"Brenda's Got a Baby" is rapper Tupac Shakur's debut solo single, taken from his album 2Pacalypse Now. The song, which features R&B singer Dave Hollister, is about a fictional 12-year-old girl named Brenda who lives in a ghetto, has a baby, and is incapable of supporting it. The song explores the issue of teen pregnancy and its effect on the young mothers and their families. Like many of Shakur's songs, "Brenda's Got a Baby" draws from the plight of the impoverished. Using Brenda as a metaphor for young mothers everywhere, Tupac criticises the low level of support from the babies' father, the government, and society in general.
Tupac wrote this song when he read a newspaper article about a 12-year-old girl who got pregnant from her cousin. She didn't want her parents to know about the baby, so she threw it down an incinerator. Tupac shows how the American society neglects black African women. Brenda couldn't even write her own name, since she had no education. When her parents found out about the baby, they kicked her out onto the streets. Brenda had nobody to help her, so she turned to selling crack for a living. When that didn't work out, she had no option but to turn to prostitution.
