In 2008 there were at least country singles about teenage pregnancy, all of which charted. Two of these singles were in a rock argot, and two of them were the more traditional country argot. All of them were about how keeping the baby, about not seeking an abortion, or an adoption, was the expected course of action. Two of them were written and performed by women, one of them were written and performed by a man. One of them, Carrie Underwood's, Just A Dream, elucidates a narrative about being a war widow at 18. One of them, Eric Church's Two Pink Lines, is an innovative narrative constructed in real time, with a strange Deus Ex Machina ending, One of them, Knocked Up, has lyrical and musical mirroring of Brenda Lee's Let's Jump the Broomstick, and all of them forget the 2002 Tim McGraw single, Red Rag Top, with it's then scandalous mention of abortion as not only an option, but a done deed.

These texts are unsettled, popular, and often lead to more questions then answers. Including was McGraw such a famous person in 2002, that he could safely mention the politically infeasible? Is this another example (with the Underwood weepie) of melodrama being used to safely couch dangerous political or social thought? Is there an autonomy to teenage pregnancy, and a rural/suburban attitude towards problem solving and against frank discussion of sexualities that inform these texts? Is there a connection between the discourses of Sarah Palin's granddaughter and the parents who direct these texts? How do they fit into the proto-feminisms of Loretta Lynn's the Pill or Jeannie C Riley's the Rib, for example? Is there something similar in the recent move by radical anti-abortion advocates against direct action and in favour of houses for unwed mothers?

I hope to use these three new songs, and Red Rag Top, to start discussing these questions using a variety of lenses including reportage, statistical analysis, critiques of media, psycho-geographic analysis of the American west and south, recent attempts to queer melodrama, protestant theologies of the body, arguments from a wide variety of sources about autonomy and abortion, histories of childhood, and studies of critical whiteness in rural societies. I hope then to not answer anything, but provide a map of strategic engagements around such difficult sites.