Give the Girls a Break

摘要

You know you've found a perfect cultural touchstone when everyone brushe's past it on the way to opposite conclusions. The tale of the Gloucester High School "pregnancy pact" has exposed many culprits, many causes and much confusion over what it actually tells us about anything larger than the luck and judgment of 18 now infamous teenage girls. When my Time colleague Kathleen Kingsbury first quoted Gloucester High principal Joseph Sullivan as saying that the reason pregnancies at his school quadrupled this year was that a group of sophomore girls "made a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together," the story made headlines from here to Australia-but no one could agree about what it meant. If only Massachusetts hadn't rejected federal funds for abstinence-only education, lamented Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. If only the school health clinic had been allowed to dispense birth control pills, countered its medical director, Dr. Brian Orr, who resigned over the contraception ban. If only No Child Left Behind hadn't diverted funds from better health education, charged Gloucester mayor Carolyn Kirk. If only Mars had not been in Leo in the eighth house, suggested Monica at Astrology Mundo, who had predicted a flare-up of teen sex around the summer solstice. The culture was an irresistible target, after movies like Juno "glamorized" unwed motherhood; if only the school's "marauding narcissistic sluts" hadn't followed the toxic example of movie stars and the Spears sisters, wrote some bloggers, who longed for the return of the scarlet letter.