High School Pregnancy Pact

• Author: admin
• Filed under: Uncategorized
• Date: Jun 20,2008

The small town of Gloucester, Massachusetts is up in arms after school officials believe a group of 17 girls made a pact to become pregnant together. All of the girls involved in the alleged Gloucester high school pregnancy pact were 16-years-old or younger. Officials and psychiatrists have weighed in as to why the teens may have entered into such a pact. The fishing community of Gloucester has been facing hard economic times and becoming pregnant, according to one theory, would give the girls “status.” Another theory looks at the connection between mother and daughter. As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there’s been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town. School officials started looking into the matter as early as October after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, “some girls seemed more upset when they weren’t pregnant than when they were,” Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. “We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy,” the principal says, shaking his head. It is a shame those two lost their jobs over it, but a lack of easily available contraceptives is clearly not what got these girls where they are. They didn’t want birth control pills, they wanted babies. But why? School superintendent Christopher Farmer blames the economy. The blue-collar fishing town has seen an economic downturn over the past decade and many jobs have disappeared overseas. “Families are broken,” he says. “Many of our young people are growing up directionless.”

There may be something to that theory, but I suspect it is much more complicated than that. Back in my day, there was a certain stigma attached to teen mothers. Pregnant girls did not attend regular classes and they certainly didn’t bring their kids to school with them. Is it possible that this school, and others like it, encourage teens to have children by lessening the consequences? Or is this just an extreme case of group-think in girls too young to know better?

In Gloucester, the 1,200-student school administered 150 pregnancy tests to students in the past academic year. The school forbids the distribution of condoms and other contraception without parental consent — a rule that prompted the school’s doctor and nurse to resign in protest in May.

“But even if we had contraceptives, that pact shows that if they wanted to get pregnant, they will get pregnant. Whether we distribute contraceptives is irrelevant,” said Verga.

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