We need a new teen pregnancy phrase — “Babies Having Babies” is so early 90s.
This story is getting a lot of play, and I can’t help but think that it’s in the category of rainbow parties and Satanic cults at daycare centers — that is, it’s a bullshit story published to scare the fuck out of parents.
Did a bunch of teenagers at this one high school actually have a “pregnancy pact”? Sure, maybe. But… why does this merit a story in Time Magazine?
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.
Something just smells fishy here — perhaps it’s the homeless guy piece of the story, which seems injected only to raise the parental terror level.
And the rest of the story makes you want to hit your head against the wall. First, it makes it sound like some people are pushing contraception as a solution to the pregnancy pacts — which, duh, if there’s a pact and you’re getting pregnant on purpose, contraception probably isn’t going to help. But contraception undoubtedly will help the girls who are pregnant by accident, of which there have certainly been a few at Gloucester High. The article doesn’t bother to separate out the idea that there are probably a whole bunch of girls at Gloucester — and at high schools across the country — who are actively trying to not get pregnant. But those girls aren’t news-worthy, and in this article, they’re conflated with girls who are getting pregnant on purpose. In reality, it’s very difficult for girls in Gloucester to prevent pregnancy if they want to. And ideologue adults are making it so difficult that the people on the front lines are quitting their jobs rather than shut up and watch as girls are harmed:
But by May, after nurse practitioner Kim Daly had administered some 150 pregnancy tests at Gloucester High’s student clinic, she and the clinic’s medical director, Dr. Brian Orr, a local pediatrician, began to advocate prescribing contraceptives regardless of parental consent, a practice at about 15 public high schools in Massachusetts. Currently Gloucester teens must travel about 20 miles (30 km) to reach the nearest women’s health clinic; younger girls have to get a ride or take the train and walk. But the notion of a school handing out birth control pills has met with hostility. Says Mayor Carolyn Kirk: “Dr. Orr and Ms. Daly have no right to decide this for our children.” The pair resigned in protest on May 30.
The Mayor is right that no one has the “right to decide this for our children.” But they should present the option for high-school students to protect themselves if they’re making the choice to have sex. We may not like the fact that teenagers are having sex, but wishful thinking is not reality. The problem, though is that Time is addressing the barriers to contraception in a scare-story about teenagers who are getting pregnant on purpose. Not helpful.
Second, the article blames policies that help pregnant girls for encouraging students to get pregnant:
The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers. Sex-ed classes end freshman year at Gloucester, where teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC. “We’re proud to help the mothers stay in school,” says Sue Todd, CEO of Pathways for Children, which runs the day-care center.
Well, clearly other students are just dying for free day-care.
Third, the big problem seems to be lack of options. Contraception access is an important issue, but in the context of this article, the problem is that the girls who are supposedly making a pact to get pregnant at 15 don’t see any better options for their lives. That gets hit in the last line of the last paragraph:
Gloucester’s elected school committee plans to vote later this summer on whether to provide contraceptives. But that won’t do much to solve the issue of teens wanting to get pregnant. Says rising junior Kacia Lowe, who is a classmate of the pactmakers’: “No one’s offered them a better option.” And better options may be a tall order in a city so uncertain of its future.
Socioeconomic issues are complicated and tricky, and apparently too difficult to get into in this article — it’s easy to just talk about birth control and daycare. In reality, teen pregnancy is about options as much as it’s about contraception access. But discussing the reality of limited options goes against the grain of American cultural mythology — suggesting that some folks have a much harder time pulling themselves up by their bootstraps than others — doesn’t play well with the American public. “Personal responsibility” is a much better catch phrase.
I wonder whether any of the journalists covering this story have considered the possibility of the teenagers pulling the wool over the principal’s eyes in regards to this so-called “pact”? Have none of them ever encountered defensive teenagers saying “Yeah, I meant to do that!”?
Either way, I have to admire their determination to stick together and support each other.
