“I stopped being a child the minute the strip turned pink”

LORELAI: You wanted to control me.
EMILY: You were still a child.
LORELAI: I stopped being a child the minute the strip turned pink, okay?

Lorelai claims that she stopped being a child “the minute the strip turned pink” on the pregnancy testing kit (with pink indicating a positive result). Getting pregnant doesn’t turn a girl into an adult, so Lorelai is wrong on that count. In fact, we can see during the show that becoming a mother at an early age stunted Lorelai’s emotional development so that her maturity remained at the level of a wayward teenage girl even into her thirties. This is the other side of the conflict between Emily and Lorelai, with neither of them being completely in the right or completely wrong, and with both of them over-dramatising their situations and claiming victim status.

By the way, Lorelai was very far from being rare as a teenage mother in Hartford. By the early 1990s, one quarter of all births in the city were to a teen mother. She was definitely an unusual teenage mother though.