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

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 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.

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!)

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

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.

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.

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”

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

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.

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

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.

Juno is teenage girl with a developing brain, and people with developing brains make decisions based on feelings and not logic, this is why when she's confronted with him questioning her motives, that she doesn't know what to say-- and all of this happened with pregnancy hormones running through her as well. Even if she did have a crush on the guy it was up to him to be the bigger person (literally to be the adult with the fully-developed brain that he has) and push back, not creepily accept her advances. It really touched on how girls can be attracted to older men but really don't know what they're getting into.

I remember this panic. I had just turned 15 and was in my freshman year. My abusive stepmom at the time suddenly had it in her twisted head that I was going to be a teen mom. Mind you- I had never had a boyfriend, gone on a date, or even expressed interest in guys. This led to traumatizing lectures about purity and the horrors of sex and pregnancy over weeks. I was also forced to watch Juno, and other teen movies of the time, with her added commentary. Turns out, I’m asexual, and my minimal interest in dating and revulsion from our sex “talks” wasn’t just because of the context. My dad divorced her before I figured it out, but I can only imagine that she would have found that to be as much an abomination as teen pregnancy. It would only right if I resisted the desire, not if I didn’t have it lol

On the "Taboo pregnancy" obsession: Does anyone remember if the whole thing with the pregnant trans man who got like.... MASSIVE coverage on Oprah was during this time? Because this shot this into my memory but I can't place it to a time frame but it definitely fits into people being like invasively obsessed with pregnancies they see as weird/unnatural/amoral

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.

I love Juno for how straightforward and realistic it is. It’s not overly dramatic. It has well rounded characters and doesn’t give in to stereotypes.

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.

My mom, who had her first child at 17, told me I can't have birth control for my periods because I'd just start having sex. Ny periods were getting bad enough I had to stay home on the first day and get taken out of school because I literally couldn't move. Top it all off I already miscarried my first pregnancy before I ever asked. She didn't know because I was terrified of becoming homeless and I was working on my escape plan before telling her.

My younger sister had a girl get pregnant in her 6th grade class. She went into premature labor and the baby died a few days later. Kids shouldn't have to go through that.

Babe wake up new Mila Tequila vid dropped

I’m 25 and feel like all the teen pregnancy stuff was so in my face and every where I looked. It didn’t glamorize teen pregnancy at all and I’m still scared to have kids tbh

I got pregnant in college at 19 and of course I got horrible things slung at me. My mother called me a useless college dropout (I never wanted to go anyway) and a whore, etc. All I could think is "how are you going to call me an adult at 18, but whittle me down to a worthless *teeeeeen mom* at 19?" I'm still in a successful relationship with my kids father. We own a home. Good jobs. Good life. Everyone said we weren't a good example, teens should be shamed for unintended pregnancies, I better not dare say "hey, your life is NOT over" or be supportive to young people who need it. They spoonfed me my ENTIRE LIFE that teen pregnancy was an epidemic and it was "babies raising babies 😭" and it was never even fucking true.

girl excuse me while I rant, but Precious is something I am really passionate about As someone who has a background in social work, the scenes in Precious are incredibly accurate. You come into work and hear about absolutely horrendous trauma that no amount of schooling can prepare you for and start from scratch addressing it. The things discussed in that movie are all too real and happen on the daily to literal children, but social services funding is slashed every single year. Young girls like Precious are everywhere, but out of all age groups I have worked with, they have the strongest drive to succeed. It is amazing what love, passion, and assistance can do, and the end of the movie showed that.

Ben was so terrible, like I remember being in complete disbelief that he was Amy’s love interest like the scene I’ll always remember is him trying to comfort Amy after she called herself a wh*re and he says: “you’re my wh*re” I wholeheartedly believed the pilot of this show was a parody….Such a fever dream

As someone who watched teen mom and the sims videos I obsessed over the idea. As a result I had my son at 18 pregnant at 17, learning from watching these girls drop out of high school I ended up finishing high school and now getting my dental assistant certification. And I am proud to say I am now married to the same man that got my pregnant and now pregnant with our second baby.

