others include the 1980s hit movies "Dirty Dancing" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," the mostly forgotten teen drama "Everwood" and HBO's "Six Feet Under." The remake of "Battlestar Galactica" offered a secondary story about abortion in a sci-fi world.

In recent episodes of "The Secret Life of the American Teenager," the teenage character Adrian discovered she was pregnant and explored abortion as an option.

The boom in teenage pregnancy on television is, in part, a product of the explosion of cable channels in the past decades, added Amy Kramer, director of the national campaign's entertainment media and audience strategy program. Television also has capitalized on the power of the teenage market that has emerged to buy film tickets and books.

The result has been a variety of portraits of teenage pregnancy, many of them well done and helpful, that have begun to reflect the reality of teenage life in the United States, Kramer and Nightingale said.

"What it does is it tees up a very rich opportunity for parents to talk about what their own views and values are," Kramer said.

Although pregnancy has been removed from the table of taboos, television has yet to deal with many aspects of teenage sexuality, Neville said.

"We are acknowledging young people's sexuality and acknowledging teenage pregnancy," he said. "But there are still vast cultural silences around contraception, around abortion and in some cases about homosexuality, where young people are living lives that are much more nuanced than we are willing to acknowledge."

As he sees it, the episode captured "something that really does happen to a teenager."