Teens made pact to get pregnant at same time

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By Associated Press

GLOUCESTER, Mass. - The girls showed up repeatedly at the high school health clinic, asking for pregnancy tests. But their reactions to the test results were puzzling: high-fives if they were expecting, long faces if they weren't.

School officials in this New England fishing town say an alarming 17 girls - four times the usual number - became pregnant this year. And even more disturbing: Some of the girls may have made a pact to have babies and raise them together.

"A typical girl you would think would say, 'Oh my God! What am I going to do now? How am I going to support this baby? How am I going to finish school?' " Superintendent Christopher Farmer said. "These young women clearly have not seen that."

The story exploded after Joseph Sullivan, the principal of Gloucester High School, was quoted by Time magazine this week as saying the girls confessed to making such a pact. Mr. Sullivan was on vacation Friday and did not return calls for comment.

The superintendent said he had no independent confirmation of a pact.

But he added: "What we do know is there was a group of students being tested for pregnancy on a regular basis, which would suggest they were not taking steps to avoid becoming pregnant, and that when some of them had their babies, they appeared to be very pleased."

None of the girls or their families have come forward to confirm any type of pact, and school and health officials have not identified any of the youngsters.

The girls are all 16 or younger, nearly all of them sophomores. The superintendent said they have been reluctant to identify the fathers, many of whom are older. But one of them "is a 24-year-old homeless guy," the principal was quoted as telling Time.

The rash of pregnancies has shaken the seaside city about 30 miles north of Boston. Last month, two officials at the high school health center resigned to protest the resistance of the local hospital to confidentially distribute contraceptives. The hospital administers the state money that funds the clinic.

The Gloucester girls' pact "is shocking, but also a wake-up call," said Brenda Miller, executive director of the DC Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. The campaign has seen teen pregnancies and births drop about 12 percent in recent years, to 1,350 teen pregnancies and 870 teen births in 2005.

One of the campaign's core messages is to get young people to plan a future that specifically doesn't include pregnancy, said Ms. Miller.

Youth who don't want to get pregnant respond very well to pregnancy prevention efforts, she said. But there are also teenage girls out there "who deliberately try to get pregnant" and others - boys and girls - "who don't try very hard not to."

Christen Callahan, a former Gloucester High School student who had a child when she was 15, said on NBC's "Today" show that some of the girls would ask her about her own pregnancy.

"They would say stuff like, 'oh, I think my parents would be fine with it and they would help me,' stuff like that," Miss Callahan said.

But she said she had no firsthand knowledge of a pact between the girls to get pregnant.

"They were just kind of like curious about it, they never actually came out and said it," Miss Callahan said.

cStaff writer Cheryl Wetzstein contributed to this article.