I think Precious resonates with a lot of Black people and people of color because it gave a peak into the life of what teen girls who come from low income households that deal with domestic violence and getting ebt. I know back in the mid 2010s BET used to play Precious a lot and families would laugh in some moments , cry, and allow us to have heartfelt dialogues about the problems with teen pregnancy and poverty that normally our community just sweeps stuff under the rug in the forms of comedy.

I think the most wild thing I remember about it was a teen mum uk episode where a girl was 15 but she’d got pregnant at 14 and her boyfriend was in his twenties…… and it was just ignored?? That man had provably committed a crime and they just pretended it was all fine and alright Edit: commenters, I said provably not probably like it’s provably a crime aha

I hate the fact that in that the principal seemed to be horribly publicly shaming the girls. But not the boys of course! Because how could a pregnancy ever be a boys fault too?

I'm so glad you brought up the STORM of teen pregnancy sims videos. There's these series called "Just One" and "Unexpected" that intrawled me when I was in middle school.

i was FASCINATED by teenage pregnancy (and pregnancy in general) as a preteen for some reason and would read teen pregnancy fanfics n such and then i ended up not even having a boyfriend til i was 22 😂 so i would say there is absolutely no correlation between teen pregnancy and the media that depicts it, at least not for me

i went to a pretty progressive high school but i still remember being taught sex-ed by my pregnant gym coach, and having a woman come in as a guest to speak about her abusive relationship with her ex. but then that same woman told me that it was "too inappropriate" when i tried to bring up "consent" when she was asking for vocabulary words to put on the board. it was just dumbfounding to have the 16 year old girl sitting behind me ask "what's consent mean" while the grown woman talking about recognizing abuse tells me that learning about consent is inappropriate and anti-abstinence. i was shut down, trying to suggest that these girls were most vulnerable to abuse by the people closest to them, like their boyfriends, especially if they never had a person look them in the face and say "even your boyfriend needs to get permission from you". makes me mad to this day.

My mom wouldn’t let me watch Juno when it came out bc she was worried I would get pregnant… little did she know I’m a lesbian lmao

“He’s kind of obsessed with having sex with her knowing fully well that she doesn’t want to until she’s married” the objective is he wants to conquer the unobtainable I’ve been straight up told this by guys when I was in HS and was strict catholic 🥴🥴 they want to be with a girl no one else has a chance with

I am 24 years old and I am STILL terrified of teen pregnancy. I've had several friends tell me the same. It might not have been a huge thing, but my mom sure thought it was and made it very clear.

As someone who was a small kid during this time I was OBSESSED with 16 and pregnant, teen mom, secret life of an American teenager, etc. and I can tell you that I’m 21 years old and still a virgin because I refuse to get caught lacking😂😂

As a teenager during this time period, it felt to me like the obsession with "bad moms", Octomom, Kate from John and Kate, and the teen moms, Jamie Lynn and Bristol Palin, was all just kind of an excuse to make a hobby out of hating women/teen girls. "Look at all these bad women doing bad things and getting PUNISHED by being pregnant! Look at these selfish women having babies they can't afford and still getting plastic surgery! See teen girls, don't be a bad woman like these poor people, sex havers, these vain women, you don't DESERVE to be happy unless you are the perfect chaste obedient daughter, not vain but you must still be beautiful, don't be poor and on wellfare but don't spend extravagantly," etc. Not to speak for everyone, but some of the fascination definitely came from a want to learn how not to be these people because all you ever heard was how terrible teenage girls were and you needed desperately to be one of the good ones.

Those pregnancy scares really did a number on me, I'm still terrified of getting pregnant and I'm a fucking lesbian

Degrassi is actually such a groundbreaking show when it comes to issues like teen pregnancy because they also actually talked about and showed several characters who chose to get an abortion and at least one couple who decided to put their child up for adoption after they tried to raise the baby but had too many problems keeping themselves afloat. I also really liked that when everyone looked to Spike to tell people that abortion was right or wrong she basically told them that just because she had a baby at 14 it doesn’t mean everyone should and that people should be allowed to chose what’s right for them without judgement

the real Juno effect is me finishing this video and then immediately watching Juno

i mean, to be fair, 18 girls in ONE high school at one time is a lot.

