by Ximena Ramirez

Created on: June 27, 2008   Last Updated: July 05, 2008

Just one day before 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears welcomed a baby girl into the world, Time Magazine released a story of teen pregnancies that hit the media by storm. In a quite fishing town in Gloucester, MA, it surfaced that an alarming 17 girls in the same high school, none older than 16, were pregnant. Coincidence? Maybe not.

With a jump in teen pregnancies so large four times more than the previous year some officials immediately saw red flags, especially considering other suspicious behavior. It turns out that throughout the course of the year, an unusual number of students visited the school clinic, some on more than one occasion, to find out if they were pregnant. While you would expect students to nervously await their test results and breath a sigh of relief when they discovered they weren't pregnant, some girls seemed more upset by the negative news.

Why would so many of these girls intentionally seek motherhood at 16? After some probing, officials discovered that nearly half the girls had made a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Now, there's a twist.

As the story has unraveled since last week, reports have surfaced that a "pact" might not actually exist, but regardless of whether it does or doesn't something is very, very wrong with this picture.

For the first time in 14 years, the number of teen pregnancies in the U.S. has risen by 3%, according to a study by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. After a steep decline in the 1990s that then leveled off between 2001 2007 this rise is significant, especially considering our President's tactic to battle teen pregnancy.

Since 1997, abstinence-only programs have received over half a billion dollars in federal funds. Over half a billion dollars! And that's not all. In 2007, the Bush administration requested yet another sharp increase to $204 million and by 2009 $270 million. Yet, this huge investment in taxpayer funds has yielded a national teenage pregnancy epidemic, not the baby-proofing plan expected. That's probably because countless studies have shown that abstinence-only programs are not effective and young people who undergo these programs are actually less likely to use contraception and protect themselves when they have sex.

If there is any silver lining to the pregnancy outbreak in Gloucester, MA it's that perhaps this tragedy will be the impetus for real change in sex education. It's about time we reprioritize our methods for preventing teen pregnancy on a national scale. If not, Gloucester won't be the only baby booming city in the U.S.

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