Why is so much published about pregnancy and so little about war?

Standing in line at the supermarket, next to a rack of celebrity- obsessed magazines, I’m treated to a barrage of headlines about pregnancy. Is she “showing”? asks one popular publication. “When is she due?” inquire others. This speculation is often accompanied by airbrushed images of TV and movie stars of various heights, widths, hairstyles, and degrees of cleavage. Clearly pregnancy, or fertility, has become a necessary badge of female stardom. To see just how widespread the subject of pregnancy has become on TV, visit “A Thin Blue Line”, a Web site created by the National Institutes of Health.

By contrast, in 1952, when Lucille Ball was pregnant during the second season of I Love Lucy, the show’s producers were concerned that this intimation of sexuality might be too suggestive for viewers. On the air, Lucy was always described as “expecting.” Behind the scenes, a special panel of clergymen reviewed each script to make sure it wouldn’t offend viewers. The executives needn’t have worried. Fans flocked to the show each week, and the episode that was shown the week of Lucy’s actual delivery received a higher rating than President Eisenhower’s inauguration speech.

Glancing at that year’s covers of Time and Life magazines, it’s easy to understand why Lucy’s condition was so shocking. Life devoted its covers to alluring starlets and divas, while Time highlighted accomplished males. The message? Women entice, and men act. As for any mention of pregnancy, that’s entirely absent.

My wife tells me one reason for the abundance of images of swelling Hollywood bellies is that they let the stars show how quickly they can get back into shape. But I suspect there’s something else at work here. These stories of hope, birth, and motherhood obscure our society’s view of today’s troubled world—a world of combat, premature death, and torture.

While tabloids will always print whatever they think curious minds want to read, there’s no reason why books for young people can’t do better. We have little excuse to be so obsessed with the latest fads. I’m eager to be corrected, but I don’t know of a single YA nonfiction book that describes modern combat. I don’t mean exposes, condemns, or judges—I simply mean describes.

I spent part of last summer in Israel, where the vast majority of Jewish teenagers serve in the army (extremely religious Jews are exempt, as are some Israeli-Arabs). As a result, most young Israelis are keenly aware of what it means to be a soldier. On the other hand, I personally know just one American teenager who is a soldier (the son of the woman who cleans our home is in the Army Reserve). In present-day America, there’s an enormous gap between teens who look forward to military service (or who see it as their best option) and those who would do everything in their power to avoid it. Since the publishing world is made up of people who are aligned with those who don’t serve, we don’t feel the need to show the experiences of those who do. In our own way, we’re as timid and shortsighted as those 1952 TV producers.

The media learned an important lesson from I Love Lucy’s second-season ratings. We all enjoy watching the rising swell of an expectant mother’s stomach. And who doesn’t have tender feelings while awaiting the birth of a child? But at the very same time, many of our teenagers are at war—learning to work together, rely on each other, and make difficult choices or perhaps, as I overheard one Israeli soldier describe it, they’re just being “boys with guns.” Either way, they, too, deserve to be represented.