Something that's been bugging me about a certain Corific...

[redwoodalchan]

 I've been rereading "Family Matters" recently (just because), and it really stuck out to me just how much of a copout the part where Jessie realizes she's not pregnant is. The thing is, at the beginning of the story she mentions taking THREE separate pregnancy tests and having all of them come up positive. I actually did a bit of research into this (since I'm writing a fanfic of my own that features a scene in which the main character's mom realizes she's pregnant with him), and it would be really very rare for even one pregnancy test to throw a false positive, if they were used correctly (as in, once the woman realizes her period is late). Maybe it would have been more believable in the Nineties, but even that seems like a stretch. They try to explain it away by claiming that the birth control hormones circulating in her system were tricking her body into thinking it's pregnant, but that's such a forced rationalization it's hard to take seriously--particularly since it raises the question of why Jessie didn't think of that herself earlier (or, for that matter, why Jessie would even notice her period was late in the first place if she'd been taking her pills at the time).

Just...the entire thing reads like Cori really, desperately wanted Jessie to be pregnant at that time, but couldn't reconcile it with the fact that she wouldn't have been pregnant at this point in canon. So, she wrote all those pages of hand-wringing about whether Jessie was pregnant--which she actually WANTED to write--and then pulled some explanation for how she wasn't actually pregnant out of her ass as a sort of retcon and hoped her readers wouldn't think too hard about it.

The really funny thing is that in "Never Too Late" she writes a scene almost EXACTLY like the one in "Family Matters" in which Jessie's mom reveals she's pregnant with her. Since I'm pretty sure she wrote "Family Matters" before "Never Too Late," she probably decided to make "Never Too Late" the surprise pregnancy fic she really wanted to write all along.

Comments

[sarajayechan]

It's the whole "three false positive pregnancy tests" that ruins the idea of a scare, really. Granted, the whole fic is melodramatic as all hell regardless, but at least Cori could have made the pregnancy scare halfway believable by omitting the tests (would they even have TIME or money for Jessie to buy the tests, considering how ~poor~ they are?) and just having Jessie assume that missing a pill, being late, and having symptoms = unplanned baby.

[redwoodalchan]

You're right. It really makes no sense at all for those tests to even be IN the story!

[sarajayechan]

Some OTC medical testing kits aren't very reliable (I had a blood pressure checker that gave my mother a ridiculously low reading, for example) but...pregnancy tests tend to be.

That said, James's weepy sobbing fit over the reveal was really stupid.