ABSTRACT
While I was researching this project, a student gave birth in a bathroom stall at her high school prom. News coverage reported that after delivery she dropped the newborn into a garbage can and returned to the prom for one last dance. 1 This became a major story headlining televised and print news reports. Yet the media fury was quickly followed by a succession of public judgments decrying that the character of our nation's youth had plummeted to the irretrievable depths of moral degeneracy. The irony of this event was difficult to miss. An event often upheld as a last preserve of adolescent innocence, the prom, collided with a morally charged and tension-laden issue, teenage pregnancy—one celebrated, the other reviled. Further, the death of a newborn gave greater fuel to one of our nation's most recent media obsessions: senseless teen violence.
