Successful teen pregnancy pact in Massachusetts

I believe these teenage girls just wanted attention and needed to feel important — they succeeded. My suspicion is that the outrageousness of this event is just a mirror of the outrageous lack of attention or love these girls experience on a daily basis. There seems to be an odd naivety among adults automatically assuming that teenage pregnancies are “accidents” or unwanted.

Days after a major news magazine uncovered a teen pregnancy pact at a Massachusetts high school, parents and school officials struggle to understand the reasons why the girls may have participated in the scheme — and what could have been done to avoid it.

What could be done to avoid it? Well, that depends on who is intervening and when that intervention takes place. From a school nurse’s perspective, I suppose force-feeding contraceptives would probably be the only strategy because clearly these girls wanted to get pregnant.

I have an old-fashioned solution: make girls earn their allowance (cell-phone, movie money, computer privileges, etc.) by baby-sitting their neighbor’s kids. That would be a great preventive measure.