Warning: Watching Teen Pregnancy Shows Could Impregnate You

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The recent news that teen pregnancies are again on the rise after declining for a decade has many people fretting.

Organizations like Planned Parenthood are right to call out abstinence-only sex education programs as being at least partially responsible. Comprehensive sex education has been shown to be more effective than programs that simply tell kids not to have sex. After all, the best way to prevent motorcycle injuries is not to hide from prospective riders the fact that helmets exist.

But Washington Post health blogger Jennifer LaRue Huget suspects there is another factor at play: shows about pregnant teenagers. With TV fare like MTV’s “Teen Mom,” Lifetime’s new movie “The Pregnancy Pact” and ABC Family’s “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” maybe we’re just feeding young girls ideas! While she does admit that these shows do not make teen pregnancy out to be much of a treat, it worries her that they depict pregnancy as “in some ways an enhancement of the teen mom’s social life.”

Nevermind the fact that shows about pregnancy and shows about sex and sexiness are two very different things. I’ve written before about how mind-blowingly unrealistic “Secret Life” is – its young cast talks about sex more than Howard Stern and Dr. Laura combined. They talk about masterbation with their parents. They talk about taking birth control in the middle of crowded school hallways. The dialogue would surely simultaneously amuse and horrify any actual teenager, let alone encourage them to have sex.

What’s also very off about the suggestion that the recent spate of pregnancy programming is influencing the uptick in teen pregnancy is the numbers and dates themselves. The Guttmacher Institute report that actually revealed the increase did not show that teen pregnancies went up five minutes after Lifetime aired “The Pregnancy Pact,” rather, they went up in 2006 – the most recent year for which current statistics on teenage pregnancies, births and abortions are available. None of the shows mentioned in the Washington Post blog were around in 2006 – in fact, “Teen Mom” and the “Pregnancy Pact” only just debuted.

The notion that kids do everything they see on TV – even when it’s presented to them in a way that is completely unrealistic or inglorious – is not giving them nearly enough credit.