The Pregnancy Pact Movie Review

Watch for yourself

Based on the remarkable true story of the ladies of Gloucester, MA, The Pregnancy Pact is Lifetime at its finest. Strong caricatures, weak one-dimensional reasoning, and the fat chick from Touched by an Angel to bring it all home.

I was mildly entertained by this film, mostly because I was trying to sort through the reasoning of each of the characters. What would drive someone to want a baby at 16? What would drive a mom to not let her kids know what condoms are? And why do these girls drink so damn much? To be honest, this is one of those movies where you can kind of group everyone into one of three characters- Grown-up, teenage boy who wants to bang chicks, and teenage girl.

Now of course, the story is loosely based on fact, as the Gloucester girls have stated that the fact that 18 of them got pregnant in about a year was just a coincidence, so I will put aside the facts for another article to more closely examine the merits of this TV movie. One glaring omission though- where was the hobo that fathered like 8 of these babies?

As it turns out, he was only homeless after his wife kicked him out of the house for knocking up too many high school girls, but Lifetime decided that the complexities of underage hobo relationships was too much for primetime, and kept the daddies as 17 year olds.

The parents are easy- they're Catholic, but they don't want to be 35 year old grandmas and grandpas. So they do everything wrong. They have a similar thought process to the guy working at the convenience store.

"If you buy a lot of condoms, are you a slut?"

"Probably."

This guy has another pearl of wisdom later:

"Who cares? It's not like all these glohos were gonna go to Harvard anyways."

And what is going on in the mind of a teenage boy, according to Lifetime?

Most of them wanted to go to college, play baseball, and bang chicks. These were the guys would did not react positively to the news of impending fatherhood. Quote of the film: "Damn, I should have pulled out every time!"

.

And then there are the guys who are little more supportive- their tune sounds kind of like, "fuck going to UMass, I'm gonna hang out in Glosta and go to Salem State!" These guys are the dumb ones.

In fact at the end of the movie, we see that some of these loyal boyfriends have moved on to baby-free girlfriends. Sad? No. Smart? Yes. As discussed in the birthing scene, one chick has to get 37 stitches. "Where?" one of the other pregnant girls asks. Yeah.... exactly.

These girls are astounding in their naivete. One of the great motivators is that a baby is a future. No need to go to college, I'm just going to hang out with my baby. My baby doesn't care that I go to school, she just likes food and attention. And if we all get pregnant at the same time, our babies will all get to grow up together, and then they can go to high school together. You think our parents had a pact too? But as one girl puts it, "Hey, Jesus' mom was 14, right?"

The school makes some great accommodations for these girls. They open a daycare at school, they have stroller racks outside of the classrooms, and many of the shots are peppered with the girls in the background pushing their babies around campus.

My favorite part is at the end of the year poolside kegger (a staple in Gloucester) where pregnant chicks are knocking back beers with the best of them. I gotta imagine the main reason you're not supposed to drink when you're pregnant is that it makes hangovers a lot worse. By the way, an instant way to kill the buzz at a Gloucester pool party is to say you don't want a baby.

There is a great turning point at the end though, when one teen mom decides to stop smoking cigarettes in front of her baby, showing that she is learning how to be a mother. Of course, a few minutes before, the baby's crying wakes up her brother. Mommy starts shouting at the baby to shut up, and he says, "Hey, don't yell at the baby. It's not her fault you don't know what you're doing. But shut it up so I can take a nap."

Watch for yourself

The movie was average, to be honest. About five shots were from Gloucester, and the rest looked like it was filmed in Boca Rotan.

Gloucester in real life

A great place to make babies

Hopefully, after this movie, we can all put this whole fiasco behind us, and let Gloucester go back to being famous for being the place where BGeezie attacked a 12 year old the movie theater, hoodlums iced a speed trap, and Borno threw the $5,000 lobster off the bridge. The Pregnancy Pact brings up some nice issues, but really paints these girls as dumb as rocks when it comes to having kids. However, it is one of the few movies where the happy ending is that the girl has a shshmortion.

But wouldn't this story have been the perfect sequel to The Babysitters' Club?