{"id":1372,"date":"2008-06-20T07:25:31","date_gmt":"2008-06-20T11:25:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1372"},"modified":"2008-06-20T07:25:31","modified_gmt":"2008-06-20T11:25:31","slug":"fears-of-gloucester","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1372","title":{"rendered":"Fears of Gloucester"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not the one in King Lear, but the one in Massachusetts. The story circulating about the high number of teen pregnancies<\/a> this year is not new: the Boston Globe reported on it June 6<\/a>. What is new is Time magazine’s claim on Wednesday<\/a> that the pregnancies are the result of a pact among several of the girls to become pregnant, or so says the principal, Joseph Sullivan. The story has spread, with the Boston Herald interviewing<\/a> two teen mothers in Gloucester who criticize the alleged pact. But even Time<\/i>‘s report is old: the Gloucester Times reported an earlier version of Sullivan’s claim<\/a> in March. But the claim in March was different: “According to his conversations with upperclassmen, some younger students may be becoming pregnant on purpose.” Then, this week, it became, “All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together.” <\/p>\n

I will admit I’m skeptical of these claims. Neither Time<\/i>‘s reporter nor anyone else has been able to confirm Sullivan’s claim with any of the families, and something about this claim seems out of a bad B movie: “We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy,” Sullivan is quoted as saying. That doesn’t mean that the story is false, but that is the type of extraordinary claim that we’d expect a little more than a single person’s assertion to back up. <\/p>\n

There is sure to be a wave of media attention on this, beyond the first few days, with questions about whether Juno<\/i> glamorized teen pregnancy, whether abstinence-only education is the problem, and so forth. When fears of teen behavior are the focus, every anecdote becomes metonymy. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not the one in King Lear, but the one in Massachusetts. The story circulating about the high number of teen pregnancies this year is not new: the Boston Globe reported on it June 6. What is new is Time magazine’s claim on Wednesday that the pregnancies are the result of a pact among several of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-m8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}