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Hanna Grol-Prokopczyk

Study: Celebrity Pregnancy Coverage Destigmatizes Out-Of-Wedlock Births Among White Women

A new study states that media coverage of celebrity pregnancies has destigmatized out-of-wedlock births especially among white, middle class women.

Analyzing PEOPLE magazine covers from 1974 to 2014 featuring celebrity pregnancy, researcher Hanna Grol-Prokopczyk, an assistant professor in the University at Buffalo Department of Sociology took note of the magazine’s reference to the parents’ relationship status at the time of the pregnancy announcement and the time of the child’s birth.

In the study, published this month in the journal Demographic Research, Grol-Prokopczyk looked at how media presentations of celebrities’ childbearing influenced larger society.

Indeed, there has been a rise in out-of-wedlock births. Between 1940 and 2009, the number of U.S. births to unmarried women increased from about 4 percent to nearly 41 percent.

While existing scholarship suggests that economic and cultural factors have contributed to this growth, Grol-Prokopczyk wondered whether celebrities might have been the trigger for that 10-fold rise.

“No one has actually tested whether celebrities in fact engage in more out-of-wedlock childbearing than the general public,” she told Science Daily. “This is an important question to address because the power of celebrity culture to shape all kinds of decisions, including childbearing-related decisions, is often under-acknowledged.”

Grol-Prokopczyk concludes that celebrities might shape how we think about the nature of the family and the right environment in which to have children and used People magazine as a yardstick because it is a reliable source of data for exploring this issue. Also, it is heavily trafficked companion to its print edition with over 70 million unique monthly visitors.

The influence of celebrity news is undeniable. Consider that 74 percent of US adults became aware of Angelina Jolie‘s decision to have a preventative double mastectomy just weeks after her op-ed appeared in the New York Times in May of 2013.

The celebrity coverage has shifted attitudes particularly among white, middle class women who generally, have less out-of-wedlock births compared to women in other racial groups.

But unlike their regular folk counterpart, white celebrity women are more likely to have a baby while not married or engaged.

“If you compare celebrities to just white Americans — which could make sense given that until recently People magazine has disproportionally depicted white celebrity parents on its covers — you find that celebrities have the same rates of non-marital fertility,” she added.

Here is the link:

Grol-Prokopczyk also found that most celebrities featured on People magazine’s covers who got pregnant while unmarried did not marry before the child’s birth. Since the mid-2000s, many have declared themselves, “engaged.”

Instead of “shotgun weddings,” Grol-Prokopczyk sees this as modeling what she calls “shotgun engagements,” which if imitated in the general population could have contributed to a substantial rise of non-marital fertility in the U.S.

Interesting findings.

Study Credits Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt with Destigmatizing Unwed Parenthood

brad pitts

A new study says that Angelina Jolie and Bradd Pitt‘s unwed parenting changed the way the gossip press covered pregnant celebrity couples, and credits them for destigmatizing out-of-wedlock pregnancies altogether.

Researcher  Hanna Grol-Prokopczyk, an assistant professor of sociology at theUniversity at Buffalo, State University of New York, told  LiveScience.com that PEOPLE magazine, in particular, helped to de-stigmatize non-marital fertility.

The researcher noted that in the 1970s and 1980s, celebrities who got pregnant out of wedlock were often married before the child’s birth, and when People announced pregnancy news, it would also include an approximate wedding date on its front cover.

But when Jolie and Pitt revealed their pregnancy in 2006, but made no public announcement of either engagement or marriage, the magazine started shifting its policy of putting wedding dates of pregnant celeb couples on its cover.

That change, Grol-Prokopczyk says, “calatlyzed a larger movement — mainly, making it more OK for a couple to be pregnant without news of wedding bells in their future, the new study suggests.”

It gets deeper and had wide-reaching implication on society as a whole, the research suggests.

“Overall, People’s coverage appears likely to have contributed to destigmatization of nonmarital fertility ” Grol-Prokopczyk said.

And it is very interesting to read how she came up with the idea for the study in the first place as it mirrors our exact experience with Google alerts for  the term “pregnancy.” A lot of the news out on that topic is about celebrities, and so much so that even mainstream news sites that focus on strict news are doing more celebrity pregnancy coverage.

Grol-Prokopczyk too had such alerts when she was expecting a child.

“I was expecting to get stories about nutrition during pregnancy, or how to avoid complications during birth,” she said. “Instead, over 90 percent of those stories emailed to me were about celebrity pregnancies.”

She said the headlines made her realized that many celebrities were having out of wedlock babies, counter to popular culture’s habit of stigmatizing unwed marriage. (Though arguably, I can attest to regularly seeing people who are traditionalist make negative comments in all unwed celebrity pregnancy stories in PEOPLE and US Weekly)

To conduct her research, Grol-Prokopczyk’s assistants found 384 stories on celebrity pregnancies between PEOPLE magazine’s inaugural year in 1974 to 2014. They coded each one, noting whether the parents were dating, engaged, married or not in a relationship at the time the mag announced the pregnancy on its cover.

Why PEOPLE?

According to the Alliance for Audited Media, PEOPLE magazine had the ninth highest magazine circulation in the United States in 2013,  which made it an ideal proxy for popular culture at large, Grol-Prokopczyk said.

She said that the magazine always celebrated pregnancies, even unwed ones, but before the early 2000s, it made sure to mention that marriage was  imminent.

And as to gay marriage, the researchers pointed out that they were referred to as single even if they had a partner. Jodi Foster, for example, famously had a partner but was featured in a cover with the title “And Baby Makes Two,” describing her as a single parent even though she had a partner.

It looks like they’ve evolved on that front too.

PEOPLE did not respond to Live Science’s request for comment and the study is yet to be published in a peer-review journal. It will be presented to the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting in Seattle in August.

Interesting sociology research!

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