The Child-Moms of Gloucester

The picturesque but declining fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, has become the dramatic focus of a national debate over teen pregnancy, with the claim and denial that a group of high school girls, all under 16, made a pact to get pregnant and raise their children together.

There are conflicting stories: Maybe the pact only involved just two of the girls. Or maybe the girls got pregnant unintentionally, and agreed to help each other stay in school and raise their children after they found out--that's what one of the girls told Good Morning America.

But there's no dispute that at least 17 girls got pregnant this year at the 1200-student school, compared with four (well, one report says five) last year.

Just about everyone agrees this is a bad thing, except possibly some of the girls, who reportedly celebrated the news of positive pregnancy tests with high fives.

Who or what is to blame? There's no agreement on that. Was it Juno? Jamie Lynn Spears? Catholic opposition to contraceptives? The day care center that is part of the high school's efforts to keep pregnant girls from dropping out? The sinking fishing industry?

But if the goal is to have fewer teen mothers, there are some hard facts that can help point the way:

First, the teen birth rate in the United States fell from 1991 when it was 62.1 per 1,000 girls, to 2005 when it was 40.5. That's a very big drop. In 2006, the most recent year for which the statistics have been compiled, the rate jumped three percent to 41.9. But it's still a lot lower than it used to be.

It's unclear whether 2006 was a short interruption in the decline, or a reversal. But these numbers suggest we're not looking at a new crisis. The Gloucester High School rate this year comes to roughly 30 per 1,000 girls, so they're still better than average. It's just that they used to be way below.

But what do these numbers really mean? Birth rates are reported per year, but a girl has more than one year as a teenager in which she can have a baby--she has seven, to be exact. Roughly a third of girls get pregnant before they're 20, and about a sixth give birth.

The teen birth rate is dramatically higher in the US than in Western Europe--roughly twice as high as in England, and eight times as high as in the Netherlands, for example. The abortion rate also higher here than in Europe--European girls just don't get pregnant as often. That may be because Europeans promote contraception among teens much more. Another factor may be Western Europe's philosophy sometimes called "solidarity," which results in less poverty. They have higher taxes and they use some of that money to lift people off the bottom. As a result, the child poverty rate is much higher in the United States than in most of Western Europe.

The fact that teen births are so rare in Europe suggests that we could do better here.

The current federal strategy focuses on abstinence-only sex education. In 2002, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a third of secondary schools were using this approach. But a carefully controlled study found that abstinence-only programs don't keep teens from having sex. (On the other hand, the study also disproved the theory that the moralizing tone of abstinence-only education could promote pregnancy by discouraging contraception. It turns out that abstinence-only education just doesn't have much effect on teen sexual behavior.)

What was shocking in Gloucester was not just the number but the report that girls got pregnant on purpose. That’s not as unusual as you might think—surveys suggest roughly one fifth of teenage girls may get pregnant on purpose. (But let’s hope that’s not true for girls under 16!)

Bottom line: Does the Gloucester incident, pact or no pact, reveal a sudden unraveling of the social fabric? No. Could we do a whole lot better in keeping teenage children from having children? Almost certainly, yes.