The popular pop culture cable station MTV has two huge hits on their hands dealing with teen pregnancy – “16 & Pregnant” and the spinoff “Teen Mom.” 16 & Pregnant just finished up their second season and Teen Mom is heading into season two this month. All of the girls in the series chose to give birth to their children and some gave their babies up for adoption.
The stories are heart wrenching to say the least. A lot of the girls don’t have support from their boyfriends and families yet couldn’t bring themselves to choose to abort their child…until now.
But MTV aired a controversial follow-up to these two hit shows last week called “No Easy Decision.” It was about one of the girls on 16 & Pregnant, Markai Durham, who delivered her baby girl and then found out she was pregnant again with her boyfriend James only eight months later. No Easy Decision follows Markai as she weighs the decision to give birth or to have an abortion.
Your heart will ache for the teen since she’s so close to doing the right thing (she becomes distraught when James calls the unborn child a “thing” and a ball of cells and she points to her daughter and, in tears, says a “thing could turn out just like her”). She voices that she already loves the baby who is doing nothing but making her sick – she had the abortion at 6 weeks gestation.
Pro-life blogger Jill Stanek has a post up questioning the sponsors since the show ran without commercials, unheard of for MTV – plus she includes all the feminist cheerleaders for the girls having abortions.
Dr. Drew Pinsky, who wasn’t exactly an unbiased moderator, hosted the special as well as the reunions for 16 & Pregnant and Teen Mom. As a Catholic, watching Dr. Drew hoist condoms on these young couples as the best way to prevent another unwanted pregnancy was sickening. Not once did the issue of self-control, self-respect, the respect of their partners and love come up. Not once did anyone suggest – hey, I really don’t want to get pregnant again so we’re just not going to have sex. Not once. It was all about artificial birth control and contraception, which the Catholic Church adamantly opposes and deems “intrinsically evil.”
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote yesterday about the shock of reality TV that leaves out abortion because, maybe, it’s just a little too real. He said that it’s probably a victory for pro-lifers but also a denial of culture since one in five pregnancies ends in abortion in the US (so much for “safe, legal and rare”). But taking it a step further, Douthat tied in infertility and abortion:
In every era, there’s been a tragic contrast between the burden of unwanted pregnancies and the burden of infertility. But this gap used to be bridged by adoption far more frequently than it is today. Prior to 1973, 20 percent of births to white, unmarried women (and 9 percent of unwed births over all) led to an adoption. Today, just 1 percent of babies born to unwed mothers are adopted, and would-be adoptive parents face a waiting list that has lengthened beyond reason.
Douthat printed a poem from Kevin Young in last week’s New Yorker:
The doctor trying again to find you, fragile,
fern, snowflake. Nothing.
After, my wife will say, in fear,
impatient, she went beyond her body,
this tiny room, into the ether—
… And there
it is: faint, an echo, faster and further
away than mother’s, all beat box
and fuzzy feedback. …
And then ended the column with these lines:
This is the paradox of America’s unborn. No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured. And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed. [our emphasis]
Last week, we were informed by our friends at the 
