British Teenagers Get Pregnant Too
Back when I alerted you to the existence of Secretly Pregnant, I expressed the view that it, and other shows about suboptimal pregnancies (Teen Mom, etc.), could only be filmed in the U.S. due to this country's retrograde abortion policy. To quote myself: "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." Turns out I am not quite the social scientist I thought I was! (I know: I'm scared too.)
New to Hulu today is Underage & Pregnant, a documentary series from BBC Three (also the home of great non-fiction programming like Embarrassing Bodies). Based on this title screen...
...I assumed it was a British remake of MTV's 16 and Pregnant, but it's not: MTVUK has its own version of that show! Meaning: even though abortion is a legal procedure fully covered by the NHS, there are still enough British teenagers carrying their unplanned pregnancies to term to support the production of not one but two TV series about their struggles. I know how naïve it makes me to be shocked by this fact, but here we are.
If you like...well, "like" seems like the wrong word. If, like me, you're fascinated by shows in which real girls and women have babies even though they really probably shouldn't as though terminating those pregnancies were not even a possibility, Underage & Pregnant is worth checking out. It feels less "produced" than 16 and Pregnant -- no fakey setups for the story of how the subject told her parents; no plinky plunky music; no animated bumpers. Instead, U&P seems to dramatize the messy, unpleasant reality of Charlotte's underage parenthood (even though, unlike most of the teen fathers of Teen Mom and 16 and Pregnant, the one in the U&P premiere lives with his child's mother and shares daily parenting duties with her, and thus offers a slightly less depressing vision of the teen mother's life). We also get the perspective of Charlotte's twin sister Allanah, who felt a rift when Charlotte kept her pregnancy a secret from her.
Underage & Pregnant may not change your mind about dumb teenagers and their propensity for being dumb. But it may cause you to feel slightly less convinced of the possibility that, if the U.S. ever were to adopt a single-payer health insurance system, all society's problems would not actually disappear. Just most of them.