Pregnancy Pact
It turns out that the "pact" may have been an exaggeration -- or an outright fabrication. But pact or no pact, the public furor over this incident reveals our profound discomfort over the question what to do about teens who decide, for whatever reason, that they want to have children.
Pregnancy Pact
First, we need to consider the circumstances in which the girls made their decisions. School funding cuts had eliminated Gloucester High's sexuality education classes. If the difficult realities of pregnancy and parenting had been in the curriculum, perhaps some of these teens might have made a different decision. This is a problem across the country, where "abstinence-only-until-marriage" programs, which censor vital information about contraception and sexually transmitted infections, are too often the "sex education" of choice.
But sex ed alone cannot solve the problem. Much has been made of Gloucester's depressed economy and lack of community resources. Without adequate youth programming, or many options for girls after graduation, one can understand why a young woman might be excited to become a mother before she's finished high school. The most successful community strategies for preventing teen pregnancy give young women the resources to pursue dreams that might otherwise seem unattainable or unrealistic.
We would hope that with positive support from adults, community youth development programming, and educational and economic opportunities, these young women and others like them would feel they had other options. But what about the teens that do become pregnant -- intentionally or unintentionally -- and decide to continue the pregnancy? Nationwide, there were 138,000 births by young women aged 15 to 17 in 2002.
On the other hand, as pro-choice advocates we believe in a woman's right to make her own decision about whether and when to have children, including the decision to become pregnant and continue a pregnancy. This right is fundamental to human dignity, and it belongs to minors as well as adults. Legal rights do not depend on whether someone else thinks the pregnancy is a good idea.
The Gloucester case points to the need to strike a balance between identifying the problems that led to the difficult situation these young women (and indeed, all pregnant teens) find themselves in and respecting the life-changing decisions pregnant girls are forced to make. We have to come to terms with the fact that some girls will decide to get pregnant, and some of those who become pregnant will want to continue the pregnancy and keep their babies. We cannot run from the complicated questions intentional teen pregnancies raise.
Pregnant and parenting girls have as much of a right to complete their education as any other student. Support services provide a vital resource for girls who have made the decision to become mothers. Research shows that quality school-based support programs for pregnant and parenting teens and their children go a long way toward supporting not only academic success, but future economic stability and well-being. Rather than suggesting that these programs encourage teen pregnancy, we need to applaud this school's commitment to keeping all students on the path to graduation and advocate for increased support for pregnant and parenting students in schools across the country.
Lifetime's The Pregnancy Pact portrays several high school girls who intentionally get pregnant, apparently seduced by fantasies of loving, carefree motherhoods. The movie was "inspired by a true story" and it's a competent made-for-TV issue melodrama, engaging enough if somewhat schematic and bland. Some might also see in the movie a "ripped from the headlines" exploitation of a serious and complex problem, particularly since the film references some events that really happened in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 2008, but it reportedly invents key story elements. The movie does make a fairly serious effort to explore some basic aspects of teen pregnancy, showing young females who see little future beyond child-rearing. It seems like almost everyone involved here--teens, parents, and community leaders--is lying to someone. The film presents the school nurse as a forceful advocate for better pregnancy prevention, a compassionate professional who takes on the school administration and a "family values" group to try to stem the school's teen pregnancy "epidemic." The nurse might have done some direct counseling of the pregnant students, as a real nurse would. And the character is limited. She never gets at the deeper issues involved in the pregnancies, and she resigns in protest roughly a quarter of the way through the movie, never to reappear. The main force for a more progressive approach to teen pregnancy in the film is actually a relentless young New York video blogger who bonds with the teens and does far more to get to the bottom of the epidemic. Still, the portrayal of the nurse as an articulate professional who is willing to make a big personal sacrifice to advance public health debunks the popular notion that school nurses are just about aspirin and band-aids. And that's especially helpful at a time when U.S. school districts face extraordinary pressure to cut costs.
