The 'Juno' Effect Strikes Again

'Juno' Effect Strikes Again | News From RNC; 'Gossip Girl'; Ajax Man; Record Stores

The "Juno" effect seems to be reverberating all over the place.

In the year since Diablo Cody’s screenplay became Jason Reitman’s hit film, "Juno," we’ve seen unmarried 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears, single 22-year-old Ashlee Simpson and now 17-year-old unmarried Bristol Palin all get pregnant and decide to keep their babies.

Palin, daughter of the proposed Republican nominee for vice president, Sarah Palin, is five months along. If she gives birth in 2008, that means her mom, at 44, will have become a mother and a grandmother in the same year.

For years, advocates on all sides of abortion and birth control issues have agreed on one thing: Unmarried teenagers should not get pregnant. They may have disagreed about whether abstinence or birth control were the best ways to accomplish this, but the end goal was the same.

Then "Juno" came along. Ellen Page’s main character gets pregnant and decides to give the baby up to a couple for adoption. Unlike another movie, the trenchant Alexander Payne film "Citizen Ruth," Juno never considers abortion seriously, so that’s off the table. She spends the entire movie making teen pregnancy look like glib, articulate fun. It’s a win-win situation.

I doubt the writer, Diablo Cody, a former stripper, had in mind to launch a new generation of pregnant unwed teens. But this summer, the soap "One Life to Live" borrowed the story for its teen heroine, Starr Manning. It was only a coincidence that in real life, Jamie Lynn Spears, younger sister of Britney Spears, got herself pregnant by her boyfriend. Then Ashlee Simpson, who’s since married, got into the mix. Even though she was starting to show, she refused to admit what had happened.

In the old days in Hollywood, star actresses hid their unwanted pregnancies lest they be shunned by the audience. I guess the most famous story concerned America’s sweetheart, Loretta Young. It turned out the child she adopted was really the baby she’d given birth to, fathered by mega-star Clark Gable. She kept it a secret, lying even to her daughter, Judy Lewis, until the day she died. (So funny, too, since Judy looks exactly like a combination of the two superstars!)

But "Juno" seems to be having the opposite effect on teens. In liberal Hollywood, that’s what's so interesting. You can keep the baby or have an abortion. But not getting pregnant in the first place is the pre-emptive stance. "Juno" at once violated and vindicated conservative values. The question is, will the public rally ‘round Bristol Palin the way it did Juno? Or will it reject her for getting in this situation in the first place?

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