Prom Baby

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

I'm just a prom night dumpster baby,
I got no mom or dad.
Prom night dumpster baby -

My story isn't long, but boy, it's awfully sad...
—The Prom Night Dumpster Baby, Family Guy

Often when a fictional work features a pregnant teenage girl, she'll go into labor at the prom. Most likely because she got knocked up around homecoming.

There was an unfortunate Real Life case of this happening in 1997, where the mother, Melissa Drexler, dumped the baby into the trash and then went back to dancing.

Examples of Prom Baby include:


Comic Books

  • Mad Magazine once featured a series of fake magazine covers, including one called "Prom Mom" with articles like "Drinking the spiked punch: What the hell, it's not like anyone expects good judgment from you at this point!"

Film

  • The movie Saved!
  • Cabin Fever 2 has a gruesome version where one of the promgoers has an extremely messy childbirth in one of the public restrooms, after contracting a flesh-eating virus.

Literature

  • The novel Someone Like You.

Live Action TV

  • The Cold Case episode "Family".
    • The mom gave birth at the graduation party, so that means she got knocked up right at the start of her senior year.
  • Sam from ER explains this to be the case with her son.
  • In one episode of Veronica Mars, Trina Echolls is revealed to be the "prom baby" abandoned in the bathroom 25 years ago, in an elaborate gambit by Clemmons to oust the principal (the babydaddy) and take his job.
  • Michael remarks in one episode of My Wife and Kids that his wife, Jay, missed her prom because she was giving birth to their first-born, Junior, that night.
  • The Law and Order episode Denial played with this trope. The parents were college students, and the baby was actually born in a hotel, but shortly afterward, the parents attended a college dance as if nothing had happened.

Music

Baby's born on a bathroom floor
Her mother prays that it'll never cry
But nothing's wrong, you've got your prom dress on,
When they ask you'll say "it isn't mine"

Western Animation

Real Life

  • "Prom Nightmare", courtesy of TIME Magazine.
  • On a related, but more innocuous, note: a persistent rumor states that Winston Churchill was born in a cloakroom during a dance.

He was not in fact born during the dance, but his mother went into (possibly premature) labour during it and he was born 24 hours later. She was carried from the dancefloor into a downstairs room, unable to get back to her bedroom. It was not a 'ladies room', nor a 'bathroom', but a regular reception room that just happened to be covered in cloaks and other articles at the time.

When somebody asked Churchill if the story was true, he replied, "Although I was present at the occasion, I have no recollection of the events leading up to it."

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