To be or not to be... an unmarried teen mother

NEW YORK - IN the new hit movie Juno and now in real life with Jamie Lynn Spears, 16-year-old girls get pregnant and decide to bear the child rather than opt for abortion. For social conservatives, it's a challenging story line - they condemn the teen sex but hail the ensuing choice.
Mr Bill Maier, a vice president of the conservative ministry Focus on the Family, said,
'We should commend girls like Jamie Lynn Spears for making a courageous decision to have the baby. On the other hand, there's nothing glamorous or fun about being an unwed teen mother.'

Spears, younger sister of pop star Britney Spears, has said she plans to raise her child in her home state of Louisiana.

The news about Spears was greeted with mixed emotions by Ms Leslie Unruh, a Sioux Falls, South Dakota, activist who has campaigned against abortion and for abstinence-only sex education. 'When I heard the story, I felt sad at first,' Ms Unruh said. 'Already her life is not the norm of other 16-year-old girls.You have a lot of teens who look at those people as role models,' she said. 'There's a danger of them thinking: 'She got pregnant? I guess I can have a baby too.' The message from Ms Unruh and others: It's not that simple.

The Roman Catholic Church, while firmly opposed to premarital sex, embraces the message that adoption is among the best options if an unmarried teen does become pregnant, said Ms Deirdre McQuade, a spokesman for the US Catholic Bishops Conference.
'The admirable choice for an unplanned pregnancy is to make the best parenting plan possible - whether that means making all the sacrifices necessary to raise the child or generously placing him or her in an adoptive family,' Ms McQuade said.

Juno is the latest in a series of recent movies in which the heroine, faced with an unexpected pregnancy, chooses not to have an abortion.
Dr Vanessa Cullins, vice-president for medical affairs at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said these story lines - generally with upbeat endings - oversimplify the tough choices facing real-life girls and women. Each year, more than 1 million of them in the United States opt to have an abortion.
'In the real world, it's important to weigh all the possible options and then come up with the best one for the teen, the family and the child,' Dr Cullins added. 'That will be different for different circumstances.'

National statistics released earlier this month showed the teen birth rate on the rise for the first time in 15 years.

Ms Demie Kurz, a sociologist who co-directs the University of Pennsylvania's women's studies program, noted that the Juno heroine and Jamie Lynn Spears come from well-off families and do not represent the many girls from low-income backgrounds who get pregnant.
'Some of them have the babies as part of their path to what they see as adulthood, but they often put their education on hold, and it makes life a lot tougher,' Ms Kurz said.
'Do we want to put burdens on these teenage girls by encouraging them to think that having a baby is cool?' She said it was reflective of the US political climate that few movies depict abortion as a valid option.

While Jamie Lynn Spears may have the financial resources to raise her child in comfort, psychotherapist Linda Perlman Gordon of Chevy Chase, Maryland, - who has written about teenage girls - said daunting emotional challenges likely await.
'Having to be a selfless parent is totally contradictory to the development of a teenager,' Ms Gordon said. 'To do it right, she's got to subsume her needs. She's going to have to give up the part of growing that would have allowed her to become an autonomous, independent person.' -- AP