Amanda was 13 when she conceived, which, OK, sounds bad, but, she points out, didn't used to be that abnormal way back in the day when a girl was married off the moment she hit puberty. Values have changed. Yes, it's “sad” that it happened when she was still so young and, yes, she was “heartbroken” when she broke the news to her boyfriend, the father, and he instantly turned into a person she didn't know at all - tried to persuade her to have an abortion in a sneakily manipulative kind of a way: “I don't want to lose you, Amanda. What if there are complications during the birth?” But despite both these things, and the prophecies of conservative doom and gloomers and the permanent state of exhaustion that motherhood tends to precipitate, pregnancy wasn't the end of the line for Amanda. Becoming a teenage parent didn't actually ruin her life.
In fact she is doing rather well. Just graduated from school, got a new boyfriend, got a place studying business administration this September, on course to set up her own bed-and-breakfast. She is just 18. Never been drunk at a high school party; she regrets that. Can't see the point of hanging around in shopping malls like other girls her age; having a baby makes you grow up so fast. Suddenly the preoccupations of your peers seem trivial.
Amanda lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a pleasant coastal town about 45 minutes northeast of Boston by car. Until last month Gloucester was most famous for being America's oldest seaport. The town is now populated by large Catholic families, blue-collar in parts, but not horribly deprived; traditional, but not averse to innovation. It is a proud and safe place with clean glorious beaches, a thriving artist community and enough bijoux shops and cafés to pacify the tourists from more upwardly mobile towns and the crop of millionaires who own properties in town. It is in many ways the perfect place to raise a child.
Which is fortunate considering what has happened to Gloucester's reputation in recent weeks. These days the town is best known as the centre of a mysterious teenage pregnancy epidemic. Particularly mysterious considering that this is Massachusetts, a Blue (Democrat) state, with the second-lowest teen pregnancy rate in the country. However, last month Time magazine claimed that 17 girls at Gloucester High School got it into their heads, sometime last year, to make a pact to get pregnant. They ranged in age from 14 to 16 and at least half of them have given birth by now. In an interview, Joseph Sullivan, Gloucester High's long-serving and well-liked principal, let slip that “we found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy”. Journalists from around the world immediately descended on a town they presumed to be swarming with baby-hungry teenage girls in search of unsuspecting sperm donors.
Clearly, there are facts in this tale that have been misrepresented or distorted. The “homeless guy”, for example, turns out to be a man who had recently moved to Gloucester and was not registered as a resident. The notion of a “pact” was also disputed by many of the young women I talked to, although it is not impossible that some of them retrospectively changed their stories once the TV crews pitched up and began chasing prams down Gloucester's tidy streets. Certainly not all of the girls knew each other and it seems likely that of the 17 (that figure has recently been updated to 18), only a handful became pregnant with intent. Still nobody know for sure and no one really has a clue about motives. Right-wingers blame liberals, income support for single mothers and the disintegration of society as a whole. Carolyn Kirk, the town's new Mayor and long-time Gloucester School committee member, blames George W. Bush for his No Child Left Behind programme, which diverted to academics money that should have been spent on sex education, now taught only until the age of 15. Christopher Farmer, the school's superintendent, blames the economy and a situation where parents working two jobs leave children lonely and needy at home. Joseph Sullivan blames the glamorisation and sexualisation of pregnancy, motherhood and young girls in the media: the film Juno and Britney Spears's 17-year-old sister, Jamie Lynn, whose pregnancy has been splashed all over American TV and magazines for months.
Brianne, 17, who was identified in the local paper as one of the “Gloucester teens”, told me that she conceived accidentally. She belongs to that group of young women who, through happenstance or negligence, make up the statistic which says that the clumsy or unreliable contraceptive techniques favoured by all teenagers will produce babies no matter what. Most years only between four and ten girls at Gloucester High become pregnant. Not 18. The question everyone is trying to answer is whether there was more to this spike in the rate of teenage pregnancies than simple adolescent mistakes.
As the story broke around the world, four pregnant teenage Gloucester girls dutifully appeared on American network television, and all of them denied knowledge of a pact. It is now thought that the pact-makers were younger girls, with low to middling academic records, who have been protected from the media by their close-knit community. There are rumours that some of their children have been fathered by the same man, and even more outlandish claims that the man in question was fed Viagra to prepare him for his mission. But Gloucester citizens have closed ranks. Two British documentary crews returned from the town empty handed.
So what do we know? Between October last year and this May staff at Gloucester High's independent medical centre administered 150 pregnancy tests. In a school of 1,200 teenagers that is a huge amount - far more than clinical staff would expect. Often the same girl would return for repeat visits and, says Sullivan, leave crestfallen if the tests showed that she had not conceived.
By the end of last year Dr Brian Orr, the clinic's medical director, believed something was seriously amiss. He diagnosed “an epidemic of teen pregnancy at Gloucester school”. But in March he and his assistant Kim Daly resigned. Orr despaired of Northeast Health Systems, which owns the clinic in Gloucester School, for refusing to supply contraceptives because of supposed liability issues related to possible side-effects of birth-control pills, such as strokes. “The example they used was a stroked-out teen from birth-control pills. Would there be any liability to the hospital?” he said.
Whatever Northeast's motivation, Orr implied that the clinic was not giving out contraception to girls who would have benefited from it. Which is all very well as an explanation, except that according to school principal Joseph Sullivan these pregnancies weren't unwanted.
