It’s rare to see a film featuring a woman who desperately wants to be pregnant. If you learned about pregnancy from Hollywood comedies, you’d think getting pregnant and having a baby is a disaster that can befall you, not something people deeply wish for, pray for, pay for, and plan for. To watch films such as Juno (the parents are teenagers), Knocked Up (baby daddy is an unemployed stoner), and Bridget Jones’s Baby (baby daddy is … unidentified), you wouldn’t understand why fertility doctors drive Porsches. Out-of-the-blue pregnancies may be a plot device to heighten drama, but they represent fewer than half of real-life pregnancies. This is just one of the ways the cultural picture of motherhood and the reality of it are dangerously out of whack.

The age of the average first-time mother is ticking up to 27. Members of Generation Z, the oldest of them in their late 20s, are often ambivalent about children. They’re worried about getting their finances in order, achieving self-actualization, and solving climate change first. All pretty tall, if not impossible, orders. With Vogue dipping into the discourse to ask, “Have Babies Become a Luxury Item?” it’s no wonder people aren’t having babies like they used to. Add to that the complete lack of cultural cachet — “Just unfollowed someone for being pregnant girl bye,” says a recent X post with 129,000 likes — and it’s a wonder anyone gets pregnant at all.

The reality is that most women want to have children, or if they didn’t at some point, then over time, they come to. In Netflix’s new Amy Schumer comedy Kinda Pregnant, we meet Lainy (Amy Schumer), whose approach is much less neurotic and conflicted than the mothers and would-be-mothers Hollywood usually shows us. “Being a mom is the greatest thing a human being can do,” says our young heroine to her best friend on the school playground. Here is a young girl on-screen unexpectedly extolling the virtues of motherhood, even if she does precede her declaration by berating her companion during birthing mother imaginative play: “I can’t do it! It hurts! I hate you, bitch! Sorry, but the expectant mother often lashes out at her support system.”

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