Teen pregnancy is a great deal of things, yet funny isn’t specifically among them. That’s why a joke gained by Anna Kendrick, Zac Efron, and Adam DeVine at last night’s MTV Movie Awards was so problematic.
The 3 took the phase at the awards on Sunday night to promote their brand-new movie, Mike and Dave Demand Wedding Dates, prior to presenting the award for Breakthrough Performance. In their scripted banter prior to presenting the award, Anna announced that due to the fact that Zac and Adam’s characters in the movie Demand wedding dates, she took it upon herself to locate them some for the awards.
Then: Onto the stage, walked four women dressed up to look adore pregnant teens. There’d been a mix-up, and the women were there to audition for MTV’s 16 and Pregnant. The women were boisterous and loud, spoke in phony southern accents, and every one of loudly agreed they were “DTEfron.” One was dressed in an orange jumpsuit that looks adore the kind you put on in prison.
Ugh.
In merely under a minute, the trio’s joke managed to cover up every negative — and untrue — assumption regarding pregnant teens. The joke makes teen moms out to be sexually aggressive, criminal, and wild. The problem along with this depiction is that girls that grab pregnant at a young age aren’t those things. They are regular teens — adore Kirstin Fitzgerald, a young woman from Mississippi, that spoke along with Teen Vogue last year regarding her experiences.
Kirstin said that she had great grades and a good-girl track record in higher school, yet every one of that disappeared as quickly as she accidentally got pregnant at 17. “as quickly as I got spine to school, the teachers looked down on me,” she said. “It’s a small town, so as quickly as one individual discovered out, every person did. It was merely adore The Scarlet Letter.”
Kirstin graduated higher school along with honors while being 6 months pregnant. prior to that, though, she said the majority of of her friends disappeared, her boyfriend and father of her kid left her, and she missed out on a great deal of senior year experiences. It wasn’t every one of fun, and it definitely wasn’t due to the fact that she was some sort of poor kid, adore the MTV Movie Awards joke suggests.
What it did have actually to do with, though, was a lack of sex ed, Kirstin said.
“The thing was, I wasn’t on birth regulate and we weren’t making use of condoms. We actually had this crazy believed that among us was probably infertile due to the fact that I never ever got pregnant. We were teenagers and we didn’t already know any sort of better,” she said. “We lived in the Bible Belt, so sexual education was for good optional in higher school, and practically nobody took it. They merely believed we need to already know better. We didn’t.”
The Centers for Health problem regulate lists teen pregnancy as among it’s top 6 priorities for prevention. To reduce down the price of teen pregnancy, the CDC recommends education on birth regulate means and exactly how to protect on your own from various other sexual troubles adore STIs. Having access to youth-friendly clinics is additionally important, the CDC says, and solid relationships along with parents and trusted adults is additionally key.
Though sex ed is still lacking in the majority of states, teen pregnancy is on the decline. In 2014, 249,078 babies were born to women in between ages 15 and 19. That makes a birth price of 24.2 per 1,000 women in that age group, according to the CDC. That number is a 9% lose from 2013 — Exactly what the CDC called a historic reasonable in teen births. The CDC doesn’t already know Exactly what specifically is causing the reduction in teen pregnancy, yet because it recommends education, that’s the route we need to go — not humiliation or mocking.
