The story really began at the monthly committee meeting at Gloucester High, a school in Massachusetts with 1,200 pupils. Around the table, along with the other business of the day — school food, parking, litter — someone raised the thorny issue of teenage pregnancy: “We really need to talk about the daycare centre. We’re licensed by the state to take seven children and we have 10 girls pregnant at the school right now...”

The reaction in the room was incendiary. The norm was maybe three or four unplanned pregnancies across the age groups per year. 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. The principal, Joseph Sullivan, announced that he believed there was “a clique who may have entered into a pact”. 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. 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.”

Gloucester, Massachusetts, is a blue-collar city, with pockets of wealth. Its waterfront is packed with art galleries and valuable properties, but its once thriving fishing industry has dwindled. Its citizens have racked their brains to try to understand why a teenage girl would view a positive pregnancy test as a cause for celebration. Some attribute it to geographic and social isolation — Gloucester sits on the southeast tip of Cape Ann — others to the fact that in this staunchly Catholic enclave, contraception is not easily available.

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.” 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.”

One resident, who runs a seafood company, remembers last year’s media storm as “a witch hunt”. “Everyone was trying to find these kids and root out their families and it really wasn’t nice for them.” While a few girls took up offers to appear on TV, most left journalists to speculate about their identities and the community closed in on its own. Patrick Anderson, who broke the story in the Gloucester Times, has been unable to make contact with the girls. What we do know is that out of the 18 reported pregnancies, 10 babies survive. There were two miscarriages, five pregnancies were terminated — at 33% in line with US national averages — and in October one baby, Brayden Silva, son of Alexis Silva, died at one month old. The remaining 10 girls still attend classes, seven babies filling the school day-care centre run by the social-service agency Pathways for Children, with three more looked after at the Pathways office a few hundred metres from the school.

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. 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.

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