This was a shocking story–but not for the reasons originally given in Time. Sullivan may have pulled the pact story out of his fetid ass and caused a moral panic.
snip
So, Principal Joseph Sullivan “can’t remember” where he heard this information, but felt free to tell Time Magazine. If I was the principal of a high school and heard something like this, I’d investigate to see if it was true; I’d talk to the parents of the girls who were pregnant if I saw them high-fiving each other (NOT evidence of a pact, however), and I’d try to get to the bottom of what was going on. I would not start blabbing to Time Magazine based on something I’d “heard” but couldn’t remember where. FFS. (Irritation not aimed at you Jill, but at the chest-clutching around this story.)
Yeah. Someone pointed out to me that journalists like to make a big scandal out of a little “trend” that happens in ONE area.
Like that whole jenkem fiasco that supposedly happened in one town somewhere in florida. Just cos a bunch of teenagers in a small town like to snort weeks-old human poop out of a soda bottle, it doesn’t mean the rest of U.S teenagers in 50 states are doing the same, too. Geez.
Couple of things:
1. I really want to demolish this story — you know teen pregnancy is my pet topic — but apparently the “pregnancy pact” verbiage was uttered by the school principal exactly once and has no factual representation as of yet whatsoever.
In other words, what we’re looking at is a scare story about the incorrigibility of sexually active teen girls instead of a story on why comprehensive reproductive healthcare is a necessity.
2. The “homeless guy” bit: Ten bucks says the homeless guy is a pot-smoking dropout who is in between his parents’ house and his own lease and couch crashes with his buddies, which is to say that homelessness varies by degrees and we’re not going to latch onto a “she fucked the dude under the bridge to get pregnant like her friends” myth. Not to minimize the seriousness of an adult man fucking a high school age girl, but in my wise youth, I did some guys that would fall into that category too.
“The Mayor is right that no one has the “right to decide this for our children.””
That’s not what Ms. Kirk is saying though. She’s saying “Dr. Orr and Ms. Daly have no right to decide this for our children.” Orr and Daly wanted the ability to prescribe without the parent’s permission, after all, not willy-nilly. It think the idea she was pushing is that the parents should have control over their children’s reproductive systems which cannot be superseded by any other party, even the actual owners of said reproductive systems.
heard on the news this morning…. and there may not even have been a pact.
Also, I want to emphasize the importance of that Lauredhel is saying here before someone distorts it to sound like we’re unquestionably condoning teen pregnancy and all its risks.
I have made the case before and will continue to make the case that all parents regardless of their situation need support. Married nuclear families form prenatal communities and playgroups for their kids wherein the parents can trade tips, tricks, and informational resources that are necessary for supporting what we consider a traditional nuclear family, and just as they do so, nontraditional families form support communities to trade their own tips and tricks that aid the special circumstances endemic to their own family’s culture. Further compounding the pregnant teen experience is the additional lack of support and resources and stigma that is tied to teen pregnancy that raises the social and economic risk levels for mother and baby alike, all the more reason that we should applaud teen parents for sticking together for survival’s sake. Mentorship becomes incredibly important in these kinds of situations, preferably from within the community, and can only bolster parental attempts to sustain their families successfully.
And before anyone throws up their hands and declares what the pregnant teens coulda-shoulda done to avoid this situation, you can’t get a teenager unpregnant against her will unless you’re into forced abortion (and I assume we aren’t into forced abortion), so you might as well help her look forward to see how she can ensure a great life for both mom and baby.
So yes, good for these girls sticking together. I hope the whole community learns from the experience and folds them into the community fabric instead of forcing them underground.
“Ten bucks says the homeless guy is a pot-smoking dropout who is in between his parents’ house and his own lease and couch crashes with his buddies”
At this point, the homeless guy might not even exist. Who the hell hears “pregnancy pact between 8 teenage girls, and one of them banged a homeless dude to get knocked up” and then has a fit of amnesia about who said it?
I mean, if I’m in charge of or partially responsible for policy at a high school where there’s been an uptick in teen pregnancies, and someone starts telling me all this, I’d like to think I would start writing shit down and doing my damnedest to figure out whether this was preventable or a bizarre one-off, if the homeless dude ought to or can be charged, if the girl supposedly pregnant by him has access to STD testing, what the reporting employees mean when they say “some” or “a few”, etc. As I understand it, this sort of information can be kind of important when it comes to figuring out precisely what the hell is going on at your own school.
