So Was There A Pact Or Wasn't There?

The story of the 18 pregnant girls at Gloucester High School has taken some strange turns since the story was broken by Time magazine on Thursday. The original story has at least half of these girls taking a pact to get pregnant around the same time. As the story progressed, it started to sound like the girls didn't take a pact to get pregnant together, but possibly to raise their babies together.

The mayor of the town is saying that there is no evidence of a pact, and that when the principal of the high school (who was quoted in Time) was questioned, he could not provide an answer as to where he had heard it.

"Any planned blood-oath bond to become pregnant — there is absolutely no evidence of," Gloucester (Mass.) Mayor Carolyn Kirk said at a press conference Monday held after a meeting of city leaders.

Gloucester High School Principal Joseph Sullivan had told a reporter for Time magazine in a story printed last week that some of 17 pregnant girls in his school had made a pact to raise their babies together.

"We have not been able to confirm the existence of a pact," Kirk said. "We are seeking to understand whether it is based in rumor or in fact."

Kirk said she was "uncomfortable" having Sullivan appear at the press conference because they hadn't been able to confirm the pact's existence with other school and health officials.

"He [Sullivan] was foggy in his memory of how he heard about the information," she said. "When we pressed him for specifics — about who told him, when was he told — his memory failed."

The thing that gets me about the reporting of this story is that in every account that has been mentioned, they keep bringing up the fact that the school did not offer contraception.

These girls wanted to get pregnant. If contraception was offered, it wouldn't have helped because, say it with me, THEY WANTED TO GET PREGNANT!

On Fox 25 Boston, the commentators discussed the issues around the situation. The usual things have come up -- are celebrity pregnancies glamourizing the issue, where are the parents, etc. -- but one thing that one of the commenters said was an interview with one of the girls who was pregnant as to why she sought to get pregnant in the first place. Her answer: she thought that having a baby in the house would get her mother to stop drinking.

To me that answer says a lot of what these girls are thinking -- they are having babies thinking that it will fix their home situations. Never mind the possible media glamorization of Hollywood pregnancies or "lack of contraception" -- it always comes down to the families.

So the answer is -- the breakdown of the family unit is what caused the 18 students to want to get pregnant. So what caused the breakdown of the family? A combination of factors -- feminists denying that men were "necessary" in the lives of children, the parents' own screwed up lives, whatever it might be. But kids need a strong family in order to prevent things like this from happening. And without that strong family, our kids are lost.