16 and Pregnant has been appointment television for me since I reviewed it for Double X's “Xxtra Small” and was thrilled to learn it’s been picked up for a second season. But like Jess, I find myself wondering whether the show will keep any teens from becoming moms. I suppose the National Campaign To Reduce Teen and Unwanted Pregnancy, which helped produce the series (get used to these sorts of nonprofit/TV partnerships), would measure success by whether more teens get intimately familiar with contraception and, for the love of god, use it correctly. The show’s teen stars are utterly thick-headed about family planning. One couple claims conception happened after they used a condom that had been through the wash; another baby came about because of that oldest excuse—the young dad just doesn’t like condoms.

Some critics have faulted the show for not presenting abortion as an option, but I have to agree with 16 and Pregnant’s decision—for one thing, it might not be safe for a teen to go through an abortion on national television; for another, it’d be hard to fill an hourlong show. One option 16 and Pregnant did present, with the season’s final couple, was adoption. Tyler and Catelynn are stepsiblings: His dad and her mom met and married after the kids started dating. Tyler’s dad spent significant periods of time in jail; Catelynn’s mother battled some vaguely referred to “problems” (I’m guessing of a substance-abuse nature). Despite pressure from their parents to keep the baby—Tyler’s dad says he thinks his son should “man up,” because “all a baby needs is love”—the young couple selects a picture-perfect adoptive couple for their daughter. The show makes it clear that adoption is not the easy solution—Tyler and Catelynn cry buckets of tears before, as, and after they hand over their little girl. But perhaps the constant refrain of how this is the best thing for the baby and for the teenagers will sink in. Or, at the very least, maybe couples who decide to keep their babies will go in with their eyes a little more open.

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: 16 and pregnant; teen pregnancy

Thanks to Kerry for linking to her compelling personal story of the ovum marketplace. As for the question of market forces bearing on gestational surrogacy sticker price, I have two words to illustrate the right circumstance for the right seller: Debby Rowe. $4 million payoffs not withstanding, however, I do sympathize with Kerry’s and Sarah’s observations on the hazy protection surrogacy contracts offer to potentially exploited owners of host wombs.

I remember well the first major legal case exploring rights of the surrogate involved a contract gone awry (in the opposite way of the urban legendary wealthy gay man of Nina’s classic six, were he to renege on the apartment after the baby is born). In that famous 1986 case, the surrogate, Mary Beth Whitehead, made a deal with William Stern to donate her egg and rent her womb to create a child with Stern, by artificial insemination, to be raised by Stern and his wife. Whitehead changed her mind when the little girl was born but what persuaded the New Jersey judge who eventually decided for the Sterns was the contract itself. A deal’s a deal was the thinking. When Whitehead appealed, the contract was disallowed as against public policy. Whitehead was allowed visiting privileges, but the Sterns nevertheless retained custody “in the best interests of the child” (referred to as “Baby M” in all the papers).  When Baby M turned 18, she terminated her genetic mother’s rights and was adopted by Stern’s wife. Big surprise, she stuck with the parents who raised her. In 2007, with a bit of a swipe at poor Mary Beth, the former Baby M, Melissa Stern, a student at George Washington University commented to the New Jersey Monthly, "I'm very happy I ended up with them. I love them, they're my best friends in the whole world, and that's all I have to say about it."

I always felt Mary Beth had been a bit out gunned although, I have to admit, I felt less sorry for her after she wrote a book about her case and then sold it for a TV movie.

Photograph by Stockbyte/Getty Images.

Tags: surrogacy; Baby M; Debby Rowe;

An odd, not-quite-paradoxical consensus is forming in our discussion over surrogacy. There is the assumption that the sticker price of $20,000 is surprisingly low, along with the assumption that surrogacy is so astronomically expensive that it’s only available to rich ladies with billionaire husbands and baby nurses. Both might well be true, but I’m more convinced by the former than the latter. Is surrogacy really out of the reach of your average middle-class dual-income couple that can, at any rate, afford to raise a kid for 18 years? Traditional pregnancies are by no means cost-free, so the cost of hiring a surrogate over becoming pregnant is lower than it first appears.

The real question is why, in the age of the active, mercury-avoiding, one-glass-of-Merlot-will-destroy-your-baby-forever pregnancy, wealthy women are not bidding up the price for equally vigilant super-surrogates. One could imagine surrogates charging more for promising to eat only organic, or regularly attending prenatal yoga, or blasting Mozart into their respective uteri. The market for eggs is highly differentiated; as we know, women with more education, better looks, and the right ethnicity can claim between $3,000 and something like $100,000. (The median is probably lower than $10,000.)