It's wild in hindsight that there was this common narrative of stupid little girls getting pregnant and not enough about how in about 40% of cases, the father is aged between 20-29 and should know better!

I was born to a 15/16 year old birthmom and a 15 year old birthdad. I've never met either but knowing for forever that I was a result of two teenagers and knowing how much my birthmom went through just through her high school experience, giving birth, and finally choosing to put my up for adoption has really placed a new perspective on teen moms/teen pregnancies.

I want you guys to know that OctoMom currently has eight 13yr olds rn.

I also want to say the reactions to precious came from the fact that she wasn't a skinny conventionally attractive white girl who had a middle class family to fall back on. I think you're right to include it but it is a fundamentally different story than the others are.

My favorite movies were definitely Juno and Precious. I feel like they covered teen pregnancy and sexual abuse really well. I remember watching 16 and pregnant as a kid and I always hoped that they would continue school or shape up as most of them eventually ended up doing.

I was pregnant in 2010 at age 20, and there were a couple of times where my mom literally introduced me by saying "and this is my daughter, she's not 16 and pregnant" lmao. The impact (and stigma) was very real

Being a preteen/middle schooler who’s mom had you at 18 was so weird during this era. I had to do so much damage control to avoid being bullied and the pta moms hated my parents.

i got addicted to drugs when i was 13 years old due to grooming by someone 12 years older than me. I had my daughter at 14. She's almost 3 now, I'm almost 18. my decision to keep her saved my life. if i had found out i was pregnant sooner, i would've had an abortion, and although it was rough finding out at 5 months, that factor of it changed my entire life. the sheer amount of hatefulness and lack of support from peers, teachers, etc. forced me to drop out. i didn't drop out because school was too hard, i didn't drop out because i didn't have time for assignments, i dropped out because school was straining my mental health and wasting my time. I have my GED now and plan to start college in the next couple of years. im the happiest i have ever been, my daughter, the support of my family, and my boyfriend + his family, are a big source of my happiness. almost 4 years clean, no longer need antidepressants, bought my own car, and i couldn't have asked for anything to go any other way.

Teen mom here (19) had my kid when I was 16 and I think it can be one of the hardest things I went through because I grew up watching teen mom because my own mother didn't want me to "end up like them" so when I got pregnant I hid it for 6 months because I didn't want to be kicked out. Once I let my family know it became one of the hardest things I had to go through because I was essentially raising my siblings at the same time.

I was pregnant in 2020-2021 and I was 21, but I look much younger for my age (I'm 4ft 10 and kinda have a baby face) I got judged constantly in public for being a "teen mom" despite me not being one. I do think media at this time did have an effect on how teen moms are treated today.

I’m really glad you included Precious because even though her pregnancies weren’t necessarily the focus of the film, it still is a VERY valuable perspective on teen pregnancy, it can be far more complicated than as presented in Juno or other high school themed films.

Jhené Aiko & Big Sean dressed up as Juno and her baby dad for Halloween. It’s actually pretty adorable 😭❤️

For those interested, Mama Doctor Jones has a video on the timeline of "Octomom's" ivf cycles and the whole thing is INSANE

LOVE that you went into the sims culture and how much teen pregnancy stories played into that. I can't believe I was watching that at 10 years old

Going to high school during this time period was wild. Purity culture was out of control. My entire school had an assembly where they had some purity culture group gave us a lecture about waiting for marriage and abstinence.

did not expect you to talk about the sims? when i played as a teenager myself i would make a family with a teenager and a parent and then have the parent adopt a baby and then move out immediately so the teenager would take care of the child as a single mom ajdhfkslajs why did i do that to them 😭

"If you don't give your children sex education, they are not going to notice they have genitals" hahahahaha love that

I appreciated so much that you included precious. It's a movie that shows teenage motherhood from a different side. The pregnancy pact showed rebellion whereas precious I found to be resilience. She went against all odds and put her children first, such a an impactful movie.

i love juno. it’s such a sweet movie that confronts many real issues facing young people without making fun of them, it’s just compassionate and empathetic.

