I’ll admit that this is my first real shojo manga read in a very long time. I will say that this is a great title to get back into the shojo game with.

Mamoru Aoi’s My Girlfriend’s Child is a stand-out manga due to its coverage of an issue that is often misunderstood and/or draws a lot of shame – teen pregnancy.

My Girlfriend’s Child is about a high school couple named Kawakami Sachi and Tsukishima Takara. Sachi and Takara are just your regular 16-year olds doing teenage things and learning to navigate adolescence together. However, after one intimate night together, Sachi starts to feel early signs of being pregnant. She takes a pregnancy test and discovers that she is indeed pregnant with Takara’s child. The manga covers the two’s suddenly complicated journey in learning how to manage their new lives with one they conceived.

What I love about the manga is how it covers Sachi’s loneliness once she knows that she’s pregnant. She starts to despair over how she will be able to support her child. Sachi also wonders how her education prospects will turn out. She initially thought about having an abortion and felt a great deal of shame on how to tell Takara and her family about it. In the beginning of the story, Sachi was worried about a missing cat named Nora. She somewhat compares Nora’s life and the baby’s life in a way as she seems to place more value in a cat’s life than her own child’s.

When Sachi decides to visit a clinic to inquire about an abortion and goes through an ultrasound, she starts to have second thoughts. Sachi finds comfort in Takara, who tries his earnest to be there for her and re-assures her that he’ll always be by her side.

After reading the 1st 3 volumes of this manga, I decided to look up research on the mental health of pregnant teenagers. There’s not a whole bunch of research on psychosocial interventions to help improve the mental health of pregnant teens or teen parents. A lot of knowledge is missing to fill in gaps for an increasingly under-served group of people.

The manga highlights how support can be helpful while complicated at the same. Takara’s mother is shown to lack compassion over Sachi’s pregnancy. She blames Sachi to a huge degree for putting Takara into a tough situation. Sachi’s mother is happy and is somewhat conflicted on how to best help her as she knows that Sachi has to take responsibility. Sachi’s older brother, Kou, tries to be very rational about the pregnancy saying that it’s impossible for teenagers to take care of a child.

All of these interpersonal problems start to freak Sachi out as she remarks that there’s no future where everyone will be happy. The only guarantee is Takara. I will say that Takara is refreshing because when I hear about teen pregnancy stories, the father is usually out of the picture. But Takara is there every step of the way even when he’s not the one who’s pregnant. He sadly has to deal with his mother’s stress over his relationship with Sachi and is actually kicked out of the house, which makes him remark on how much teens still have to rely on their parents despite craving independence as adolescents.

Girls face so much more mental adversity than boys do because they’re “expected” to be married before having children. That’s not to say that teen fathers who do care have it that much better. They face a stigma in that they should be “wild and free” while struggling to make ends meet much earlier than they would have liked. There’s many socio-ecological factors in play that affect both genders. It does not help that sex education in first-world countries is extremely lacking. Institutions in general seem to treat teenage parents as aberrations that don’t deserve support. Children born to teenagers can experience health risks due to teens not being well-versed in various life skills, but people love to blame the parents for that.

I do notice that the manga provides a fresher perspective in that the child of Sachi and Takara might turn out okay. There’s a lot of real-life evidence that goes against that, but I think that’s because teen parents aren’t given positive messaging about their experiences. It’s okay for teens to want to be parents if they want to. We don’t honor that enough. Parenthood is indeed stressful, but those who welcome it are able to fare better when they are willing to build the strength to do so and have others to help encourage that strength.

My Girlfriend’s Child is a very thoughtful series because teen pregnancy isn’t really discussed enough and there’s definitely a community out there willing to support expectant teen parents. I do feel that teenagers are smarter/better than people think at times and not many people respect that enough. Birth is a part of life that can happen to anyone and teens can make the right decisions for themselves if we let them and respect their ability to do so.