The Pregnancy Problem

If you read this blog on occasion or chat with me on twitter, you may be aware about how I have issues with pregnancies on soap operas. This post goes into detail as to why I feel soap operas show too many stories of this nature.

While I understand that sometimes soap operas make characters pregnant for the sake of the actress playing the part, many times it frustrates me. Below are some examples from soap operas in the last 20 or so years where pregnancies became too much.

GH's Elizabeth Webber is a good example of this due to the amount of times, she's been pregnant. Only one of these coincided with Rebecca Herbst's real life. The character has three living kids, was a surrogate (though that child didn't live) and also miscarried on screen. The character was pregnant in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007 and 2011, but only her 2004 real life pregnancy was written into the show. (She had her other children in 2001 and 2010.) I've been so glad to go over 3 years without Elizabeth being pregnant, and I hope she says that way. 

With Days it feels like every year, the show has had a major story about a baby or a pregnancy. In the last few years, most of these involved EJ being the man who got the woman pregnant. The character returned as an adult in 2006 and this is the number of pregnancy plot the character had. Sami discovered she was pregnant with twins and had Johnny (EJ's child) in 2007, in 2008 Sami was pregnant again as was Nicole. Nicole lost the child, but Sami's lived and was born in 2009. 2012 had Nicole miscarry a second time, and 2014 had EJ's lover had a pregnancy scare. In the time between Sydney's birth and Abby's scare, EJ and Sami were involved in her son Will's pregnancy plot. Why is it that Days is obsessed with having babies in EJ's story? 

Another situation is when soaps decide to make a gay character pregnant to desexualize them. I'm looking at All My Children and Guiding Light for this one. Bianca finally finding a love interest on AMC and then she gets raped. Later the character uses a surrogate to get pregnant, but the way the story was handled was offensive as she asked her brother-in-law without getting permission from her sister, and her wife fell for her brother-in-law. On Guiding Light, Natalia found out she was pregnant after figuring out that she was in love with another woman. Yes Jessica Leccia was pregnant in real life when this story was going on, but by the time she figured it out she was visibly pregnant it was almost funny. (I'm not saying the acting was humorous, just that the baby bump was so noticeable, that I laughed at the screen.)

Another is characters who are teenagers get pregnant their first time having sex. One Life to Live did this three times that I can think of off the top of my head. Jessica back in the 90s, which was a story about teenage pregnancy though she lost the child. Starr had a child, as a teen, who was killed off on General Hospital, but now we're supposed to forget the character was ever on GH. Destiny also had a child in the same manner, and at first she didn't want a child at all. 

So that's the end of my whining about pregnancy in soaps. There are other examples of my complaints on my blog. And I bet I'll continue mentioning this on occasion, as it just is something that I wish would be used more sparingly.