My high school had a daycare so it was common to be a teen mom at my school cuz girls at other schools in the district would transfer to my school when they got pregnant. It kept so many young women in school and I wish that was the type of resource that people would have seen as a response to this supposed “problem”

My mom made me watch secret life and I felt that it was so unrealistic to how teens acted and how things were in high school. She still made me watch it because "you have to be careful around guys like this" lmao. She would've kicked me out if I got pregnant as a teen. I made a promise to myself as a mom to a little girl that I would teach my daughter how to prevent teen pregnancy, but that if it happens at all she will still be loved and supported.

Minor correction, but Quinn's pregnancy in Glee was not in the pilot episode - it was actually in episode 4 of S1, though to be fair, it was a really big episode because it's also the episode in which Kurt comes out.

Omg I'm SO GLAD you mentioned the Sims 2 teen pregnancy RU-vid Videos 🤣😭 I remember those videos SO WELL.. the "scene" aesthetic, the extremely dramatic fighting and crying scenes.. I was obsessed with those Sims 2 videos and also had the teen pregnancy Mod lol

my mom MADE me watch teen mom with her when i was younger to try to scare me out of getting pregnant. we both ended up getting attached to the show and the people and still watch it together to this day. i cant say whether or not it was effective but im 23 with no baby yet soooooo 😂

It's so refreshing to see that you did a clear timeline on this media. I grew up in the early 2000s to a teen mom (gave birth to me at 17 in 2004) along with her friends who were teen moms and their kids, and my mom was obsessed with every show and movie you discussed. I really was imersed in the teen parent panic and this whole era both in media and in real life. This is such a niche thing and its so refreshing and relatable to see how other people get this era. Also its so true that kids of teen parents and people who see these depictions are less likely to be teen parents. My friends who also grew up to teen parents in the early 2000s have such a realistic view on teen pregnancy. Its also so important to note that most teen moms baby daddies are ADULT men. My dad wasn't a teen father and none of my friends dads were teen parents either. So much focus is on shaming young girls sexuality when the root issue in teen pregnancy is groomers. Support teen moms and have real open conversations around sex education and abuse.

I was 19 already when 16 and Pregnant first aired but it definitely served as my “birth control”… watching it made me really steadfast in my desire to not get pregnant even in my early 20s

The slow-dancing scene in Juno creeps me out even more now than it did back then.

Teen mom here. I got pregnant when I was 16 and had my son when I was 17 in 2013. I’m 26 now and my son is 9. Let me tell you back in the day the stigma was SO high and I was treated like absolute trash for being a teen mom. Regardless of media or anything else that influences people, know that whatever or however it happened support the mom and don’t judge for choices that were not made by you. Trust me, teen moms are going through enough. Positive note: I’m super happy now and am gonna be a hot mom living my best life in my thirties. 😂🥳 Stay safe out there!

Push was a really good awful book. I recently read it. It’s written as if precious herself wrote it so the spelling is atrocious. That helps to really put you in her position and you start out feeling so sick to your stomach sad for her. It’s one of my favorite books and favorite movies. I too this day have never watched a movie that gripped me as tightly as precious did

I watched Juno as a teen and thought it was a great movie, really sensible in its depiction of the characters. I didn't personally watch the other series, but my wife did, and she told me she had this irrational fear of pregnancy growing up, even without sex haha to this day (she's 28) the first reaction when she hears a friend is pregnant is like "omg poor girl she's so young" like its a tragedy haha reflection of those days.

There were two camps of sexually active teens: “I have no clue how getting pregnant works and I don’t care to learn” and the second camp which was “I’m so scared of getting pregnant I’m taking plan b, wearing condoms, on birth control, and having my boyfriend pull out”. That was me. All that plan b i didn’t need to be taking.

