The Juno Effect: The Teen Pregnancy Panic

Happy Milaween everyone!!! Hope you enjoy! Jumpscare warning for when my video glitches around 12:20 😧

I think Precious is so important because it’s one of the few where the pregnancies aren’t because “omg teenagers are so horny or too curious and dumb” but just pure abuse. Many teen pregnancies are a product of abuse, not as a result of the former.

I'm actually pretty mad that a nice story about teen girls supporting each other to finish school despite young babies/pregnancies is turned into a salacious story about "trying to get pregnant"

Me and my two best friends growing up all got pregnant at 16. In 2009. The things we had in common: 1. our mothers were teen moms. 2. Unstable home lives. 3. Very poor. 4. We all survived csa. 5. Baby dads were all over 18. We didn't have a pact. Just a whole lot in common that lead to this. We were friends from kindergarten on and people really thought we did it on purpose. We absolutely did not.

My mom was a pregnant teen and constantly threatened to kick me out if I ever got pregnant. Until I turned 20 now it’s “where are my grandkids” wth

“Support teens who are pregnant, not teen pregnancy”

Never forget the time Grace DOES have sex in secret life and her dad immediately dies in a plane crash, leading her to believe it’s punishment for her having sex

I got pregnant a month into being 19 by a 24 year old. I watched Juno while I was pregnant and just sobbed. While I wasn’t in highschool I feel like it was such a realistic depiction. I remember her saying she was wearing a “fat suit that she couldn’t take off” and it hit so hard for me. Almost a year later and my son is 7 months old and I love him more than life itself, but I can’t help but think how my life would have been different had I never gotten with that guy and gotten pregnant. I feel like having a baby before I was done growing up affected me a lot. I have so much respect for moms that make it work in highschool.

contrary to the moral panic, i actually think watching 16 and pregnant is the reason so much of my generation and younger had sex way later or not at all. it was the opposite of glamorizing for me

I also think it's really important to point out that despite the popularity of teen pregnancy stories, they fail to mention that the vast majority of teen moms have a baby with a man significantly older than them. Young girls are left to shoulder judgement when they are often victims of grooming or at the very least an uneven power dynamic!! (edit: vast majority was definitely an overstatement but various studies still show a significant percentage!)

I remember watching I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant when I was around 8-11 and being really confused about the controversy of teen moms, because I thought pregnancy just happened 💀 I couldn’t understand why it was such a shameful thing because I thought the girls had no choice and their bodies just went “oh yeah, we’re having a baby now”

Media like this and the intense focus on teen pregnancy made me (a person with an anxiety disorder) cripplingly afraid of pregnancy. People are crying and moaning about the fall in birth rates nowadays, but all that anti pregnancy programming doesn't just go away once people grow up I feel. I remember juno in particular making me feel pretty anxious, but hey that was just me, I was a skittish kid. My parents were particularly mad when the school did that project with the robot baby in my health class, as they felt it did nothing to fight teen pregnancy and just demonized babies, which was true honestly.

In the 30s my great grandmother Olive fell in love with a catholic. Her Protestant family didn’t approve. She became pregnant with a baby boy out of wedlock as a young woman. This wasn’t discovered until many years later when her children noticed she had a mysterious C-section scar. Still nobody knows what happened to the baby boy. Later, in the 60s Olive’s daughter Holly became pregnant at the age of 14. She was sent away for months to a facility to have her baby (Catherine) and returned without her. Her little sisters didn’t even know she was pregnant and it was hidden from everyone in the community. It wasn’t until Catherine was fully grown, married, and had tragically lost her adoptive parents that she reached out to find her birth mother. Teen pregnancy is not more common now, pregnant teens are just now afforded the support and dignity they need.

I went to a super small school in a poor area (only 90 kids in my grade alone). One of my classmates was a girl who constantly acted out, and never did any school assignment. Sophomore year comes and she becomes a pregnant minor. After that when the school found out the staff was all so helpful towards her, helping her prepare for a maternity leave and the assignments she’d miss. Many of the teachers were parents too and offered to donate baby stuff they no longer had use for. This support helped her turn her life around. She started paying attention in class, doing assignments, and when senior year and graduation came, she passed me in the class ranks. At our school the first 20 students with the best grades are honors students, I was placed 18. I can’t remember where she ended up placing, but it was higher than me, and I don’t think she’d ever have pushed herself to do better without that support. I heard she got accepted into one of the state’s highest universities, don’t know much after that, But I think she’s got it handled

im 22 and im still scared to become a teen mom... they really made a number on us

I am the child of a teen mom, and I remember telling people my mom’s age, thinking it was so cool how young she was because she was a cool, young mom. I remember being judged by other students in elementary school after telling them this and was so confused as to why, I just knew I loved my mom. I was so grateful that my mom was open when talking to me about sex and sex ed so that I knew about safe sex and birth control by the time I started doing it and never had a pregnancy scare.

That Children Having Children article also mentioned that kids as young as 8 were having sex. It caused such a panic in my mother that she asked my 8 year old older sister if she'd been having sex, which she hadn't. Then when my sister said she hadn't done it and didn't even know the word our mom was talking about, my mother refused to speak to or look at my sister for months out of this irrational...i don't even know what. I do remember that article.

I remember watching “I didn’t know I was pregnant” in elementary school. As a kid that was the most horrifying thing to me and I started getting paranoid 😭✋🏻 I didn’t use public bathrooms bc I was scared I would get pregnant if I accidentally sat on someone’s bodily fluids. TLC (the network) definitely capitalized off of the whole teen pregnancy panic.

I saw a statistic recently that in America a 40% of the fathers responsible for pregnancies where the mother is 15 years old or younger were between the ages of 20 and 30 years old. I'm over half way thru the video but I just thought I'd add that bit of information. The problem is always presented as if it's the minor who is the problem when in reality it's adult men who are the problem. The movie Precious, therefore is likely closer to the reality of the "teen pregnancy epidemic" than any of the other media where the teen pregnancy is a by-product of relatively normal teen behaviour.

She’s a pop culture historian. These videos could be used in anthropology classes or some shit