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

[kerkevik_2014]

Women being shamed for giving up their children?

Pretty much universal :-(

[st_aurafina]

I've only seen one episode but from the snippet they gave us at the start, I assumed that her parents' religion would have factored into the shaming - I don't know how Jehovah's Witness are viewed in Denmark, but over here they're seen as a bit cultish and odd.

I wonder if the scandal of it is related to how much more parental support she would have received in Denmark, as compared to the US? If it's easier to raise a child, maybe it's worse to give your child away, even if you're a teenager?

Also, it's a more rural area - maybe it's more conservative? I know that wouldn't explain her daughter being scandalised, though.

But yeah, shaming women for anything? Always the easiest option. Whatever she did, I'm sure it would have been made to shame her in some way.

[the_rck]

I think that, in the US, the dark secret wouldn't be having given the child up for adoption but having had a child out of wedlock. The giving up for adoption can be read, from certain points of view, as a heroic penance for the sin of having had sex.

I suspect that part of the reason our welfare system is set up the way it is is that single mothers who keep the child(ren) are seen as having done something terrible without having had the grace to apologize/atone for it.