I think we should look deeper into the "fresh out of high school" 19-23yo pregnancies cus almost everyone I graduated with that I know has a baby now

Last semester I had parenting, which of course we discussed pregnancy, teen pregnancy, and even sexual diseases etc… during the end of the teen pregnancy section, we watched Juno and we had to take notes on what we would do and how we would feel. Majority of the class definitely learned that teen pregnancy ain’t no fun game even if we didn’t think of it in that way. Don’t understand why people think the movie is bad 😤

When i was 11-13 i had a deep obession with this kind of media. It sent my mother into a panic whenever it was even vaugely mentioned by anyone cause she didnt want me getting pregnant BUT also had her own obsession with me settling down young on a weird timeline. I am now a trans guy well into transition, estranged from my mother and planning to get sterilized. Was it the reality tv and sims youtube videos the prevented me getting pregnant as a teen? Who knows. (It was the roblox wolf roleplay. It was the roleplay that did it 100%) It'd be really funny to blame my transgenderism on it like my mom did tho.

Precious, please don't skip that part. Many of us black girls go through the same thing, or variation of such. Many of our mothers are mean, or weren't given the tools to be nice, or hate their lives and take it out on their kids. So many of us end up in foster care, or at family house, and end up getting raped and molested as we are children. Please don't skip this part

It's finally making sense my crippling fear of pregnancy even though I'm not in high school anymore and never had any direct traumatic experience of it. I never realized how prominent teen pregnancy in media was when I was a kid. I remember those Sims videos were like crack cocaine for little me.

When I was graduating high school, my teacher commented how amazing it was that our year managed to go through 4 years of high school without any student getting pregnant. Then I went college, where I was in the class with this girl who was a teen mom. At first she kept to herself, THEN the teen mom thing got hot. And my god did the ugly fly. I never went through the high school drama phase, but this girl manage to let me experience it in college. She was an over the top drama queen and roped a class of 90 people into her drama (some of whom are men in their mid 40s). She was glorifying teenage pregnancy like crazy, she said things like her baby would be 18 and she would still be in her mid 30s and be a "hot mom". Shopping together on the arms of her handsome son. And people would mistake her for a cougar with her hot young boyfriend (ew). She was suggesting it was trendy and genius idea and that other people should do it too. Her close friend circle was chiming in and agreeing for heavens sake. I was just stunned, it was so disgusting how she went about glorifying it and sucking everyone into her drama. I wasn't even close to the center of her drama vortex, but I got sucked in regardless. I don't give a f*** that she was teen mom, I wish she kept to her self.

As someone who kept getting egged on to get pregnant when my friend was pregnant, I would totally believe a group of girls to do that. MIND YOU!! I was 18/19 and she was still 17!! Eventually she convinced another woman (who was 26 at the time & her coworker/sis in law?) to get pregnant too. So after like 2-3 weeks of dating the girls boyfriend’s brother!!! She got pregnant too and they both had babies around the same time. Crazy ppl out here in the world.

My mom didn't care lol. She was a teen mom that struggled herself, but never talked to me about safe sex. Or did anything to keep me from making mistakes in general really. When I was 14 and started dating a 21 yo, AND TOLD HER he took my virginity, she barely raised an eyebrow. Believe it or not that's not the worst case of her not protecting me. Just one of the many reasons I don't speak to her now. And a great lesson on how not to parent lol

I watched teen mom content in all forms from as early as I can remember. Then I got pregnant at 17 and I decided to keep my baby solely off the fact that these movies and tv shows and teen mom RU-vid made me feel it would be like a movie. Now I’m 24 and I have a 6 year old and while I’m so so glad I kept my child I do feel that it was irresponsible to make that decision because i wanted to emulate media. I am LUCKY I have a family who did not kick me out, were supportive in my decision and still to this day help me physically and financially. It took me a long time and a lot of therapy to admit that I only made that decision because of the media I was consuming as well and was not thinking about how many other lives were being affected by that decision, particularly my child’s life. I take being a mother extremely seriously and it’s a complete focus in my life, but I was lucky that I was able to finish high school and get some higher education and not have to worry about having a place to live or having food to eat. I was lucky my family didn’t disown me. I am lucky I also have a good group of other teen mom friends now, that also were affected by media and we all help each other cope but this is a real trauma a lot of people experienced. I believe that the teen pregnancy rates went down or stayed on the same downward slope, but there were absolutely girls who got pregnant on purpose, or only decided to keep their accidental pregnancies because of these shows/movies/reality TV. I was one of them

I was in high school back then. My high school had the highest teen pregnancy rate in the US. 900 freshmen and 200+ graduated. All of the girls in my group were teen moms and three personal friends were teen dads.

