The reaction to reports of a pregnancy pact among teens in the US shows how little adults understand them, writes Ann Marie Hourinhane.
YOU HAVE to admire teenagers. Miserable conservatives that most of them are, they bring an ingenuity to upsetting their parents that never fails to impress. It is reported that at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts, 17 girls, not one of whom is over the age of 16, are pregnant. The families of the girls have refused to comment, even though, God help them, the matter has been written about in Timemagazine. But the school authorities smell a teenage plot. They think the girls arranged to conceive at the same time; that they made a pregnancy pact.
No one knows why the girls should make a pregnancy pact. It is another teenage mystery, with all the hallmarks of an urban myth. It may not even be true. But teenage culture is at once so intense, so monotonous to the outsider and also so extreme, that the rest of us believe teenagers to be capable of just about anything, except driving safely and doing their homework.
Perhaps one of the girls became pregnant by accident and the others decided to show solidarity with her. Perhaps it suddenly occurred to them that babies are cute. Perhaps they were influenced by the 17-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears, Britney's younger sister and star of the children's television series Zoey 101, who gave birth to a girl last week.
In any case Gloucester is a Catholic town, and there were objections when the school nurse - alerted by so many requests for pregnancy tests, and the alacrity with which the positive results were greeted - proposed distributing contraceptives. Sex education was not a priority at Gloucester High. And nor, a cynical old grown up might suggest, were the greatest prophylactics against teenage pregnancy: female optimism and self-esteem.
The story of Gloucester High School pregnancies, if it turns out that the girls really did act as a group in order to conceive at the same time, sounds like the premise of a Stephen King novel. The shocking aspect of it is not teenage pregnancy, which is after all rather common, but the Neanderthal focus on the social group.
As adults we like to present sex as safely locked behind the front door of our firmly individual houses, and here are a group of teenage girls showing us that sex is as social as food around the campfire at the mouth of the cave. And the adult commentators on the Gloucester case aren't any better than they should be either. They have a tribal explanation: Gloucester's fishing industry, like fishing industries in a lot of places, is in steep decline. This economic uncertainty, the grown-ups say, could be one of the reasons for all these young girls deciding to get pregnant. Uh oh.
Jamie Lynn Spears, in contrast, is an economist's dream. She started working when she was 10 years old, watched by adoring girls aged between nine and 14. With this type of career history who can blame her for deciding it was time for a bit of maternity leave, just as she reached the age at which her grandmother got married? It was, apart from the couple's photo deal with OK! magazine, a private matter.
If the pregnancy pact turns out to be real then the Gloucester High School girls have, for whatever the reason, brought collective action to a new, or perhaps very old, level. You have to give them 10 out of 10 for their efficiency.
The teenage talent for co-ordination is the stuff of adult nightmares. In the UK there has been consternation over the outbreak of suicides that have occurred near Bridgend in Wales, and there were similar clusters in Northern Ireland, in Ardoyne and Co Armagh, not so long ago. Of course pregnancies and suicide are not comparable catastrophes; although if you listened to the parents of teenage girls you might be forgiven for thinking they were. One Gloucester adult responded to the rumoured pregnancies by saying, "Their whole life is over." This is an example of adults sulking. Not everything teenagers do is tragic. It just comes as a big surprise to grown ups, and often ruins their plans.
Presumably the teenage talent for acting as a group comes down to us from the time when the youngest, fittest and most fertile members of the tribe had to defend the rest of us; or maybe that should read from the rest of us. And whole empires have been built on teenage ruthlessness and daring, as young soldiers willingly ran in to battle before their capacity for rational thought had had time to kick in.
This all sounds very anti-teenager. The great teenage reserves of energy and of compassion should not be ignored as terrified adults cower before the teenage ability to take mind-boggling risks with their own lives. The fact of the matter is that now that we've stopped marrying them off or sending them out to work at 14 we just don't know what to do with our teenagers. Physically they are adult, emotionally they are something else. We spend a lot of our own energy screaming at them not to drive fast or get pregnant, without ever really providing them with another interesting outlet for all that curiosity and good will; after all, they can't spend all their leisure time shopping.