Mockumamas: Our new era of reality pregnancy
When should you have a baby?
I ask not because I am planning one of my own (sorry, Mom!) or because, as I creak over the midpoint of my 30s, I can’t weigh the risks and drawbacks for myself. It’s not even that I care what you think. But between the Superbowl’s controversial Michael Tebow ad, Lifetime’s highest-rated debut ever, The Pregnancy Pact , Rielle Hunter’s very public child-support woes, and a flood of recent other online, onscreen and on-page debates, I’ve finally realized that even if the question is moot (like, twenty years moot), a woman is still expected to offer it up for general discussion.
So, here we go. Just so you know, I’m already up to speed on the major ones. Not if I’m too young. (Covered!) Not if I’m too old. (Oh, no worries! Apparently it’s too late–when you’re over 30, even your eggs fly the coop.)
And here come the more wobbly proscriptions of our modern era. Allegedly not not–prepare the crimson ‘S’!–if you’re single. (See: “Not in the best interests of the child“.) Not if you’re amicably separated. (Unless you’re prepared to be seen as a damsel-in-distress by the entire Western world.) Definitely not when the father of your baby is currently married to someone else. (Here, as far as I can see, mainly because people won’t be able to differentiate that choice from the choice to have the affair.) And not if Scott Brown is anywhere in the vicinity. (Witness the man who used his victory speech to auction off his daughters give a moral-police snort at our President’s mother’s connubial status when she gave birth–which, as it happens, was married.)
But even these are just an offshoot of our culture’s favorite debate about women: how much you need a man, and how bad a person you probably are if you don’t have one. Children simply up the ante, because it’s generally agreed that children fare better in stable households, and it’s easy for the moral police to fudge “stable” to mean “mother and father.” (Don’t be insensible to the powers of such fudging. Well-meaning people tsk-tsk’d about my probable psychological damage as the daughter of one black parent and one white parent my whole life, and Loving v. Virginia only overturned the laws against it 6 years before I was born.)
But only so many people have enough free time to subjugate women and second-guess other people’s parenting on a daily basis. (More than you’d like, but only so many.) Despite the perennial political football Roe v. Wade, the majority of Americans irritatingly persist in thinking other people’s child-bearing and child-rearing choices are basically their own. So what’s a media stalled on Rielle and John’s sex tape and Jon & Kate Plus Eight to do?
If the last few weeks are any indication, it’s to release a veritable Grand Guignol of mother-in-waiting stories, each so grotesque they bypass controversy for straight-up jaw-dropping.
First, Lifetime aired The Pregnancy Pact, the real-life story of a 17 girls at a Gloucester, Mass high school who apparently mutually decided to get pregnant on masse. A harmless piece of puff mainly saved by the presence of a intent and smart Thora Birch, it leaves the viewer mainly feeling that’s what happens in a culture that says you’re too young to have sex at 16 and too old to give birth at 30. (Can you blame them for getting a head start?)
Next, the web series Bump hit the web. A faux-documentary of three real-life women played by C-list actors choosing whether to end or keep their pregnancies, the crowd-sourced, web-based series defies easy definition. (Mockumama?) The series allows commenters to choose what happens in the next episode on the site blog, and so far hundreds seem invested in the performances, which are on the level of your basic Glad Wrap ad. (Though I do love the intensity of doctor Andray Johnson, going for the Oscar).
Other reality shows are there for perusing. The second season of MTV’s 16 and Pregnant airs next week — and for viewers who missed the first, the general direction can be summed up by the info box that welcomes you on the show’s site. (“Got a question? All About Pregnancy Prevention.”) But the most compelling of all is TLC’s “I’m Pregnant And…” Each week, the ellipsis is replaced by another improbability: Bipolar, Homeless, 55 years old, Addicted. On the bipolar episode, the camera gives a spooky rippling overlay to the scene when a support group wraps the subject in toilet paper, something I would like to think would freak me out too. But it’s a strange moment–who’s turning the helpless subject for their exploitative purposes more–the support group, or TLC itself?
That question is writ large in the controversy approaching during this week’s Superbowl: the Michael Tebow ad, in which the player’s mother, Pam Tebow, discusses keeping her son despite a dangerous illness that threatened her life. Funded by the evangelical group Focus on the Family, the ad drew NOW’s ire, who called on the network to drop the ad. (Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richard’s wisely followed up with a more crowd-friendly video featuring the Gold medalist Al Joyner and the NFL’s Sean James discussing the power of choice.)
In our reach-across-the-aisle era, it’s very easy to make the argument that these ads–and the flurry of bump-related projects–are simply there to open up the conversation. But here’s another question–why is this a conversation? No one even feels compelled to suggest we’re hearing Pam Tebow’s story or watching “I’m Pregnant and…” without rendering a judgment, that the subject can exist free of agenda. because we’ve come to associate pregnancy by its very nature with judgment. The entire country routinely, like Solomon, feels free to split babies in two from gestation to adulthood,It doesn’t matter whether we win the argument to choose. We’re still losing when it has to be an argument at all.
Bump’s supposedly novel convention–allowing strangers to determine what the women will do about their pregnancies–has been depressingly real for some time.
Posted by altehaggen in General @ Friday, February 5, 2010 3:53 pm | | Comments (0)












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