Teen "pregnancy pact" shocks U.S. city
Pastor Dale Morgan
Teen "pregnancy pact" shocks U.S. city*
Reuters
By Jason Szep
BOSTON - A Massachusetts city is investigating an apparent teenage
"pregnancy pact" that has at least 17 high-school girls expecting
babies, four times more than last year, including many aged 16 or younger.
A high school health clinic in the city of Gloucester became suspicious
after seeing a surge in girls seeking pregnancy tests. Local officials
said on Thursday nearly half of those who became pregnant appear to have
entered into a pact to have their babies together over the year.
"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.
Sullivan was not immediately available to comment. But local officials
said at least some of the men involved in the pregnancies were in their
mid-20s, including one man who appeared to be homeless. Others were boys
in the school.
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.
NATIONAL TREND
"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 on 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 non-profit
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 Centre 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.