Taken from:
http://drphil.com/shows/show/1576 [video clips available at the link and it subsequent pages]
Today's episode on Dr. Phil is about a teen mom-to-be, Emily, 16.
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Dr. Phil says today’s teen moms, thanks to reality television, have become a pop culture phenomenon — their images splashed on the covers of magazines being sold at newsstands across America. “Is Hollywood glamorizing teen pregnancy, or just giving us a realistic look into the lives of these young mothers?” Dr. Phil asks.
Jeanie, Charles and their 16-year-old daughter are not reality television stars. They are an everyday, average family dealing with a crisis — Emily is pregnant.
“From the moment I found out I was pregnant, there was nothing that was going to change my mind that I was going to keep this baby,” Emily says defiantly.
“She is not ready to be the mother of a child,” Charles says.
While Jeanie says she supports her daughter, and the decision she’s made to keep her child, step-father Charles doesn’t agree. “With Emily being pregnant, it’s caused a huge rift in our family,” Jeanie says. “Her decision is to keep the baby. My husband and I don’t agree with each other.”
“Is she qualified to make this decision?” Dr. Phil asks Jeanie.
“She’s young. She’s immature," Jeanie says, "but right now I feel like it’s my job to teach her how to become a mom, and it’s my job as her mother to get her qualified and get her ready.”
“One thing we have to do today is be completely, brutally honest — that’s something that comes with maturity. When you’re a child you can have fantasies and get caught up in the romance and emotion of something — but when you’re moving into the real world, you have to deal with the absolute, drop-dead honest true facts,” Dr. Phil says. He asks Jeanie whether, in hindsight, she wishes she would have encouraged Emily to place the baby up for adoption.
“I was worried about the pain she’d be going through [giving up her child],” Jeanie says.
Emily admits she was having unprotected sex.
Jeanie says they put Emily on birth control as soon as they found out she was having sex. She also had a fear that Emily even wanted to have a baby.
“Did you get pregnant on purpose?” Dr. Phil asks.
"No," she says.
“Did you want to get pregnant?” Dr. Phil asks.
“No,” Emily says adamantly.
Jeanie says she’s in a difficult situation where she feels the decision is her daughters, and she must support it, but it’s a decision that still very much affects her, as she will probably be left raising the baby.
The Hardest Job in All the World Emily's 12-year-old sister, Kristen, says she saw her big sister's big news coming, and Dr. Phil gives Emily a quiz about the high costs of raising a baby. Will the teen pass or fail what could be the most important test of her life — giving way to the hardest job she'll ever have?
[Nikolita note: If you watch the video clip, Emily fails.]Alarming StatisticsDr. Phil says today's pop culture celebrates teen pregnancy, with the stars of shows like MTV's Teen Mom and 16 and Pregnant glamourized on the cover of magazines. But, are these shows accurately portraying the strife of young motherhood? Recently, Amber, the star of MTV's Teen Mom, revealed in court proceedings she makes a meager $280,000 per year — not exactly the model of the typical teenage mother. While reality television can portray less than the reality, what we know is certain, are the stastics don't lie.
• While teen pregnancy is down in the US, the rate is still eight times higher than it is in Japan, two times higher than it is in Canada and England, and the highest in the western industrialized world.
• Teen pregnancy costs the U.S. at least $9 billion annually.
School Comes Second:• Only one-third of adolescent mothers will graduate high school, and only slightly over 1 percent of those will earn a college degree before they turn 30.
It's Hardest on the Kids:• Children of teen moms do worse in school than those born to older parents — with half failing a grade. Those same children are less likely to finish high school then those from older mothers, and have a lower performance on standardized tests. Many children born to teen moms have behavioral problems, juvenile delinquency and conflict with authority.
• Two-thirds of families begun by a young unmarried mother are poor. More than half of all mothers on welfare had their first child as a teenager.
• Daughters of teen moms are three times more likely to become teenage mothers themselves. The sons of teen moms are two times more likely to end up in prison.
A Baby Won't Make Him Stay • Eight out of ten fathers in cases of teen pregnancy don't marry the mother of their child, and these absent fathers pay less than $800 annually for child support. Children who live apart from their fathers are also five times more likely to be poverty striken than children with both parents at home.
Teens, think you know what it costs to have a baby and raise him or her in the first year of life?
Take our quiz! [Nikolita note: I took the quiz and got 7/8] ** Clicking the main link for this episode takes you to a page on th Dr. Phil site that has a ton of teen pregnancy info links at the bottom. 
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