Mass. girls may have made pact to get pregnant
GLOUCESTER, Mass. The girls showed up repeatedly at the high school health clinic, asking for pregnancy tests. But their reactions to the test results were puzzling: high-fives if they were expecting, long faces if they weren’t.
School officials in this hard-luck New England fishing town say any alarming 17 girls - four times the usual number - became pregnant this year. And level more disturbing: Some of the girls may have made a pact to have babies and raise them together.
“A typical girl you would think would say, `Oh my God! What am I going to do now? How am I going to support this baby? How am I going to finish school?’” Superintendent Christopher Farmer said. “These young women clearly have not seen that.”
The falsehood exploded after Joseph Sullivan, the principal of Gloucester High School, was quoted by Time magazine this week while saying the girls confessed to making similar a pact. Sullivan was on vacation Friday and did not return calls for comment.
The superintendent said he had no absolute confirmation of a concordant. But he added: “What we do know is there was a group of students being tested for pregnancy in continuance a regular basis, which would suggest they were not catching steps to avoid becoming pregnant, and that at what time more of them had their babies, they appeared to be very pleased.”
None of the girls or their families have come forward to confirm any type of contract, and school and health officials be under the necessity not identified any of the youngsters.
The girls are the whole of 16 or under, intimately completely of them sophomores. The superintendent said they accept been reluctant to identify the fathers, many of whom are older. But one of them “is a 24-year-old homeless guy,” the principal was quoted during the time that telling Time.
City and school officials in this township of about 30,000 people 30 miles north of Boston have been struggling for months to explain and mete out with the pregnancies, in what place on average only four girls a year at the 1,200-student high school become pregnant.
Just last month, couple officials at the high school hale condition center resigned to aver the local hospital’s refusal to put up with a proposal to distribute contraceptives to youngsters at the school in the absence of parental agree. The hospital controls the clinic’s funding.
Mayor Carolyn Kirk said Friday there are many contributing factors to what she called a “blip” in the pregnancy price, from glamorization of teen pregnancy in clap culture to cuts in funding that have reduced teachers and health classes in Gloucester.
“We be in actual possession of fallen put on unfeeling times,” Kirk said of her city, which has suffered in recent decades with the fall away in the fishing industry that has defined Gloucester since the colonial era.
Gloucester is the village that lost six fishermen in the 1991 shipwreck that inspired the book and movie “The Perfect Storm.” Its high school teams are known as the Fighting Fishermen.
