Drinking, smoking, manipulation and naïve parenting is everything I got out of the recently shown Lifetime movie, “The Pregnancy Pact.”
This movie was inspired by a series of news stories about the increase in teen pregnancy in June 2008, with a fictional backdrop of the pregnancy pact. The pact was formed by a group of high school girls who decide they want to become pregnant together so their kids will grow up together and become best friends. As the movie continues, Sidney Bloom (Thora Birch), an online magazine journalist catches drift of this pregnancy outburst at her old high school and goes back to investigate. You later find out that Sidney was also pregnant in high school, but she put her child up for adoption after lying to her then boyfriend, and deciding that it wasn’t the life she wanted for herself.
Sidney and the school nurse are the only two people that seem to notice the problem in this town.
Due to the small-town life these people live, the thought of condoms or sex education in schools is mortifying. They ignore the fact that a group of 18 girls get pregnant together in order to keep their boyfriends. These girls think that this is all they need in life. They want to have babies and get married.
From reading the summary of the film, you would think this movie would be educational and even teach girls how to adjust their lives after having a baby.
To your average intelligent movie watcher, this is an absolutely illusory idea and is not something women actually do, but there is a young teenage girl watching the movie and thinking about how cool it would be for her and her friends to have babies at the same time.
Throughout the movie, the girls are seen smoking, drinking, and telling each other how excited they are about their children being friends forever.
In one scene, a girl gets so intoxicated that she has to be hospitalized, and the real issue of whether the baby will have defects from the alcohol and smoke intake is only briefly touched on.
The fact that she was clearly immature enough to drink and smoke during her pregnancy was also never spoken about. This is the bigger issue.
These girls didn’t have a single understanding as to why they should not have started this pact and how they were trapping themselves and their boyfriends by doing so. While still being kids themselves, they were not thinking of the big picture. They painted themselves this life with a happy ending and a boyfriend that would stay.
The families of these girls were disregarding the idea of a pact and often times blaming the girls’ boyfriends on the girls getting pregnant. The issue of sex education and options of future plans after high school were not mentioned once during the movie. The option of adoption was never a thought in these girls’ minds.
This all goes back to age and maturity. When you are in high school and your biggest worry is if your jeans are dark enough for your shirt, you are not ready to think about pregnancy. If you are not educated on it, the problem only gets bigger, and false hopes are created about the life you think you will have.
“The Pregnancy Pact” seemed like a good idea, and I can see that the idea of education was there, but it didn’t happen. You can’t make a movie about a serious issue this light hearted, because you will never get your point across.
The maturity of the girls in this movie was pretty accurate to the maturity of girls in high school today, and if the trend of young pregnancy is gong to make another debut, the least we can do is educate and give options.
Encouragement of a college education, the options of adoption and practicing safe sex if you’re going to have it, are all things that schools can do. Then, if girls are still getting pregnant, then they are least educated.
The idea that this is a family problem, which was also mentioned in the movie is why this was a problem in 2008, and why it continues to be a problem in 2010.
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