Sex, lies, and sensationalism

Truth absent from Gloucester-inspired ‘Pregnancy Pact’

January 22, 2010|Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff

As a document of fact, Lifetime’s “The Pregnancy Pact’’ is nothing but a gesture at a loose description of a supposition vaguely resembling the truth.

The movie, tomorrow night at 9, is “inspired by’’ the sensational 2008 Gloucester High School case. No one ever proved that any of the 17 students who were pregnant that year were participating in a pact. But the pact theory nonetheless took on a truthy life of its own in the press, and the theory fits together nicely with the dramatic needs of second-rate TV fiction. And so we have a group of girls on Lifetime absolutely swearing to get knocked up together, with footage of Gloucester all around them. Obviously, “The Pregnancy Pact’’ makes a more alluring movie title than “Mysterious Pregnancy Spike’’ - just as it was a more alluring media notion than ordinary teen pregnancy back in 2008.

The “Pregnancy Pact’’ concept also carries a buried allusion to the most scandalous event ever involving emotional New England girls, the Salem witch trials. What Lifetime TV producer worth his or her weight in female target-audience reports can resist that kind of fire?

So please don’t come to “The Pregnancy Pact’’ expecting accuracy, either in the specifics or in the general shape of the Gloucester story that made national headlines. Don’t let the movie’s use of real news footage - it’s Anderson Cooper talking about Gloucester! - mislead you. The vagaries surrounding principal Joseph Sullivan’s comments to Time magazine about a pact, the internal politics at Gloucester High once the Time story broke, and the ultimate determination that the pact was hooey - they’re all fudged.

That’s what disclaimers like the one at the beginning of “Pregnancy Pact’’ are selling: Free fudge.

Don’t come expecting a very engaging or enlightening piece of entertainment, either. As a story of sex, girls in need of attention, and the contraception-abstinence debate, “The Pregnancy Pact’’ is pretty shallow. The script, by Teena Booth and Pam Davis, offers no more insight into the emotional reasons teens get pregnant than you might find in a waiting-room leaflet. The possible motivations are given a quick nod - to emulate Jamie Lynn Spears, because no birth control was available at school, because day care was available at school, because she wanted unconditional love.

But none of these ideas is teased out as the movie tumbles forward, straining to make the obvious point that teen pregnancy is no holiday.