When I sold my eggs in order to write this article on the subject for Reason Magazine, the demands on ova-quality were so specific that I had to send the couple an official copy of my GRE scores in order to get them to upgrade my hotel room during the week of the donation. By contrast, wombs look something like a commodity, with standard prices that increase slightly with experience. (I hope the surrogate moms in comments will correct me if I’m wrong.) Does it make sense for parents to focus so intensely on the quality of genetic material and treat the gestational environment as relatively fixed? Doesn’t that run counter to every panicky, paranoid pregnancy article you’ve ever read?

Photograph by Digital Vision/Getty Images.

Tags: egg donation, motherhood, surrogacy

Willa, I don’t think the problem with Apatow’s movies is that the women are flawed or not sufficiently romanticized; it’s that they’re shallow. Is it “romanticizing” a gender to give it depth? The great thing about the men in Apatow flicks is how nuanced and insecure and sweet they are under their foul-mouthed, stoner exteriors. The women, though, are often either blatant stereotypes (the sex-crazed bimbo or sex-crazed boss in The 40-Year-Old Virgin) or cryptic sphinxes.

In the speech you linked to, Willa, Apatow responds to critiques that Katherine Heigl’s character in Knocked Up should have had an abortion: “I’m like, ‘What? Really? But then what would I do? That would have happened at minute eight, and then what happens?” But it’s not the lack of abortion itself that was unsatisfying. It was that you never understand why she didn’t seem to consider that option. While the bro hang-out sessions (the glue and the highlight of an Apatow film) give us plenty of insight into the mind of the Seth Rogen character, we never quite get what’s going on in Heigl’s head. I’m not asking for romanticized women characters, but it would be nice if they weren’t quite so inscrutable.

Production still of Knocked Up courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Tags: Judd Apatow, movies

I've aged out of almost all of MTV's programming—watching barely legal 20-somethings binge drink grain alcohol on various incarnations of the Real World is no longer my idea of entertainment. But I've caught a few episodes of the MTV series 16 and Pregnant, and althought I'm not the target audience, I have found the show to be pretty riveting stuff.

True to the title, each episode follows a different teen mom-to-be for several months during her pregnancy, through the birth of her child, and into her first months of being a mother. Though there are twee Juno-esque interstitials, the series offers a pretty unvarnished view of being a teen mom. The second-to-last episode followed a Georgia girl named Whitney, who seems thoroughly beaten down by her pregnancy. She's dropped out of school and withdrawn from her friends almost entirely, and spends most days lying on the couch. Other women in the series seem to take pregnancy in stride, like Maci, who has a supportive family, graduates early, and goes to college, all while taking care of an infant.

In Salon today, Amy Benfer, who was 16 and pregnant herself 20 years ago, says, "No one's asking teenagers to take the girls of 16 & Pregnant as role models." But that rings false to me, because I know that the show was produced in conjunction with the National Campaign to Reduce Teen and Unwanted Pregnancy. So one could argue that yes, someone is asking these girls to be role models, and whether they want to be role models or not, they are going to be looked up to by some sheerly because they are on national TV. A much better point, one that Benfer also makes, is that what's great about the show is it gives pregnant teens "some space to talk about their own lives, rather than be talked about by others who see them as statistical symbols of social decay."

Tonight is the season finale of 16 and Pregnant, and this episode follows up with each woman months after she's had her baby. It will be interesting to see how they're faring. The show taken as a piece of art or entertainment is clearly a success: It's infinitely watchable and genuinely moving. I never believed that more girls wanted to get pregnant after watching Juno, or seeing Bristol Palin on network news shows. But I wonder if 16 and Pregnant—a show explicitly meant to reduce pregnancies—has any effect whatsoever on the behavior of teens who are watching it. My guess is that it's a wash, and that teens are more influenced by their parents and peers. What do you think?

Photograph by Stockbye/Getty Images.

Tags: 16 and pregnant, MTV, teen pregnancy

Judd Apatow’s new movie Funny People, starring Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen, comes out next week. It’s pretty much guaranteed to restart the conversation about bromantic men-children and the women who love them that Knocked Up began, but Apatow really doesn’t want to be called sexist this time around.

Speaking about Knocked Up at a recent screening of Funny People, Apatow defended his earlier film, saying, “I think, really, what a lot of these issues are is that women are romanticized in movies. [My] movies go pretty hard at having women have as many problems as men. They make mistakes that are as big as men’s. So when someone says Knocked Up seems sexist, I’m like, ‘Really?’ I mean, Seth [Rogen] has an earthquake, and he grabs his bong before his pregnant girlfriend. That’s pretty bad. But I try to weigh it evenly so it’s not really about men or women; it’s just about miscommunications and us at our worst.”

