This is timely: The March 15, 2012 episode of Up All Night features stay-at-home-dad, Chris, having "baby fever" such that he wants his working mom wife, Reagan, to agree to have another baby. The episode is called Baby Fever.
He approaches his wife right after she gets home from work. She is a little tipsy from happy hour with her new boss. She's babbling on about the drinks she's had and this mixologist who made drinks with a mortar and pestle. Nevertheless, he says, whilst she's preparing another drink, "Babe, I was thinking that, you know what? Let's have another baby." She laughs derisively, and says, "Let's have six!" Really, bad timing. Who decides to have this kind of conversation with a drunk spouse? But okay. It was a bad scene, a poorly realized scene. And really not funny.
The next we see of the husband, he is in conversation with his hockey buddy in which he says this:
"Yeah, Reagan's career is really taking off. I'm worried that we're going to miss our chance. Gotta get her on board now or it's gone."
His friend just says that he needs to argue his case to Reagan, talk about "tiny socks."
He then show up at her office with his iPad with videos of their daughter. He refers to himself as the "baby maker" and his wife as the "baby grower." And that's about the only acknowledgement he gives of the relative burdens of pregnancy during the entire episode.
And he continues in this vein through the episode. He demands she agree to get pregnant and she demurs, in part, because her job is just taking off and their child is only just one year old. He never actually wants to talk about her address her concerns. His desire to have this baby is paramount. But her concerns about her job and the age of their daughter are not unreasonable considerations. They do actually warrant consideration and discussion.
I am sure that the writers and producers of Up All Night did not anticipate that the airing of this episode would be timed so perfectly with the renewed debate about contraception. But here we have an episode in which a man is demanding that his wife put her body at risk for 40 weeks -- indeed, possibly her life at risk -- because he wants another child. He is not asking her to have a discussion about whether they want more children and when. That would be perfectly reasonable. He is demanding that she do it. And that sounds a lot like shades of Rick Santorum's pronouncement that it is "not right" to use contraceptives.
I know that this is supposed to be a comedy show, but I didn't laugh once. Whether or not to submit your body to the condition of pregnancy is a serious decision for a woman. Having spent literally years trying to get pregnant, and then experiencing some health problems with that pregnancy, I know a little bit about how serious a decision that is.
In the last scene, we see him in a bubble bath wearing a Frank Sinatra hat saying, "It's time, Reagan. We're having another baby. Case closed." Aside from just being oogy, is that really supposed to be funny? She says she can't deal with this right now because of everything that's going on at work. And he gets angry: "That's what you love. Little Baby Work."
There it is.
Here's the thing: every demand by the male lead of his wife to get pregnant was code for "don't be professionally ambitious." It's okay if you want to have a job and all, but don't try to advance. And if you do try to advance, then you're putting your job over your family. And that's bad. (P.S. I happen to agree that it is bad to put your job over your family. But queary, why is it culturally acceptable for the multitude of ambitious men to put job over family, but not the ladies? Tradition?)
The entire episode fails to recognize, in the voice of the male lead, that pregnancy is a significant medical condition for women. It fails to recognize that women should have some say in whether they get pregnant. In the voice of the male lead, he only must demand that she get pregnant, and then she should agree. Her feelings, her fears, her professional ambitions, they are secondary to his desire to have another baby. Maybe the problem isn't that this show is a reflection of our culture at large . . . maybe it's yet another sign that this show is just really not funny. But if the episode is a reflection of our cultural attitudes about pregnancy, it disturbs me. I thought we were past the days when men made demands of women like that.
