Word: pregnant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...wonder if the critics would be so quick to condemn if they viewed the story another way. There is certainly troubling anecdotal evidence that some of the girls set out to get pregnant together. But other girls talk about a different kind of resolution. What if the "problem" in evidence at Gloucester High has more to do with the rejection of abortion than the acceptance of teen pregnancy...
...many students give birth each year, but--especially in a heavily Catholic town like Gloucester--it is impossible to know how many pregnancies are terminated. Birthrates are not the same as pregnancy rates, and the national trends in both tell an interesting story. While 750,000 teens become pregnant every year, that is the lowest level in 30 years, according to the Guttmacher Institute, down 36% from a peak in 1990. Abortion rates have fallen even faster; since the late 1980s, the abortion rate for girls ages 15 to 17 has fallen 55%, and this year the overall U.S. abortion...
...students give birth in a given year, but it is impossible to know how many pregnancies are terminated - especially in a heavily Catholic town like Gloucester. Birthrates are not the same as pregnancy rates, and the national trends for both tell an interesting story. While 750,000 teens become pregnant every year, that number is at its lowest level in 30 years, according to the Guttmacher Institute, down 36% from a peak in 1990. This does not suggest that we are witnessing a mass moral collapse, especially since abortion rates have fallen even faster. According to the Centers for Disease...
...Which brings us back to Gloucester. What if the visible leap in pregnancies is part of a different trend: kids aren't necessarily having more sex or more girls aren't getting pregnant, but more of those who do are deciding to keep the baby rather than abort it. In Oliver's case, she was on the Pill and the pregnancy was unintended. She made her own "pact" with friends, she said, after they were already pregnant, so they could help one another get through it together. She and her boyfriend, a 20-year-old community college student, talked about...