Way to disappoint, Time.
Pregnancy pact aside though, there might be an interesting story behind why suburban high school kids choose to have babies in the first place.
When I was in high school, it happened a lot. And the closer we got to graduation, the more pregnancies there were. I used to joke that babies had become some kind of contagion: touch a boy? Oop! You're pregnant.
Having a baby felt like a Next Step, a path that came to us so we wouldn't have to stare into some gaping void and ask, "What do I do now?"
I'd say it betrays a problem in how we perceive the future in general. The country demands that kids go to school for at least twelve years. What next? Nudged forward by their parents, a lot of kids decide to go to college.
After college, so many of us flail around confused because we've run out of prescribed steps: it's all you, alone with your decisions -- and the doors that slam behind you when you choose one thing at the expense of something else.
What if you're a kid out of high school who's not really thinking about college? Next logical step: find work, get engaged, make a baby, not necessarily in that order.
I got engaged. Oh yeah, and there was some college in there too.
Lucky for me I never got around to conceiving, because I probably would have been one of those "This is a sign, let's keep it!" girls. And I probably would have dropped out of Berkeley and moved in with my fiancé in Iowa.
Today I could have been standing barefoot in a corn field somewhere, waiting for homie to get home from blowing coke with his DS-Max chums, and watching little Alice and Tom play catch. Wouldn't that have been something.
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