“Like that whole jenkem fiasco that supposedly happened in one town somewhere in florida.”
I think they’ve found that nothing ever actually happened anywhere. Some small town’s sheriff’s department bought into an internet myth and reacted as if it was the real deal. It’s kind of like if a town decided to ban unicorns and institute and anti-unicorn task force, and then the media picked it up as the moving story of a unicorn crime-wave being fought be the brave police officers of Northeast Bumfuck Adjacent.
Like you, I’m studying for the NY bar. Given that the principal appears to have made this all up, I can’t help but wonder if there’s a defamation claim to be had here…
For the average 16 year old, the risks are social and economic – they are constructed, not intrinsic or biological. In my feminism, those barriers and risks shouldn’t be there. Yes, I support reproductive choice and the absence of discrimination on the basis of sex or parental responsibility at ALL phases of life, including early womanhood (16 is the age of consent here).
How many people predicting doom for teenage mothers are working just as hard to reduce those social and economic risks? No, most of them want them there, as a “deterrent”.
Flip it. People working hard to reduce access to abortion as a deterrent are anti-choice, slut-shaming and woman-punishing. _So are people who are in favour of maintaining or increasing social and economic risks to early motherhood (or any motherhood, for that matter)_.
This is the other side of reproductive choice (assuming, for a moment, that these young women and/or girls were able to make a choice; the ones under 16 were raped by definition, which complicates things, and their access to abortion may be limited, which also complicates things, but none of these negate their right to make a positive choice to birth and care for their babies. Some people, even some feminists, find this aspect of reproductive choice challenging.
Sorry to double post – I just looked up the age of consent in Massachusetts, and it’s 16. At least some of the pregnant students are 16, according to the Time article. Why the hell does the principal and school officials not directly involved in their health care know anything about their positive pregnancy tests??
Even under 16, down to around the age of 14 or so, girls should be entitled to medical privacy and autonomy in healthcare also, should the healthcare professional determine them to be competent to make their own decisions.
I am just appalled that the city and apparently the media doesn’t think that 17 year olds have the right to make their own decisions. Frankly, if a 17 year old girl wanted to get pregnant, I would think they are stupid, but that is their right to choose. If they refuse to acknowledge or accept ample evidence that pregnancy at that age can limit their choices, well that is none of my business. Conversely these girls should absolutely be able to choose if they want to be on birth control or not. At 17, and even 16 these girls are well past the age of reason. They are allowed to drive cars, certainly they should be allowed to control their own bodies.
Actually, the business in Florida was a hoax. While Jenkem might or might not be used by street children in Africa (most of the information comes from one source and it seems a bit too much like “oh look at what these poor savages are reduced to!” for my taste), the story in Florida was certainly staged. In particular it was staged by Anonymous and the Chans as a prank that took on a life of it’s own.
See, guys… so the whole jenkem fiasco WAS a hoax, but the national U.S media picked that up and acted as if ALL U.S teenagers was doing it.
Kind of like the whole uproar over one small town’s case of 17 teen pregnancies.
Of note, from reading the article I got he impression that there were 7 or 8 girls involved in this pact not all the girls pregnant at the school.
There is an ambiguity as to how many are in the pact, and I wonder if it is not intentional. Also the homeless 24yr old comment also has the same ambiguity. He could be the father for any of the girls pregnant. Since the article is of note because of the pact, he gets rolled into as well. To me the school is willing to leave the impression that the fourfold increase in pregnancies was not preventable by them and the girls need to be held accountable not the school, educators or their policies. The way the whole thing is written and presented gives a strong yellow journalism vibe with a patricentric twist.
Although there’s no proof that there were ever pregnancy pacts, it’s kind of sad how so many people, myself included, believed this story. It is a believable story, unfortunately. And as happy as I am that it might not be true, I’m still disappointed that it could be.
yeah, I saw this story on CNN and sighed heavily and impatiently. And did you hear that the Mayor apparently discredited this whole “pact” club thing? So basically there is every possiblity that the principal or whoever hyped the premise. Who knows.
