Sitting at home, I obsessed over the show “16 and Pregnant” on MTV and fol­lowed the weekly jour­ney of four of the girls in the spin-off of the show “Teen Mom.”

I watched the young moth­ers deal with dat­ing, their babies’ fathers, day care, receiv­ing gov­ern­ment assis­tance and one mother’s jour­ney of cop­ing with adoption.

The show “16 and Pregnant” will now have a sec­ond sea­son with 10 new girls. With the sec­ond sea­son sched­uled to air on MTV Feb. 16, I can’t help but won­der if the pro­gram pro­motes teen pregnancy.

Recently, the Lifetime Network came out with a film that explores the costs of teen preg­nancy with a story that depicts a fic­tional “preg­nancy pact” set up using the data from actual news reports about teen preg­nancy from June 2008.

After watch­ing the Lifetime movie, I could not under­stand how the char­ac­ter of the teen mother could pos­si­bly be so igno­rant toward the facts of preg­nancy. I could not under­stand how any young mother would have thought that rais­ing chil­dren would be so easy.

Data released last week from the Guttmacher Institute shows that after a low in the 1990s, teen preg­nancy rates increased three per­cent from 2005 to 2006 (med​ical​new​sto​day​.com). The study also showed increased rates of teenage abor­tion for the first time in over ten years.

The mass media is a great influ­ence on soci­ety for worse or pos­si­bly for bet­ter. Stars like Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers have made head­lines with their pub­lic pro­nounce­ments of sex­ual purity. The faces of the recent “vir­gin­ity move­ment” are everywhere.

Despite the influ­ence that celebri­ties advo­cat­ing sex­ual absti­nence may have, teen preg­nancy is up. The Obama administration’s 2010 bud­get elim­i­nated spend­ing for abstinence-only pro­grams, shift­ing funds to preg­nancy pre­ven­tion edu­ca­tion that includes infor­ma­tion about abstinance.

The 1990s showed a decline in teen preg­nancy. This is a heart­en­ing devel­op­ment con­sid­er­ing the com­mon hard­ships that ado­les­cent moth­ers and their chil­dren face, and con­sid­er­ing the poten­tial costs of teen preg­nancy to soci­ety as a whole.

Many believe that the sud­den decline was from changes in sex­ual behav­ior and changes in con­tra­cep­tive use, while oth­ers claim that the decline was the result of increased absti­nence education.

Whatever the case may be, shows like the ones I men­tioned are effec­tively undo­ing a lot of hard work. Shows such as “16 and Pregnant” are glo­ri­fy­ing and exploit­ing the lives of teen moms and show­ing how they get along despite their hard sit­u­a­tions. The show should serve as a way to pro­mote absti­nence and preg­nancy pre­ven­tion, but, con­sid­er­ing the climb­ing rates of teen preg­nancy, it seems more like a depic­tion of moth­er­hood as a typ­i­cal rite of pas­sage for teenage girls.