Jonathan Adams

No, Movies Don’t Make Babies

Photo: Seng Chen

TIME Magazine reports on the story of a pregnancy pact among teenage girls who promised they would all have babies and raise them together.

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.

Read the rest of the story here.

Also, read the story of one teenager, as told to Kai Wright, who lost her virginity at 14 because she didn’t have comprehensive sex education in school.

Posted at 2:38 PM, Jun 19, 2008 in Sexuality | Women | Permalink | View Comments