When a 15-year-old at Gloucester HS in Massachusetts learned she was pregnant a few months ago, there were no tears.
Shown her positive pregnancy test, the girl said simply, “Sweet!”
And she rushed off to tell her classmates – 17 of whom are also pregnant, none of them older than 16.
The baby boom is the result of what the school principal described last week as a “pregnancy pact.”
“Some girls seemed more upset when they weren’t pregnant than when they were,” principal Joseph Sullivan said. “We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy.”
Local police have opened an investigation to determine the paternity of the babies.
At a 7-Eleven convenience store yesterday, 17-year-old Alexis Palazola, who is due next month, said she did not plan her pregnancy.
“It’s not something that I’m all excited about,” the expectant mom, in braces, told The Post. “It’s just something that just happened. And I’m going through with it.”
Said Joshua Medeiros, 17, as he lounged on a bench near a town beach, “When you live in Gloucester, there’s nothing else to do but have babies.”
The school is familiar with pregnant students. It offers child-care facilities for up to seven mothers. The program is already full for next year.
The spike in pregnancies has brought upheaval to a staunchly Catholic fishing town on Cape Ann in Massachusetts where there have been five times the number of teen pregnancies as last year.
Critics have questioned whether the school invites pregnancies by accommodating young mothers.
Others have cast scorn at the few sex-education classes and the lack of contraceptives distributed to sexually active students.
The school administered 150 pregnancy tests during the school year. Nurse practitioner Kim Daly said that by October, the number of positive results had reached the average for most years, according to reports. But the figure continued to climb.
Some teens immediately started baby-shower preparations.
Until the baby-mama bonanza, Gloucester was most famous for the book and movie “The Perfect Storm,” which chronicled a group of its fishermen on an ill-fated ship.
Now city schools superintendent Christopher Farmer is under siege as the media jumped on the story.
Unlike Farmer, many of the teens in the town seem unfazed by the alarming spike.
They’ve seen unexpected pregnancies glamorized in movies like “Juno” and “Knocked Up” and watched their idols sport a baby bump.
Britney Spears’ baby sister, Jamie Lynn, announced her pregnancy to her boyfriend in December. The “Zoey 101” star gave birth to a girl last week.
After 15 years of declines, national teen-pregnancy rates are spiking. A new study found that the number of teenagers who said they had used a condom the last time they had sex dropped from 63 percent to 61 percent.
For Gloucester HS student Alycia Mazzeo, being a mom at a young age is not what it’s knocked up to be.
“When I first found out, I didn’t know what to do. Mine wasn’t planned,” said Mazzeo, who gave birth to a girl last November.
“For me it was a jaw-opening experience It was really scary. A lot of my friends stopped talking to me.
“Now it’s like, ‘I’m pregnant. Let’s throw a party.’ ”