Teen Pregnancy & The Media

As teen pregnancy rates have increased in previous years, television producers have begun featuring the young parents are stars through a variety of medium. Movies such as Juno, and television programs including The Secret Life of the American Teenager, 16 and Pregnant, and Teen Mom illustrate the lives of these young people as part of the statistic that 750,000 girls between the ages of 15-19 were pregnant in the United States in 2006.

New programs have been funded to decrease these pregnancy rates among young girls. One of which involves a partnership between the Denver Department of Human Services and the Open Media Foundation in Denver. Through this program, young parents are hired to an internship where they are responsible for documenting their lives as young parents and thus producing a video. These videos are intended as grassroots projects to serve as public service announcements to reach teenagers. The idea is that these videos produced by young people for young people will be ore effective that those produced by an older government official. Consider the anti-drugs “your brain on drugs” commercials of the 1980s and its effectiveness, or rather the lack thereof.

For this blog, I intend on talking with Michelle Gabrieloff-Parish, the Youth Programs Coordinator for the Open Media Foundation, concerning the program being conducted and the experiences of the interns so far in the program.

I’m currently unsure of events I could attend for this blog. While there may be a political speaker who discusses the issue of teen pregnancy, including the Colorado Amendment 62 on the voting ballot in November, I haven’t been able to find anything of the sort.