Was there a pregnancy pact between the teenage girls attending Gloucester High School?  Whether or not there was a pact I believe the real issue is not the veracity of the story but the fact that there are so many pregnant girls in this Massachusetts High School.

The pregnancy pact brings up many issues, among them sex education and young women’s self esteem.  A big issue within sexual education is the offering of information about contraception. According to several articles on this case Gloucester High School does not teach sex education through out high school, but only in the Freshman year. I believe that students should be fully informed on all means of contraception, about the option of abstinence, and that contraceptives should be made available to those students who make a choice of becoming sexually active. The reality is that some young people are going to have sex and the high school should be involved in giving them the tools to do so safely.  My position on this issue is similar to the one presented by Shelby Knox in the movie “The Education of Shelby Knox”, where young people are given the full information on their options in order to equip them to make an informed personal decision.

If these teenagers got pregnant on purpose the issue of self esteem is definitely one to be explored. Why do these women want to have children so early in their lives?  Pregnancy significantly reduces life chances. Less than one third of teens who become mothers before eighteen will finish high school. About forty percent of teens have a baby, and almost half of teen mothers end up on welfare. http://www.coolnurse.com/teen_pregnancy_rates.htm.  Perhaps all this is the result of  them not having enough opportunities or the support system to help them out once they have become mothers.

  The Gloucester case is interesting because it stands against a lot of stereotypes about teen-pregnancy, specifically against the myth that this type of problem is mainly a Hispanic or African American girl problem, or that it is a problem that occurs in only poor neighborhoods. In Gloucester the median household income was above $47,000 and only 7 per cent of the inhabitants were below the nation’s poverty level. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloucester%2C_MA Young women in America grow up watching sexualized images of women in society. When you think of wanting to have a baby to validate your life you are definitely having self esteem problems. No young woman should feel that she has to have a baby in order to not feel alone.