Juno redux

    There was a great op-ed in the Times Sunday on why Juno is a fairy tale. I really resonated with this point:

The final scene of the movie shows Juno and her boyfriend returned to their carefree adolescence, the baby — safely in the hands of his rapturous and responsible new mother — all but forgotten. Because I’m old enough now that teenage movie characters evoke a primarily maternal response in me (my question during the film wasn’t “What would I do in that situation?” but “What would I do if my daughter were in that situation?”), the last scene brought tears to my eyes. To see a young daughter, faced with the terrible fact of a pregnancy, unscathed by it and completely her old self again was magical.

We just received a Christmas letter this year from a friend who, now in her 40's and the mother of a young girl, just met her adult son, whom she gave up for adoption over twenty years ago. The way she described this meeting, and the loss and wondering all the intervening years have meant for her, was profound. For me, as someone who knows her not that well, it was as if a piece of the puzzle clicked into place, and all the things I've known about her as a parent made sense. Caitlin Flanagan's op-ed asks the deepest questions about teenage pregnancy, going well beyond the pro-life/pro-choice debate.