With the success of Knocked Up, Juno, and Waitress (they had to throw that last one in there so there’d be three), it was inevitable that the academics would get into the mix and tell us what we love about baby movies. 

"This is a sea change," says Leonard Maltin, film historian [Ed Note: Haa!] for Entertainment Tonight. "It reflects what’s going on in the world, which is that women no longer need to feel like victims, even if something as dramatic as this has happened. For decades the very phrase ‘unwanted pregnancy’ was a synonym for soap opera. There was no question what kind of film you were going to see: It was going to be weepy. That has changed enormously. We’re now open enough in our willingness to deal with it and show that we can even laugh at it. These attitudes are in the zeitgeist, and the smarter, hipper movies tap into that."

Zeitgeist, dammit. My gratuitous big-word money was on Schadenfreude.  

"It reflects a shift in morality and acceptance of young women who are not married having sex lives," says Jeanine Basinger, lesbian chair of film studies at Wesleyan University and author of The Star Machine. "There is a difference in the cultural climate. The acceptance of keeping and raising a child if you’re unmarried, or meeting and choosing the adoptive parents and discussing it openly, is a modern phenomenon."

They go on like this for a while.  I’m just a little annoyed none of these movies choose abortion.  I think today’s young ladies need to know abortion is still a viable option.  Or “miscarriage”, as it’s known in my hometown.