a little false

Rating: 3/10 (23 January 2008)

The sixteen year old pregnant girl is played brilliantly by Ellen. She is depicted as a confident and autonomous young person making extremely important life decisions. She does this without any discernible guidance, except for the disproportionate weight she places on a placard-bearing peer, who advises her that her unborn already has fingernails. Hence, she abandons her original and previously unchallenged plan of abortion, in favour of finding some infertile yuppie adopters to be recipients of a free baby.
What irks me horribly about this (popular!) movie, is the dishonest account given to teen viewers about the impact and consequence of teenage pregnancy, childbirth and in this case, surrender of a newborn without even looking at it! That is, no account, representation or hint is given about any of these issues. It's as if a 16 year old girl can uneventfully travel through the gestation and parturition and surrender and there are no great issues to debate about that.
Quite irresponsible and potentially damaging to young girls making life decisions.