As noted on WMB, Carolyn Kirk, mayor of Gloucester is attempting to debunk the idea of a “pregnancy pact” at Gloucester High School – a pact the principal blamed for a fourfold increase in the high school’s teen pregnancy rate.  Whether there was a pact or not (Kirk hasn’t convinced everyone), the situation is unsettling conventional wisdom about teen pregnancy. 

Seventeen girls are pregnant and none is over 16 years old, reported Kathleen Kingsbury of Time. The town of 30,000 has experienced economic decline, causing city budget restrictions that affected education. Kirk told The New York Times, “There are cuts in economic programs…and they’re impacting the social climate.” One such cut was from sex-education.

But how much of a difference did the lack of sex ed make?  At the press conference, Kirk said Gloucester High School’s spike in pregnancies was similar to spikes in other communities and in the nation as a whole.  Between 2005 and 2006, the nation saw a three percent increase in teen pregnancies following a historic low, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Time writer Kathleen Kingsbury told National Public Radio that the girls she interviewed seemed to lack direction. “”So these are girls who didn’t have a strong life plan,” she said. “They decided … being a mother would be their identity.” It’s an identity that Kay S. Hymowitz of the City Journal notes has become more appealing in the wake of glamorized Hollywood mothers such as Jamie Lynn Spears. That may have made pregnancy seem reasonable, even appealing.

The City of Gloucester is considering ways of preventing further teen pregnancies, but is meeting opposition. The school’s former nurse practitioner and medical director suggested revising the health policy to allow the distribution of contraceptives without parental consent. The idea—a hard-sell to a predominately Catholic community— reportedly led to the pair’s resignation, said Kingsbury.

But as Hymowitz notes, if the girls planned to get pregnant, “Unless someone has figured out how to force young people to take birth-control pills, sex education is completely beside the point.”  Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy told the AP, “This is not a story about sex education. This is a story about a failure to take childbirth seriously.”