But I do concur. What irritated me about the CNN coverage was the salivating attention the reporters were paying to these girls’ sexual activities. oooo… one of them had sex w/ a homeless man! And it was a big deal for the reporter that none of the girls would come forward with their names (because of the SHAME!” … loooorrdddd. Some moron talking head also blamed “movies like Juno” for such activities. And lots of “teenagers are stupid and cannot think for themselves” statements. Despite the fact that they had a teenage girl on who talked about how she didn’t believe it’s a good idea to get pregnant as a way of being part of a club.
Condescending stupidity.
But theres a difference here. In this case, 17 young women did get pregnant in a town that doesn’t usually see that many teenage pregnancies, whereas in the Jenkem case a bunch of assholes on the internet tricked a bunch of easily fooled school administrators and local Barney Fifes. The national discussion is now focusing not on why there might be a spike in teen pregnancies in this area, but on the fantasies of one school principle.
While the “pregnancy pact” angle of the story is one administrator talking out of his ass, the story itself has some obvious implications. Why is it that the circumstances in this town lead to a teen pregnancy rate four or five times what had been seen in previous years? The idea of a pregnancy pact is rich, psychologically speaking, in data about the people who put the idea forward and the media/parents/alarmists who are so ready to believe it. The objective data in the case says that several girls were being regularly tested for pregnancy, and that many of them became pregnant. The questions that would immediately leap into my mind with that data would be things like what was access to contraception like in this area, what kinds of sex ed was offered, what kinds of services were available in the communities?
But still, its the pregnancy pact angle of the story that took off. Why? The themes I’ve been seeing in this story, just off the top of my head, seem to be an attempt by large segments of the community to explain away the sexual activity. Its almost as if its easier to believe that these young women were racing to breed than, you know, having sex because they enjoyed it. It seems like a lot of people would rather believe theres some kind of fantastic circumstance that makes this town special, that makes this unusual, that makes this an outlier that no one has to worry about in their own communities.
No, see, 17 young women didn’t get pregnant because of shitty sex ed, a lack of contraceptive options, poor abortion access, shitty social systems, or community and economic factors which lead them to feel that having a kid was the only way to get attention/independence/self-worth. No, no, they got pregnant because they want babies. Everything is right in the world, its just that these poor stupid little girls were just a little too eager to do what they were put on this earth to do. And they certainly weren’t having sex for enjoyment, no, this was still about fulfilling God’s plan. We didn’t do anything wrong, we didn’t teach them the wrong things or put them in a terrible situation. We didn’t fail in our jobs as parents, teachers, and members of the human race. No uncomfortable questions, nothing threatening, just a few dumb little girls who weren’t being controlled well enough. Really, the only problem here is that this little town didn’t keep their little girls (and its always the girls, the boys just can’t be expected to think about these things) on a short enough leash.
Thats the thought process thats going on here, thats what this particular hoax means. Laughing it off as ignorant ignores the ugly reality that caused it to get legs and become a national story in the first place. Sure, you can be horrified and disgusted, you can get a little narcissistic boost by looking at these women as something ridiculous or foolish, but at the end of the day you can just brush this story aside and not have to think about what it might mean to your worldview. The only way you can ever change the way the public thinks is by tearing away the veils and not letting them get away with this comfortable little lies.
I have yet to see any confirmation from girls who supposedly participated in this pact.
The school officials pushing the pact story are also highly motivated to come up with an excuse not to provide contraception. But I think even the girls that want to get pregnant might reconsider if they are offered contraception. A lot of people on the brink of these kinds of decisions will reconsider if they’re given the message that they matter to someone as people. It’s not untrue that teenage girls often get the message that they’re worthless and they plug that hole in their souls with pregnancy. For them, a school nurse looking them in the eye and saying, “I believe that you deserve choices,” might make all the difference.