I’ve never thought Knocked Up was quite sexist, so much as vastly more sympathetic to immature behavior than uptight behavior, but I’ll take the bait. Is Apatow onto something? Are women romanticized in movies more than men? And isn't romanticizing people and situations part of what movies do? And does this seem like a plausible defense of Knocked Up, given that, in the Apatow universe, grabbing the bong doesn't feel like as big a mistake as being a shrew?

Production still of Funny People courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Tags: Funny People, Judd Apatow, Knocked Up, movies, sexism

Thanks, Samantha, for pointing out a tendency by some white people to show, as you say, a “reflexive defense mechanism” whenever another white person, usually one in a position of power, is accused of showing racism. Coming from me, a black person, similiar sentiments are often dismissed as biased. But aren't the white people defending Officer Crowley and criticizing Skip Gates also showing bias?

The difference in perception is predicated on a simple fact: Most white people have never experienced, and could never imagine, such a thing happening to them or their loved ones. But if you’re black, you’ve probably experienced an unpleasant, potentially dangerous, encounter with white police, or know some other black person who has. In my case there have been several such encounters.

I was once stopped on a Brooklyn street by two white officers while I was on my way to catch a train to my college campus on Long Island. They accused me of having robbed a clothing store owner. Even after they snatched my duffle bag from my shoulder and emptied its contents on the sidewalk—a pair of jeans and some other clothing, two textbooks, and my college ID—they forced me into the cruiser and took me to the store in question to ask the owner if I was the stick-up kid who’d robbed him. My brother was once severely beaten by white police officers in upstate New York who mistook him for bank robber. Never mind that he was withdrawing money from his own bank account at the time. My sister’s former stepson was accosted by several police officers after inquiring about CD rates at several South Florida banks. They mistook him for a potential bank robber. I could go on, but you get my drift. (And don’t get me started on the number of times I’ve been pulled over for Driving While Black.)

I was a girl when my brother was beaten and unable to do anything about it. But when the stepson was racially profiled, I was a reporter, and I certainly fought back. His story ran in the Miami Herald, where I worked at the time, and later on the front page of the New York Times. He went to court and sued the cops, and he won. It was sweet revenge. I can’t wait to see how Skip Gates gets his with Cambridge’s finest.

Photograph of police near a memorial for a black New York teen who was shot and killed by police by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

Tags: henry louis gates, Race, racial profiling

This week's fascinating conversation about surrogacy has got me wondering: Where does race fit into this already complicated picture? It has to, somehow—doesn't it?

Way back in the early aughts, when I was a fresh-faced college graduate, an urban legend began circulating among my crowd: A girl had been approached by a friend who asked if she would consider donating some of her eggs, so that he and his partner could have a baby. In exchange, he'd buy her a classic six on the Upper West Side. She declined.

I know! I know! But that's the way the story gets told. And frankly, I can't say I would have done differently. Even then, when my real estate lust was nowhere near the fever pitch it's at now, I knew that a big Manhattan apartment represented some pretty sweet compensation. But I always hesitated, and usually decided that I would have turned it down, too—and it always came down to race.

I'm biracial, which means that, perhaps more than most people, I'm constantly aware of the fact that I'm the product of two very specific people's very specific genetic make-ups. If you see me alone with my light-skinned, Chinese mother, we don't make much sense as a unit—until my Indian father enters the picture. Obviously, I don't think genes determine "family"; I know too many blended families, and families with adopted kids, to believe that. But given my personal history, the thought of a kid out there who looked half like me, but wasn't mine, made me uneasy in a very weird, very primal way.

Double Xers who have donated eggs or are members of the surrogacy community—care to share your thoughts? How often does race come into play in these kinds of transactions?

Photograph by George Doyle/Getty Images.

Tags: motherhood, Race, surrogacy

Kerry asks, "Why is it OK to search for a surrogate mother rather than, say, adopt?" She's asking it in the context of the way we think about surrogacy, but for a parent, or an "intended parent," those are two really separate questions. Searching for a surrogate is an extension of the search for a solution for infertility—to parent the biological child of at least one partner. To adopt is to relinquish that desire, or, at least to conclude that you can put it aside.

"Why don't you just adopt?" is not a fair question. Most adoption agencies are determined that before you start down the long and uncertain road to adoption, you've "resolved" your long and uncertain quest to produce a biological child. It's somewhat inherent in the nature of adoption post infertility that adoption is a second choice, but adopting—and I speak from experience—is difficult enough without lingering doubts about whether, if you'd just tried one more thing, you could have a child with your blood in her veins.

Photograph by George Doyle/Getty Images.

Tags: adoption, motherhood, surrogacy