Officials at a Massachusetts school are investigating reports of a “pregnancy pact” after a huge spike in the number of teenage girls expecting babies. Time magazine reported that 17 girls at Gloucester High School in Gloucester, a largely Catholic fishing town of 30,000, are pregnant, four times as many as last year. Joseph Sullivan, the school’s headmaster, told the magazine that last autumn officials began noticing a large number of girls had started asking for pregnancy tests at the school clinic. The nation’s teenage pregnancy rate increased in 2006 for the first time in 14 years, according to the most recent figures from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Some blame the trend on films such as Juno and Knocked Up, arguably pro-pregnancy films that show young, unwed mothers, or celebrities such as Jamie Lynn Spears, the 17-year-old sister of Britney, who yesterday gave birth to a baby girl. One young mother and former student of Gloucester High, which has a free day care centre for children, said many of the now pregnant students approached her when she was expecting and said how lucky she was to have a baby. read more

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