Reminds me of my sister, who teaches the equivalent of high school and is getting more right-wing with every passing week, apparently in frustration at students who say “Yeah, whatever, I’m just going to have a baby and get benefits.” And I keep thinking, if I had a teacher who kept giving me lectures that had zero relevence to the options I could see for my life, I’d probably say something very similar.
I’m from the Gloucester area and this pact is a complete speculation. I’m not sure if it will make it out to the mainstream media, but the mayor came out today and stated that there is absolutely no evidence to support there was any “pact” at any time between any of the pregnant girls. http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2008/06/gloucester_mayo.html
This is a poor, struggling, working class town where many children are neglected by their parents, their school system, and their community in general. They aren’t the first girls in a town like this one to talk to each other often about wanting to have babies who will love them unconditionally, I’m sure. Addressing the issue of *why* they have these feelings (they seem to believe that unconditional love can only come from a source outside of themselves) and providing them the proper information and tools to make informed, empowered choices for themselves is BADLY needed. Creating and then focusing on this idea of a “pact,” as one poster pointed out, is just an attempt to distract from the bottom line here, which is that this town (and so many others) ignores it’s children, particularly it’s girls.
“Although there’s no proof that there were ever pregnancy pacts, it’s kind of sad how so many people, myself included, believed this story.”
There’s no particular reason to believe that it didn’t happen in this case as an immediate reaction to the article, though.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that eight teens did something rather naive and poorly-planned and decided to get pregnant at approximately the same time. Okay. People–frequently in much larger groups than that–do dumber and more ill-considered things all the damn time. It’s hardly beyond the realm of the credible that eight girls in this high school decided that they wanted to have babies now instead of, what, a year or two after graduation? And they wanted to have their friends help them through this rather than families who well may have failed them or biological fathers of the sort they may have seen run or drift away from responsibility before.
You don’t have to reject that scenario as possible (few things are flat-out impossible, and things that happen all the time don’t make the news) in order to reject the idea that it’s newsworthy, or something that can be trotted out as an example of anything re: teen pregnancy, or worth anything to someone who isn’t jonesing for a hit of salacious fearmongering. You don’t have to buy into it as a mile marker on the road to damnation in order to believe the bare bones of the story.
Now that it seems that the principal made up the pact, doesn’t it seem likely he did so the cover up his own liability, along with the mayor’s and the school committee’s in not providing better access to birth control and sex ed? Sex ed in freshman year only?
Did you know that hear in Massachusetts (I am a high school teacher not 30 miles from Gloucester) that only 1 semester of health education is required in high school and students do not even have to pass it? Let’s maybe thing about how that impacts pregnancy rates.
Also who ever heard of programs like on-site day care encouraging girls to get pregnant? Get real.
Preying mantis, I was saying that it’s sad that the story was believeable, not that the people who believed it were naive. But seeing that sentence by itself, I can see how I wasn’t as clear as I could have been.
“But seeing that sentence by itself, I can see how I wasn’t as clear as I could have been.”
No, I think it’s just that I was coming at it from a different angle. I interpreted your “believable” as “one of those stories that we credit too easily.” Not really out of naivete–it plays to narratives and prejudices that the culture pushes pretty hard. I think that’s how a lot of this erroneous stuff makes it into print in the first place. It speaks to what the reporter, editor, etc. feel is true, so the bar for fact-checking is lowered and the bullshit detector is turned off. If hadn’t been caught up in that line of thought, I would have understood what you meant.
I think those are two slightly different issues. Sex ed really isn’t that complicated, nor is it something likely to fade from memory. The issue here isn’t that they don’t get sat down through numerous mandatory lectures but that quality education is clearly not being made available. More of the same failed material on a more regular schedule isn’t anything other than a make work program for the teachers and administrators who failed these young women in the first place.
