Apparently, you folks are interested in the "pregnancy pact" story based on the amout of discussion it’s generated here. It's based on a report in Time Magazine that 17 girls from a Gloucester, Mass. High school decided to get pregnant and raise their babies together.
My last post on the matter drew huge comments, and I've seen other headlines about the story everywhere (including at the grocery store today, on a supermarket tabloid "We wanted to be like Jamie Lynn"—Pregnancy Pact Girls. Sure.)
And now some of the girls who got pregnant this school year are coming forward and saying there was no pact, that it was just chance.
I think something is rotten here, although I'm not sure what. The school generally sees 3 or 4 pregnancies a year, not 17, so something was up. However, the teacher who spoke to Time about the story has since refused to comment publicly.
And the larger question, of course, is why so many girls got pregnant, pact or no. Lack of access to birth control and information about sex ed and pregnancy prevention is one reason. The town is also dependent on the fishing industry –life there is pretty hardscrabble, it seems, and these girls had little sense of hope for their future. And many of them came from teen parents themselves.
Equally as important as why these girls got pregnant is why they so much as glancing at, much less having sex with, winners like one girl's babydaddy, who was quoted in the Guardian with this trenchant observation as to how the spike in pregnancies happened:
"They were horny, it was a cold winter. It's boring around this town. Nothing to do."
Oy.
