"It's not TV, it's birth control!" trumpets NBC Television's home page for The Baby Borrowers, a new reality show in which five teenage "couples" will pretend to be parents.
A "riveting social experiment" they call it, although one can think of less complimentary terms for it. The concept, borrowed from the UK, involves putting each pair of young people (aged 18 to 20) in a house and asking them to set up a home, find a job, and become "caring parents first to babies, then to toddlers, pre-teens and their pets, teenagers and senior citizens -- all over the course of three weeks". 
The promo continues: "Through this emotional, dramatic journey, each young couple will get a unique opportunity to peer into the future and see what they (and their partners) might be like if they remain together and decide to build a family. Tested by the everyday ups and downs of taking care of others and maintaining a relationship, most of the teens find themselves looking at all of their relationships and notions of parenthood in a new light."
It's hard to know where to begin in criticizing this concept, but starting with the most obvious thing, it is first of all an experiment in living together without the benefit of marriage. Putting real babies and children into that set-up is simply further exploitation, even if their real parents are hovering nearby. The message is: move in with your boyfriend by all means but DO NOT have a baby.
One video clip shows a distraught girl declaring that she's had enough and can see herself staying single for the rest of her life. Maybe this is the real and intended effect of the show: not birth control but anti-natalism, disgust with the whole idea of children and family life. Fast-track to adulthood? To parenthood? No way.
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