Pregnancy Pacts

This is pretty creepy. A high school in Massachusetts recently saw a spike in teen pregnancies, 17 in all. It's suspected that about half of them were part of some pregnancy pact where the teens vowed to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Of course, Jamie Lynn Spears was blamed for having the nerve to have a kid. It's funny. First, Jamie Lynn is congratulated for "doing the right thing" by remaining pregnant and having the baby, and now she's being singled out for the same reasons. Those are the kinds of mixed messages that confuse teens and grown-ups alike about how they're supposed to handle their sex lives.

What was never mentioned in the above clip is sexuality education. They talked about the possibility of making contraception available to students, but that doesn't really help when the girls actually want to get pregnant. I also don't agree with the idea that these girls are looking for unconditional love or anything like that. It struck me as kind of odd that these girls were making a pact with other teen girls, so they do have a sense of friendship and togetherness, maybe even sisterhood. It's almost as if they don't even expect any guy they make a baby with to support the kid. That's pretty sad. I think if these young women learned that their worth wasn't measured in how many babies they have and that they're good people in and of themselves, that things like this wouldn't happen.