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Have you heards about the Teen ?pregnancy pact?
What do you think if it? I had a casual friend in HS like this. (We hung out from time to time, but wearn't BFF's). She started having 'baby fever' our freshman year, and got PG and dropped out of school the end of our sophmore year. I know at the time her home/family life wasn't very good (her parents basically didn't really give a crap about her and what she did, and her father was a alcoholic). We still had a few mutual friends, and I taked to her when her baby was about a year old and she admitted that motherhood wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and nothing like she was dreaming about. I lost touch with her after that, but think of her from time to time. Her son would be about 12 right now.
Teen ?pregnancy pact? has 17 girls expecting
Many moms-to-be at Mass. high school are aged under-16
"Some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," Gloucester High School principal Joseph Sullivan told Time magazine, which broke news of the pact on its Web site. dap('&PG=NBCMSH&AP=1089','300','250');
Some of the girls reacted to the news they were pregnant with high fives and plans for baby showers, Sullivan said. One of the fathers "is a 24-year-old homeless guy," Sullivan told the magazine. Others were boys in the school.
Statutory rape charges?
Superintendent Christopher Farmer confirmed the deal to WBZ-TV, saying the girls had "an agreement to get pregnant."
He said the mothers-to-be are generally "girls who lack self-esteem and have a lack of love in their life."
Carolyn Kirk, mayor of the port city 30 miles northeast of Boston, said authorities are looking at whether to pursue statutory rape charges. "We're at the very early stages of wrestling with the complexities of this problem," she said.
"But we also have to think about the boys. Some of these boys could have their lives changed. They could be in serious, serious trouble even if it was consensual because of their age ? not from what the city could do but from what the girls' families could do," she told Reuters.
Under Massachusetts law, it is a crime to have sex with anyone under the age of 16.
The ?Juno?-Jamie Lynn effect?
"At the very least these men should be held responsible for financial support, if not put in jail for statutory rape as the mayor has suggested," Greg Verga, chairman of the Gloucester School Committee, told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Nationwide, teen pregnancies are showing signs of rising after steadily declining from 1991 to 2005. This trend was highlighted Thursday when Britney Spears' 17-year-old sister Jamie Lynn, star of Nickelodeon's popular TV show "Zoey 101," gave birth to a baby girl, according to People magazine.
"The data seem to be indicating that the declines that we had seen through the 1990s are coming to a close," said David Landry, a researcher at the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based nonprofit group focusing on reproductive issues.
Birth rates for teenagers aged 15 to 17 rose by 3 percent in 2006, the first increase since 1991, according to preliminary data released in December by the National Center for Health Statistics.
Landry cautioned against attributing the trend to Hollywood following the recent hit movie "Juno," in which a teenager gets pregnant and decides to have the baby, and "Knocked Up," a comedy about a one-night stand.
"The trend emerged before those movies," he said.
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.
Re: Have you heards about the Teen ?pregnancy pact?
I find this very sad.
And I also think the media jumping all over it, is not going to help matters either.
omg that is awful!!! i wish they would spend one day with me at my place doing all i do and then they would reconsider! moms usually make it look easy because it becomes second nature, but man are they in for the shock of their lives!!!
I was 16 when i got pregnant with Chloe and 17 when she was born. I so did not have the baby fever it was one stupid careless move. I found myself lucky in this department cuz when i found out i was pregnant thru parenthood they told me iw as gonna be so poor that i wouldnt beable to afford anyhting. IT turned out to be a bs cuz my family supported me and i was able to finish school and still went to college but ofc i took a leave of absence due to fincial aid that screw up . HEre i am now still managing it good, i mean yah iahve my days and bads but thats the life we all go through in.
My mom was never the one to tlk about sex with us either but i changed that with my girls . Im lucky i have a good commuation now with chloe who knows if that will change i hope not! i doubt chloe will be pregnant early cuz she already expereience it with three younger sisters
I find this whole situation to be incredibly disturbing. It's one thing to have an "oopsie baby" as a teenager. It's another to have dozens (literally) of girls all gang together and make a concious (sp???) decision to have a pact to have babies and "raise their children together". How many of those girls do you suppose will actually be friends with that group 1, 2, 5, 10 years down the line? I'm willing to bet few to none. But they'll all still be stuck with their babies, who more than likely won't have a father at that point (if they ever even did at all). And it's also a proven fact that teenage mothers are MUCH more likely to have children who will also become teenage parents. Grrrrreat....