Everyone's Favorite Topic!

Is everyone kidding me right now?

According to MSNBC, people are upset because Teen Vogue has a pregs teen on the cover. Hello, she's gorgeous. Hello, they didn't know she was pregs during the shoot and as we now know from watching the excellent doc "The September Issue" (in theaters now!), it costs way too much to re-do a cover shoot. And hello, if your teen role model is a model, your risk of teen pregnancy is probably already through the roof.

Why don't they point THIS out: if her feature article profiled her decision NOT to have the baby, imagine how the conservatives' heads would spin THEN.

It's 2009. Do people really think women of all ages aren't getting pregnant all the time, married or not? Aren't we past this yet?

And because everything has to happen in threes, last night I was borderline shocked to hear the pregnant Kardashian even utter the word "abortion" on the ep where she's deciding whether to have her baby. It's like Hollywood kryptonite, which is just amazingly backwards.

But that's a reality(ish) show. I'm so annoyed that people on TV and in movies don't deal with the news of pregnancy the way people like them in real life would. It's the reason I refused to see "Knocked Up." The only reason I can bear "Accidentally on Purpose" is the brilliant Lennon Parham as the quirky sister, but you know that in real life no 30-something single urban career woman would just suddenly decide to keep a pregnancy without seriously considering abortion.

Now, the residue of growing up fundamentalist Christian is that I'm still highly uncomfortable with the idea of abortion. But I am politically pro-choice, because people who are smarter than I am are and I know a lot of my former opinions were a result of radical conservativism (the three being that I came across my parent's copy of Chuck Swindoll's "The Sanctity of Life" while watching a particularly preachy ep of SVU last night. Hmm, I guess that's four. Quadruplets!).

So let's talk about real life, or at least as much as we can while protecting privacy. I'm personally lucky that I've never been pregnant, but every single woman I know who has become pregnant when not purposely trying has either aborted or personally visited an abortion clinic, and that includes my friends that you still see at church every Sunday.

My point is that if we all acknowledged what's actually going on in the world instead of ideas and ideals (I suppose that could apply to nearly every right-wing hot point), we'd be in a much better place to actually deal with what's going on and develop strategies (contraception, education, counseling), to make things work better.