Insight: Feb 13

Jenny Brockie returns to Insight next week, looking at possible consequences from Tinder dating.

What’s it like having an unplanned child with someone you hardly know?

When 40-year-old Emma swiped right on Tinder at work one night, she wasn’t expecting the first date to result in a baby.

Once the initial shock of finding out she was pregnant had worn off, Emma found herself coming to terms with being bound to a stranger for the rest of her child’s life. She’s now co-parenting her six-month-old daughter with a man she’s still getting to know.

Insight, Australia’s leading forum for debate and first person stories, returns to hear from a number of women and men whose one night stand, fling or ‘friends with benefits’ hook-up accidentally resulted in parenthood. But is a ‘Tinder surprise’ baby just a modern label for an age-old issue that many people face at some stage of their lives – an unplanned pregnancy?

While it’s undoubtedly a life-changing event for a woman, we also hear from men like Josh and Daniel who didn’t choose to be fathers and had to step in to the role much sooner than they’d hoped.

Guests include:

Catrina: “He said yes to having sex with me but he didn’t say yes to being a father so I couldn’t force that responsibility on to him.”

Lucy: “[I was] trying to convince myself that it was better that the father was the fellow that I’d been exclusively seeing for six months as opposed to a fellow I’d been very casually seeing.”

Nicole*: “I felt an immense pressure to tell him [I was pregnant] and I guess I felt sick because I didn’t want to.”

Megan: “About nine months after I had the termination I met someone, and after about six weeks, I fell pregnant again.”

Josh: “I was a bit shocked but at the time, I was a bit hungover and thought, well, I can probably deal with this tomorrow.”

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