Unwanted or not, Brianne was in no doubt as to what to do when she found out she was pregnant. She was on the pill, she swears. Her boyfriend, Michael, is her first, a lobsterman, a boy who kept her out of all the trouble she was in when they met. She used to skip school, but now she knows the meaning of responsibility. She predicts they will be together for a long time. Michael's mother was 16 when she had her first. His grandmother, Claudette, was 18, but married. The problem is, says Claudette, “these girls don't keep their legs closed”.
In Gloucester, if the local news reports are to be believed, pregnancy is still the fault and responsibility of young women. Statutory rape is an issue, say the police, only if “someone comes in and makes a complaint”. Amanda isn't one of the Gloucester 18, but did attend Gloucester High and made use of the day-care centre, a crèche where her daughter was looked after while she completed her studies. Some journalists reported that it was the sight of young teenage mothers such as Amanda wheeling their children around school that inspired rose-tinted fantasies about motherhood among the younger girls. Amanda says this is unlikely. Babies are everywhere in Gloucester and the day-care centre has been open since the mid-1990s. Gloucester's teen birth rate declined by about 45 per cent from 1996 to 2006. Nationally, the birth rate for women aged 15 to 19 rose 3 per cent in 2006 - the first increase since 1991. All 18 of the students who were pregnant at Gloucester High completed the school year in 2007. Not one dropped out.
Thirteen is too early to have sex, says Amanda, although “it's a natural thing for two people to do”. God knows, she knew all about where babies came from, she just wasn't thinking. Besides, it was easier to have sex behind her parents' backs than buy condoms. Most teenagers would rather die than say “Hey Mom, I'm having sex, any advice?” Why do some girls start so young? Amanda doesn't know. “Maybe they are looking for affection?” she says. Which appears to vindicate the results of all the studies that correlate early sexual activity among girls with absent fathers.
So the facts surrounding the pregnant Gloucester teens are hazy and rather mysterious. But then, intriguingly, there's the wider story about the people supposedly keeping an eye on the Gloucester teens - health professionals, teachers and civil servants whose opposing views on teenagers, contraception, pregnancy, privacy and abortion have served only to complicate the facts further. A month since Time published its article, they are no closer to explaining the reasons for this pregnancy spike and continue to disagree about the facts surrounding the case. Behind closed doors many of them seem to be at war.
These include the Mayor, Carolyn Kirk, who attempted to throw cold water on the episode by calling a press conference from which Joseph Sullivan was barred. There was no pact, claimed Kirk. Sullivan was just incapable of remembering, or verifying, the statements he made in Time. “When we pressed him for details about who told him...his memory failed,” she said. But Kirk never did press Sullivan for details. She hasn't talked to him at all.
In a carefully worded statement released by Sullivan through his lawyer, he denied accusations of a “foggy memory”. He did not remember using the word pact, but “my understanding was that a number of the pregnancies were intentional and that the students within this group were friendly with each other”. Sullivan hasn't spoken publicly since. Kirk then moved to silence everybody else involved in the matter by launching an investigation into whether information about the number of pregnant teenagers handed over to the press constituted a violation of students' privacy. It didn't. In a televised committee meeting, Kirk then lightly berated school superintendent Christopher Farmer for having failed to inform the school committee of the situation. But the committee had been informed, in the autumn. Kirk was away campaigning to be Mayor at the time. While the committee and the school dithered over how to deal with the situation, a group of girls were apparently still trying their best to get pregnant. Parents do not seem to have been informed until several months after the school had picked up on the situation.
Education is the great equaliser in America, the stuff on which its middle-class movement is built. To get pregnant in your teens usually means foregoing all that - the Gloucester girls are “ruining their lives”, many columnists lamented.
Few Gloucester teenage mothers see it quite that way. They can continue with their studies, many have an extended family network to help with the baby, some never intended to go to college anyway and look what happens to the women who put child-rearing to one side to pursue careers: they leave it too late for children. “I'd rather be me than her,” says one 16-year-old mother-to-be to whom I spoke. Yes, she was scared when she found out, but she won't be pitied.
So was there a pact or not? My own view, having spent time talking to people in Gloucester, is that there was a knot of girls who made a pact to get pregnant, but they account for only a minority of the 18 pregnancies. It's possible that the mystery goes no further than that - the rest were part of the normal run of teenage pregnancies in any given year at a school this size. What we do know is that American teenagers are getting very conflicting messages about motherhood and sexuality.
In 1991 Demi Moore posed for the cover of Vanity Fair pregnant and naked and caused such controversy that some newsagents refused to sell the magazine. The public were confused as to whether the picture sexually objectified pregnancy or empowered Moore, but eventually gave up caring. Since then Gwyneth Paltrow and Christina Aguilera have featured in similar cover shots, and Britney Spears killed two birds with one stone when she unveiled a new hairstyle and her new baby bump on the cover of Harper's Bazaar in 2006.
Young girls, pregnant women and celebrity motherhood are more heavily sexualised in the media than ever and young women in Gloucester told me that they felt that the TV and magazines, not boys, were most likely to make them feel inadequately sexually experienced. The media furore surrounding the events in Gloucester seem merely to reflect that confusion.
I unfortunately know a lot about the topic of teen pregnancy. I had my first child when i was only 15 years old. I came from a baptist family, that put a great deal of value in education. After a great deal of reading about adoption due the the insistence of my parents, I chose to keep my son.
Michele, Erlanger, US
That's not fair ( to the comment below).
Rates of everything are rising, pregnancys and knife crimes, etc.
Anna, Glastonbury,
Who cares? All these people blaming various people; is it that horrific that some teenagers became pregnant? As has been said it's certainly not a new thing, and even if it were is it bad? Teenagers have sex. Always have always will. And they won't adhere to laws telling them not to do so.
John, London, UK