Michaela Dempsey's Blog #10

My questions are:

Do TV shows glorify teen pregnancy or desensitive the importance of planning and protection? And

does the prevelance of teen pregnancy make it socially acceptable?

Source 1:

Sun, Feifei. "Baby Mamas." Time 178.3 (2011): 58-60. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.

"Last December, Portwood disclosed that she earned $140,000 from a six-month contract with MTV" -would teenage girls get pregnant just to try and get on the show and get famous?
"4 in 10 teenagers who watch an episode of 16 and Pregnant talk about the show with a parent afterward and that more than 90% of them think teen pregnancy is harder than they imagined before watching the series."-Do this many teenagers actually talk to their parents after the show and does that keep them from having unprotected sex?

This article gave me a lot of insight to the show Teen Mom and the impacts the show has made, I will use this a lot to reference Teen Mom.

Source 2:
B., K. "Reproductive wrongs: The so-called secret life of baby-borrowing American teens." Bitch Magazine: Feminist Response to Pop Culture 41 (2008): 16-17. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.

"The show works to counter the age-old myth that you can’t get pregnant your first time with the central character of 15-year- old nice girl Amy" -the article also talks about the characters in the show who are so cliche that they make the show unbelievable, this may discredit the show and make girls think that because everything else in the show is so forced and unreal, the fact that you can get pregnant the first time you have sex probably is an over exaggerated part of the show as well.

This article is mostly about the television show The Baby Borrowers and The Secret Life of the American Teenagers.  I could possibly use this article to produce doubt but overall it is not very helpful.