Secretly Pregnant Is Teen Mom About People Who Should Know Better

"Secretly Pregnant...is that the one where the women don't know they're pregnant?"

"No, that's I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant."

- Actual conversation I was part of recently.

Discovery Fit & Health's Secretly Pregnant -- which airs Thursday nights at 10 -- joins a host of pregnancy-themed reality shows on the network, from the above-named I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant (self-explanatory) to I'm Pregnant And... (...pregnant under weird or suboptimal circumstances, like "I'm Pregnant And...OCD" or "I'm Pregnant And...Obese"). And if you're looking for a pure judging experience, Secretly Pregnant may be the best of the bunch.

As the title suggests, Secretly Pregnant profiles women who are, for various reasons, keeping from their loved ones the fact that they are In A Family Way. Each episode documents two women's stories, switching back and forth (as on the earlier DFH series My Mom Is Obsessed), which gives the viewer the opportunity to decide which woman's story is the more fucked up. And in last night's season premiere, it was actually kind of close!

First, we met Natasha, who's in her early twenties and five months pregnant. Neither she nor her boyfriend Axel is employed; she has trouble finding work because she never finished high school, and he's on probation (though we never learn the details of his crime). A month into their relationship, Natasha became pregnant, but at the time they decided she should have an abortion. This time, she is ready to be a mother, she tells us, but she's scared that when Axel finds out about her pregnancy, he'll leave her. So in addition to judging Axel on the basis of what we may reasonably surmise is Natasha's correct estimation of his character, we get to judge him for being too dumb to notice that she's pregnant when they live together and sleep in the same bed every night.

In the other half of the episode (and also at the other end of the spectrum), there's Charity. She's thirty-seven and already the mother of five boys, the oldest of which is only eight. Patrick, her husband knows about her pregnancy, but she's keeping it secret from her parents. Due to her straitened financial circumstances given all her kids, Charity accepts a lot of help from her parents, who (according to her) have said shitty things to her in the past about having too many children; she's afraid that when she tells her parents she's pregnant again, they'll cut off their financial support. But Charity and Patrick have a good reason for having another kid! Well, not a good reason, but a reason: they're trying for a girl. (It's sort of implied that some of their younger kids might have been girl attempts that didn't pan out, too.) Watching Charity's segment without judging her for her poor choices would be impossible even for the Dalai Lama: not only are she and her husband as irresponsible with their money as they are with their reproductive health, but when they meet with a financial advisor about figuring out a budget plan, they tell her they actually have no idea how much debt they've accrued. This is not a situation into which a thoughtful person would bring a sixth child.

Basically, the reason all these women aren't public about their pregnancies is that they have good reasons not to have their babies. Unspoken though obvious in all these stories is that they've waited so long to announce their pregnancies so that they will have progressed past the point where anyone in their lives could even try to get them to terminate. Pulling at this thread leads on to all kinds of logical conclusions: if this country weren't run by religious fundamentalists, the decision to terminate a pregnancy wouldn't be so fraught. If safe, legal abortions were less expensive, and readily available in more communities, more women who aren't in the best situation to become mothers would terminate their pregnancies without ever having to tell anyone they'd even been pregnant, if they feared repercussions from the announcement. If contraception were more accessible, fewer women who aren't ready to be parents would get pregnant in the first place.

But never mind that! Natasha's telling Axel she's going to the doctor so he can put her on a diet plan, because Axel's noticed she's gaining weight! Let's see how this plays out....