Seeing What We Want To See....

The ‘Times’ has an intriguing little story about a high school in Massachusetts and it’s ‘unexplained’ rise in teenage pregnancies:

In March, 10 girls in the 10th grade were pregnant; by April, the figure had risen to 15. By June, as school broke for the summer, there were 18 pregnancies.

Which would be bad enough, but the principal decided that he could make this situation worse if he really, really tried:

The principal, Joseph Sullivan, announced that he believed there was “a clique who may have entered into a pact” .

And in the age of the prying media and Internet, that was like throwing petrol on a bonfire:

That extraordinary statement was picked up by Time magazine and the story went global.

Sullivan quickly went to ground, accepting neither visits nor calls as the world’s press gathered at the school gates. A feature of this saga is how quiet, then and now, the participants have been.

Few girls gave interviews and none admitted to the existence of any pact.

Because there was no pact, and the principal was making it up as he went along?

Hmm, where have we seen that sort of thing before?

But Ray Lamont, editor of the Gloucester Times, believes there may have been something in it. “It doesn’t really matter how you define it: it seemed clear a few girls who were friends had gotten together and tried to get pregnant at the same time. How they got the idea we don’t know. My feeling was that we needed to find out how they came to think it was not only okay to be pregnant at 15, but a good thing.”

How, exactly, does it ‘seem clear’? You don’t seem to have any evidence other than ‘it feels like a pact’. How are you any better than the idiot principal?

But, like Rorschach blots, the pressure groups can see their own personal bugbears in this incident:

Bill Albert, of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, blames Hollywood: last year, the Nickelodeon star Jamie Lynn Spears announced her surprise pregnancy at 16, and teen single motherhood was championed in the hit film Juno. “There’s no data that measures this sort of thing,” he says. “But you’d have to be naive to think that what goes on in celebrity culture doesn’t help shape the social script for teenagers.”

'We have no data, but it just must be true!' Why isn’t this chap in the ‘global warming’ industry…?

Patricia Quinn of the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy believes blaming celebrities is a “smokescreen” for communities that need to become more involved in the problem to solve it. “We’ve had to hold up a mirror and examine our community,” she says. “That’s never a bad thing.”

So, what examining of their society did they do? It doesn’t seem to be mentioned much in this article.

Principal Joseph Sullivan, always set against offering any kind of contraception in school, despite the school doctor reportedly having run more than 150 pregnancy tests last year, stepped down from his post to head a Roman Catholic elementary school in Wakefield, several miles away.

Hmmm, 150 pregnancy tests, eh? That’s a very big ‘pact’…

And in October, under a new principal, Bill Goodwin, the school committee voted unanimously for condoms and birth-control pills to be distributed, with parents’ consent, to all students.

I wonder if that will have the desired effect, or if it will make no difference?

After all, they are pretty widely available here, with very little difference to the teen pregnancy rates. I guess time will tell…