The problem, as I see it, isn’t the students or the requirements. The problem is the system that has let these students down. Lets face it, a semester of health is a lot of time. Thats what, 45 minutes a day 3-5 times a week for 15 weeks? In the Chicago Public School System a semester of classes would come out to a little over 56 hours of in-class instruction. Thats a lot of time; thats more time than I get for a three credit hour class in a doctoral program. We aren’t talking about quantum physics or the history of China here. Forget whether or not students are required to pass, any half way decent teacher with a good curriculum (fact and science based rather than “JAY-sus wants you to keep your whorish legs shut!” chanted for forty five minutes a day) should be able to transfer the basics by osmosis. Grinding students through more failed classes of failed curricula taught by burnt out teachers isn’t going to help anything. Neither will requiring students to learn how to parrot (which is all most high schools in this country have even even bothered to do) the same material which clearly hasn’t worked if they want to get a high school diploma.
I was thinking the same thing, but I didn’t know how to word it. Yes, it’s definitely more believeable considering that the media loves to show what gigantic whores teenage girls are. Or if they want to seem sensitive, they talk about how these girls got pregnant to fill a void or have someone who’ll love them forever, which I think is crap in this case. Whether the story is true or false, it gets the job done by providing entertainment as well as hysteria. But the part of the story that made me believe it was that the girls wanted to raise their babies together, as if they had no expectation of the fathers of these children to be around at all. That’s the part of the story that made me feel for these girls, and I wasn’t as skeptical as I should have been, since now making a pregnancy pact just sounds too dumb even for a bunch of sophmores.
This story was very believable for me just because when I was in high school, we had about a million pregnancies (that’s what it seemed like–I think in my junior year we had nearly 20 out of 800 students), and many of them were among a particular group of friends. It started with one or two of them, and then by graduation, every single one of them had had at least one baby. When a group of 7 or 8 girls who are all friends all have at least one baby by the time they graduate, you begin to wonder if some of it wasn’t planned in some way.
So yeah, a pact wouldn’t surprise me.
As for why the principle may know about the pregnancy tests?
Required reporting of possible cases of sexual abuse of a student.
Actually my mother has worked her entire career in a low income school district and she completely blames lenient daycare programs for making teen pregnancy seem like an appealing option to girls who do have a lack of direction. The program in her district provides student mothers with brand spanking new everything, strollers, bags, clothes, toys, etc. Plus they let the mothers carrying around their designer decked babies to their classes like fashionable totes.
Now, I do think that providing daycare opportunities is crucial to getting those teenagers to finish their highschool education but you can definitely go about it in the wrong way. In some cases girls are basically being financially rewarded for having babies in their teens.
Sorry, I don’t agree. The problem isn’t that the girls are seeking status through the babies, the problem is the system that tells the girls status is based on material things like new strollers or designer baby clothes, and they have no self worth of their own. If the “lenient” daycare ended tomorrow, many of the girls would move on to other potentially dangerous ways of gaining the “stuff” of status. When you are poor, and you are told that makes you ‘bad’, and you have it rubbed into your face every day, you look desperately for any way to prove you aren’t poor- hence conspicuous consumption.
And teenage motherhood being the booming money-maker that it is, providing supplies to people who are just so darn financially capable of providing them themselves is just crazy! Sure! I know just what to do: we could make those damned impertinent babies fester in substandard daycare with dangerous castoff supplies. That would really solve the problem, wouldn’t it? Oh- and we could make those showoff mothers wear a scarlet “A” upon their ragged clothing, for all to mock. But we’d definately let them finish school, which I’m sure they would just LOVE to do in that atmosphere.
Financial rewards for being teen parents? What a dastardly plot! Is that kinda like the tax breaks you get for kids, only not so middle class?
Last night I was watching public television and a woman from the Teen Resource Center in Gloucester reported that last year there were 19 teen pregnancies. Why wasn’t there a media uproar last year?
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/16692720/detail.html
There was no pact.
[...] Links: Sisterhood of the Maternity Pants Inconsistent Contraception Use But Juno! OMG Pregnancy Pacts!!?!?! Google blog [...]
If there was no pact, why did Time run an entire cover story on this? Where is good journalism? Where is the fact checking?
Such irresponsible media…. sigh.
If society were pro-woman and pro-child teen pregnancy would be no big deal. The community, the people and the place would support the woman and child fully.
[...] maybe this will lead to a resurgence in teen preganacy pacts, much touted in Time [...]