Jamie Lynn Spears couldn't be happier.
The 17-year-old actress/singer and younger sister of Britney Spears tells reporters that spending time with her new baby girl is "so much fun."
"I love taking care of her," Spears gushed. "I just want to hug and kiss her, and I'm happy all the time."
Spears' postpartum high is also evident in her picture on the cover of US Magazine. She smiles, as baby Maddie sleeps in her arms.
OK, they're both adorable and it's a sweet picture, but something is wrong here. The pendulum of cultural acceptance of teen pregnancy has swung too far the other way.
It wasn't that long ago that an unwed teen mother, like Spears, brought shame upon her family. Some of those girls resorted to back alley abortions while others were shipped off by their parents to have the baby, which was then put up for adoption.
No, those were not the "good old days," but there's also something fundamentally wrong about the new culture that glamorizes and celebrates teen pregnancy.
Spears' charmed life is the exception, not the rule. Statistics consistently reveal a whole host of social and economic problems associated with children born to unwed teenage mothers.
The young mothers are less likely to finish school, more likely to have trouble establishing a career and more likely to end up on government assistance than teenagers who don't have babies.
Also, the children of unwed teenage mothers are themselves more likely to have children out of wedlock.
In short, a teenager having a child out of wedlock creates all sorts of problems.
But that's not the message the popular culture is sending these days, and the US Magazine cover story and the subsequent media attention are all examples of the glorification of teen birth.
Sarah Brown of The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy notes, "Hundreds of thousands of teens and unmarried young adults get pregnant and become parents every single year and very few of them have Hollywood beginnings or endings."
In fact, according to the Guttmacher Institute, each year almost 750,000 women aged 15-19 become pregnant and 82 percent of those are unplanned.
That means the father is even less likely to become involved in the child's life.
Meanwhile, the teen birth rate, which had been dropping consistently, rose 3 percent in 2006. It wouldn't be fair to say that glamorizing teen pregnancy has contributed to that rise, but the portrayals of young, unwed mothers have sent a message that getting pregnant can make you the center of attention.
Of course, no one holds the attention span of others forever. The novelty wears off and reality settles in. Experienced parents will tell you that caring for and nurturing a child is one of the greatest challenges in life.
Somewhere there has to be a happy cultural medium between treating pregnant teens like The Scarlet Letter's Hester Prynn and celebrating them with magazine covers.
