16 and Pregnant



16 and Pregnant is an MTV reality series produced by Morgan Freeman, (No, not THAT Morgan Freeman) and was first broadcast on June 11, 2009. It follows the stories of teenage girls dealing with the hardships of teenage pregnancy. Each episode features a different teenage girl; the episode typically begins when she is four to eight months into her pregnancy, and typically ends when the baby is a few months old. The series is produced in a documentary format, with commercial breaks preceded by an animation of an elaborate cartoon depiction on notebook paper of each episode's highlights.

This series provides examples of:

 * Abusive Parents: Not any of the girls themselves, but their parents (who are obviously soon-to-be grandparents). The mothers of Catelynn and Farrah come to mind.
 * Babies Make Everything Better: Averted hard; the girls are often shown getting a crash course for how being pregnant will ruin their lives: chaining them to a Jerkass, make it extremely difficult to finish school (let alone attend college), and keep you in debt and shatter any dreams you might have for the future.
 * Bratty Teenage Daughter: A few of the mothers. Some mature once the baby is born, some... don't.
 * Farrah, in particular, bounces between this and Children Raise You, often within the span of minutes.
 * Jenelle OWNS this trope.
 * But We Used a Condom: Sometimes.
 * Character Development: Always, not always in a favorable direction.
 * Daddy DNA Test: one recent episode features the father's family giving his wife an at-home DNA kit and demanding that she take it to prove that the baby is his.
 * Domestic Abuse: Amber, toward Gary.
 * One girl got in a fight with her baby-daddy while they were out driving. He pushed her out of the car and drove off with the twins.
 * Another girl found out her (unemployed) baby-daddy wasn't using the internet to look for a job anymore, but was instead chatting with another girl on Myspace. Later, when she confronted him about it, she ended up hitting him.
 * Do Not Do This Cool Thing: A little bit, in that there have been claims that girls are getting pregnant to get on the show.
 * Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Some of the parents and some of the girls believe in this trope.
 * Averted in a spin-off special No Easy Decision where Markei, a girl previously featured on the show, became pregnant a second time and decided to abort it.
 * May be something of an unintentional deconstruction; see Babies Make Everything Better and, on the YMMV page, Accidental Aesop.
 * Completely averted in a season 4 episode featuring a girl who's older sister became pregnant around the same time as her and decided to abort the pregnancy. The girls go back and forth about who made the "right" decision, with the new mom eventually telling her sister that even though she loved her baby, if she could go back, she would have ended her pregnancy.
 * Jerkass: Usually the fathers of the babies, but sometimes the mothers themselves.
 * Mama Bear: A lot of the girls are very protective of their newborns. This isn't exclusive to them, though-- Jamie's mom stands out as being fiercely protective of her daughter AND granddaughter.
 * Not Blood Siblings: After Catelynn and Tyler started dating, his dad started dating her mom. Becoming stepsiblings didn't stop Catelynn and Tyler from dating and getting engaged for awhile, though.
 * Panicky Expectant Father
 * Spin Off: Teen Mom
 * And of that, Teen Mom 2.
 * Teen Pregnancy: Duh.
 * Too Dumb to Live: One girl on the show was talking about how she got pregnant. She didn't know too much about birth control (a quick google search could have cleared that up) and suggested that her boyfriend use condoms. He confessed that the reason why he didn't was because it was too awkward to buy them.
 * The original reason he gave for not using them, before confessing to being too embarrassed to buy them, was that condoms didn't feel good for him. Long story short, if you don't know enough about birth control to find an alternative to condoms because your boyfriend has made it clear that he isn't going to use them, then you should not be having sex.
 * One season 4 girl said she didn't use birth control because she didn't want to get fat. Yeah.
 * What the Hell Hero: Farrah is called out by a few different people on being more interested in getting a new boyfriend than taking care of her baby.
 * Jenelle too. We rarely see her with the kid at all and she was recently picked up on marijuana possession. It's no wonder why her mother is trying to take custody of the baby!
 * She was filmed getting in a fight with another girl. Jenelle and the girls who were encouraging the fight ended up getting arrested for it. You can find the fight video on YouTube.
 * Kaylin in a way. She was allowed to stay with Joe as long as she didn't date. However she ended up dating someone else and she went back to living with her mother for awhile after telling Joe.
 * Possibly Amber, when she was smacking her baby daddy around.
 * Speaking of Farrah, she ended up getting a boob job so she could continue modeling.
 * The boob job doesn't entirely count as this trope. Being able to continue making money as a model isn't the worst thing to do. Of course she almost certainly is not doing it primarily for the baby, but extra spare cash, at least some of which will help that baby, is not the worst thing to "invest" in.
 * In a season 4 episode, the babydaddy's grandmother, who was a bit of a Cool Old Lady, sat the soon-to-be parents down and gave them one of these, calling out the girl for missing her birth control pills and her grandson for not using a condom.