cultural difference?

[kindkit]

I've started watching the Danish TV series Dicte, about a crime reporter who keeps getting entangled in her own stories and ends up helping the police solve crimes. (The police, on the whole, would rather she stopped.) So far it's a pretty mediocre show, but Lars Brygmann (aka Thomas LaCour from Rejseholdet) is in it.

Anyway, in the fourth episode of S1, it's publicly revealed in a rival newspaper that Dicte had a son when she was 16 and, under pressure from her parents, gave him up for adoption. The newspaper treats this as a dark secret, and so does almost everyone Dicte knows, including her daughter. This surprised me, because as far as I'm aware hardly anyone in the modern US would think that a woman who'd made this choice was "an unfit mother" or a bad person. And in the US media, if a teen mother gives away her child, it's usually presented as a good decision, as almost heroic.

I'm hoping someone can tell me if this is a matter of cultural differences (a European or Nordic or Danish stigma against giving up a child for adoption) or if the show is being unrealistic in order to create drama.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

I have to agree with kerkevik_2014 on that one. If she didn't want a child why didn't she have an abortion? If she didn't want to do that, why didn't her family support her, or why didn't she try to raise the child? Was she on drugs? Did the state have to take her child into care because she was abusing or neglecting the child? The assumptions are very different.

[kindkit]

So, even if the mother was 16 years old, as on the show, she'd still be perceived as having done a morally dubious thing? That seems really harsh to me, and I guess reinforces kerkevik_2014's point that women get punished somehow no matter what.

[lilacsigil]

Well, it definitely isn't fair! And it's not like the income support is particularly great, either. But the usual narrative is that if a woman chooses to have the baby she is planning to keep it, so then if she doesn't something has gone wrong (and since she's not just female but a mother, it's probably her fault).

I think some of that is the relative lack of stigma on abortions, but there's also the effect of the Stolen Generations, and a lot of single mothers from 1973 and earlier who had their babies forcibly taken at birth and adopted out. Both groups have received formal Parliamentary apologies, so the idea that it's terrible to take a baby from their mother except in dire circumstances has been strongly reinforced over the last decade.