The Lifetime movie starts with a disclaimer that it's "the story of a fictional 'pregnancy pact' set against actual news reports from June 2008, and although some of the locations and public figures are real, any resemblance to actual persons is purely coincidental." Got that? So basically we're going to present something with obvious similarities to real recent events, and set it in the same real place, with some real characters, but we'll feel free to invent things as we see fit. The disclaimer is followed (and arguably undermined) by a sampling of snippets from real television reports about the 2008 story from Gloucester. But regardless of whether the story is literally true in every respect, viewers will form impressions of those portrayed, including the nurse, based on what they see. In fact, the staff of the real Gloucester high school clinic--a nurse practitioner and a pediatrician--did reportedly resign after their pleas for better birth control measures at the school were rejected. On the other hand, it appears that contrary to the movie plot, there may have been no actual "pact" among the teens to get pregnant. And the crusading blogger character, who drives much of the film plot, does seem a bit far-fetched.
Anyway, the film's depiction of the Gloucester high school is of a place where students walk around with books, couples hang out, and female students push baby strollers down the hall. We see one student in the nurse's office, giggling as the nurse unwraps a pregnancy test. The student's giggly friends wait outside. Nurse Beth--we'll call her that now though she is actually not named till her last scene in the movie--asks the student if she thinks this process is funny. The student says no, seemingly chastened. Beth explains how to do the test. She is serious and professional, but also trying to be comforting. The student emerges from the bathroom and gives Beth the test, sneaking a big smile at her friends outside, but looking crestfallen when Beth informs her that she's not pregnant. The student walks away, and her friends console her.
As the story unfolds, the focus is on the experience and eventual interactions of two women. One is 15-year-old Sara Dougan (right), a fairly quiet student who seems to be at the margins of what we might call the school's pregnancy pack but who becomes intensely focused on having a baby with her baseball-playing boyfriend Jesse. The other central character is the progressive New York video blogger Sidney Bloom (below), who learns of the pregnancy epidemic while doing her teen-oriented blog TeenUp.net. Sidney notes that teen pregnancy rates are up all over the U.S. for the first time in years, and then she travels to Gloucester, where she herself attended high school a decade earlier, to figure out what is going on. Neither of these characters actually interacts with nurse Beth, who is on a different track and destined to bow out before things really spin out of control.
And while Sara has two loving parents who are doing their best, her mother Lorraine is a somewhat clueless ideologue who leads the local "Family Values Council" that is stymieing efforts to introduce modern birth control measures in the school. Lorraine insists not only that abstinence is the only way but also that teen pregnancy should not even be publicly discussed, since it is (as she says over and over) a "private" matter between the young women and their families. At one point, Lorraine suggests to Sara's father that they can trust Jesse because he goes to church. Sara's parents spend a lot of time lecturing and laying out strict rules, but not much time paying attention to what their daughter is actually saying or going through.
Nurse Beth does not have a chance to lay much of this out. But she does play an important role in some early scenes that illustrate how the community got into the situation, and she advocates strongly for a way to at least reduce the incidence of teen pregnancy generally. Early on, we see Beth telling one student, in a grave voice, that she is pregnant. "Thank you," the teen squeaks, and departs without another word. Outside, the teen tells her friends that they were right, "this is the most amazing feeling." Later, Beth tells assistant principal Brady about this.
He and Brady leave. Beth seems stunned that they wouldn't devote any more attention than this to the issue, though she seems to have made progress with Brady at least. Beth has no response to Bachman's last point, and it's actually a pretty good one as far as it goes: What difference would contraception make to girls who are so determined to get pregnant? Perhaps one answer might be that any responsible program to provide contraceptives would include at least some family planning counseling, and that this would entail providing the teens with some information about why it might make sense to wait to get pregnant. And it's not clear that every pregnancy at the school was intentional; surely contraception could prevent at least some of them. 041b061a72