Gloucester Pregnancy Pact Actually Baby-Raising Pact: Well, That Makes It All Okay!

Baby photo tagged Bostonist by hmmlargerart on Flickr

It turns out that the pregnancy club that such illustrious sources as ourselves (and some magazine called Time) reported on last week wasn't a pregnancy club at all! It was just a baby-raising club, which makes things so much better. After all, teenagers are far more suited for raising the children who'll create America's future than for having sex!

Good Morning America has the scoop:

"There was definitely no pact. There was a group of girls who decided that they were gonna ... they were already pregnant before they decided this... they were gonna help each other with their kids so they could finish school and raise their kids together, to do the right thing was their decision. Not, let's get pregnant, like, as a group," said teen pregnancy expert (i.e., pregnant teen) Lindsay Oliver, 17, whose 20-year-old baby daddy looks about as stoned as Bender. We're not math experts, but had been under the impression that 17 + 20 = statutory rape (turns out that's for kids under 16, but coerced sex with someone under 18 is punishable too). Maybe we should be worried about teens having sex with twentysomethings (including a 24-year-old homeless man, as Time reported), rather than whether a pregnancy pact existed?

The Massachusetts Family Institute blames Deval Patrick for not funding abstinence education. We blame a host of factors, including Gloucester for not offering teens enough job or community opportunities, parents for not educating their children, Gloucester High School for normalizing teen pregnancy by providing day care and denying access to contraception, and 20-something boys for hanging out with high schoolers. Maybe when all the 20-something girls are busy raising three children with no support (news flash for teens: day care's not free when you get out of high school), the 15-year-olds become a more attractive option. (Ugh.)

Probably the most messed-up thing about this whole situation is that it only got media coverage in the first place because of the "pact" aspect of the story, and that the media coverage is only continuing due to the question of whether there was actually a "pact" or not. People aren't really concerned with preventing teen pregnancy or seriously thinking about what options teens have; they're just concerned with whether a principal said "pact." All this while Washington, D.C.; Texas; and New Mexico have teen pregnancy rates of over 60 per 1000--and who knows whether any of those pregnant teens even stay in school.

That's the real tragedy here: nobody cares about the real issues, just the peripheral semantics. The media uproar will die down in a week, and there will still be thousands of teens having unprotected sex, putting their health and their futures (not to mention their babies' futures) at risk. Maybe some high school or some community, somewhere, will actually put workable policies in place to educate teens and prevent teen pregnancies--but, somehow, we doubt it.