Teenage girls in Gloucester make pregnancy pact

Of course, the first words out of my mouth when I began reading this story were "where in the hell were these girls' parents?!" 

There's a stunning twist to the sudden rise in teen pregnancies at Gloucester High School. Seventeen students there are expecting and many of them became that way on purpose.

Time Magazine first reported that nearly half of the girls confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. None of them is older than 16.

Schools Superintendent Christopher Farmer told WBZ's Bill Shields Thursday the girls had "an agreement to get pregnant."

Farmer said these are generally "girls who lack self-esteem and have a lack of love in their life."

"The common threat is the lack of self-esteem and purpose in life, and a lack of a sense of direction," said Farmer. "Young women wanting and needing affection."

For God's sake what is going on in our families that these children, and that's what these girls are - children, can make an agreement like this, plan it, and go through with it without their parents knowledge? Well, considering one of the girls' friends said they all wanted to have babies so that they would have someone who loved them unconditionally shows that their parents didn't seem to have any interest in their daughters' lives or well being.

They want unconditional love, they should have gotten dogs.

And take a look at who one of the fathers is:

Sullivan told the magazine that the pact wasn't the only shocking incident.

"We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy," he told Time.

Cassy Fiano, one of my Wizbang blog colleagues is commenting as well on this, and she isn't buying the unconditional love excuse. She thinks it's more due to the media's and the Hollywood's glamourization of pregnancy:

The students are lacking love, so they decide they want to have a baby?  I call B.S. 

This is simply a bunch of girls who have no idea what they're getting into. They see movies like "Knocked Up" and "Juno". They see celebrities like Angelina Jolie, Jessica Alba, Ashlee Simpson, and Jamie Lynn Spears having babies out of wedlock. They're constantly being bombarded with sex from every direction and told by adults that it isn't a big deal, as long as they're "safe". Their parents are likely never there, absentee parents who don't pay enough attention to their daughters' lives and won't put their foot down, yet will always be their safety net.

All of these things combine, and what do we find? A group of sixteen-year-old girls with no comprehension of what they're doing to their lives or what the real world is like, who are so desperate to be adults that they're getting pregnant on purpose, one of them by a homeless man.

I understand her anger here; however, it's the parents' responsibility to teach these kids that the characters in movies and the Hollywood stars who are having kids are not the examples they should be following.  It's the parents' job to instill the kind of values in their children that would cause them to not want to be like Hollywood stars.