I went to the school Juno was filmed at and the place was known for teen pregnancies. I think all the schools in that area had a problem well before Juno was ever filmed. Just a cool fact.

I was a freshman in high school in ‘08, 14 years old. The week of homecoming, my parents sat me down & lectured me about abstinence and how important it is to wait until married for sex. I was given a purity ring that they called a promise ring- a promise to god 🤢 🤮 I was shamed for clothes, not allowed to wear makeup, or go to parties. You can imagine the shit show when I realized I was pregnant right before I graduated in 2011 at 16- I was forced to abort. It was so traumatizing & affected me so deeply that I ended up throwing away a full ride to law school because of the mental health issues that had arised. I’m now 28, married, with 2 kids- I have always been open about bodies & not shaming them for curiosity because I want to be able to provide support and sex Ed at home without my kids feeling ashamed or uncomfortable for being totally normal. So far so good ❤ ps I am no contact with my parents since 2011 :)

As a 23 year old, I am absolutely SPEECHLESS when I think about how crazy it would be to have a baby so young. My mom had me when she was only 15!! when I picture my mom having a 5 year old child at only 20 years old, I can’t even imagine what that was like!

Crying at the precious section, that movie destroyed me but I’m also so proud and amazed by what the actors brought to the table, Monique’s performance was SO REAL! God I love and hate that movie

I was obsessed with teen pregnancy stories as a preteen/teen. I had absolutely no interest in getting pregnant, but loved media about it

when the world needed her most she returned!! missed you mila :)

I remember writing an entire essay on why 16 & pregnant and Teen Mom were encouraging teens to get pregnant just so they could be famous 😭 when in reality I watched those shows religiously and clearly did not have a desire to be a teen mom. It’s funny how “logic” works lol

I love this video! You did a great job of covering the topic broadly. I was also a preteen around that time and I have such distinct memories of watching things like 16 and pregnant, teen mom, and secret life of the american teenager. I really enjoyed them at that time and I feel that most of the obsession was just because we love to consume content about taboo topics. For many consumers it probably didn't have much to do with moral panic about themselves or teens around them

thank you for blessing us with this video sis, girl you ✨the anticipation✨ for your return was reallll

I got pregnant As a teen, 14-15 actually… Ik. and Juno came out so closely after I birthed my son, it was so similar to my story … besides the fact that I kept my baby… craziest decision of my life, I was too young to understand. Way to young. Im now 29 & he’s 14!… & obviously I love my child. I lost out on so many opportunities in life, due to being a young mom….. things I didn’t see as opportunities at the time, but now it’s so obvious.. you can’t reply on anyone else to take care of your child, your parents can only do so much. The young father can only do so much…. Don’t rely on them… it’s not easy but once you’ve made the choice you can’t turn back. Like I said I love my child, but I would’ve cherished being a “regular teen” much more… then have my baby later. Idk I get mixed replies when I cmnt this stuff , but it’s my reality & my interpretations on such.

There was an entire sex panic for a while there. The "omg I had sex for the first time and something bad happened!" trope was getting really tired by the time it got to April Kepner which just pushed it over the top (to the point that even though the Grace episode aired nearly three years earlier, Grace is referred to as a "Kepner character"). Every time a character had sex on Secret Life it was like something bad happened and it reminded me so much of the fundamentalist purity culture I was in at the time and how "BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN TO YOUR AND YOUR LOVED ONES IF VAGINAL INTERCOURSE HAPPENS CONSENSUALLY OR NONCON OUTSIDE OF MARRIAGE". The sex panic of the late '00s and early '10s was wild, especially if you grew up fundamentalist. I am no longer that and have had therapy to deal with the deprogramming but the sex panic is one thing that sticks in the back of my mind every now and then.

I got pregnant about two weeks after I turned seventeen. I would binge watch American teenager because at least I’m handling it better than that