Recently, Time magazine broke a stunning story about a suspected teen pregnancy pact in a high school in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Apparently, the alleged pact was discovered when a surge in girls seeking pregnancy tests at the high school's health clinic was noticed. The result was that in one school term, 17 girls, aged 16 and younger, were confirmed to be pregnant. School officials say this figure is four times the figure for pregnancies last year.

Puberty certainly bitch-slapped those girls, didn't it? And not in the good way, either.

I'm not too old to remember my teen years, those halcyon days of inchoate adolescent angst. I managed to circumnavigate the characteristic anger and surliness. I felt lucky. All I needed to do was get through high school without getting pregnant. Of course, I wasn't engaged in any hectic sexual activity to have warranted that kind of fear - I had my first serious kiss, the summer I was 16, in a darkened laundry room in a house in Florida - still, I was terrified. I was afraid of the maelstrom of emotion the kiss stirred within me - before our lips parted, I was already contemplating our future together along with our kids. I was walking a knife's edge, I thought, and hereafter, I could get pregnant on a dime. Maybe I just thought that God was going to visit punishment on me in the form of an unplanned pregnancy, in pretty much the same way he visited plagues on the Egyptians, for kissing my cousin, a boy who was a few years older than I. It was 1982, a time of innocence. Miami, our summer playground, was sweltering; the heat against our faces was as if from an oven, and we'd sit on the grass outside until two in the morning waiting for the jacked-up central air-conditioning inside to kick in. Quincy Jones' Ai No Corrida was blasting from every juke box (God, I still love that song!), and we ate ribs and steak dinners at Tony Roma's until we thought we'd puke. Then, as if that wasn't bad enough, that same summer, I'd also engaged in tawdry make-out sessions with one of my cousin's friends, a guy who was not just significantly older but quite possibly positioned on the wrong side of the law, and with whom I had no business swapping saliva.

Even though I knew that, technically, I hadn't done anything to worry about, I was nevertheless worried. All that kissing, up and down Dade County, had opened up a door in me. It was now just a matter of time before some guy would kick it down, walk in, then just walk right back out, leaving me with a baby. I had no resources to care for, and parents who would be crushed at the evidence of the failure of their parenting skills.

Fear was probably what saved my teenage hide.

Fear, however, is what is conspicuously absent from these teen girls at Gloucester High. These girls, upon receiving positive readings for their pregnancy tests, were going around high-fiving each other. Those whose tests came out negative wanted to throw themselves under a bus. The story, coming capriciously on the heels of teen actress (and sister of pop singer Britney Spears) Jamie Lynn Spears' delivery of a bouncing baby girl, caused a big sensation in the US last week, as it should. It is shocking to hear that a new trend may be developing where teens are romanticising teenage motherhood.

An article in last Sunday's Gleaner, titled 'Fewer Teenage Pregnancies,' meanwhile, has sought to reassure us that teen pregnancies in Jamaica are down. The latest statistics from the Registrar General apparently show that 8,021 teenage girls got pregnant in 2006, as against 8,568 in the previous year. Of course, no one knows if 2007 and 2008 have seen the 'trend' continuing or reversing. I can't see how a slight drop in the figures over one year can constitute a trend but.the hope is, nevertheless, that the figures are in fact going down. I don't know about you but I think 8,000 is still a ridiculously high figure for teenage pregnancies in a country as small as Jamaica.

Forget about appealing to teenagers' paranoia in order to reduce the figures, though. I don't know that teenagers today have that kind of moral inner compass that keeps them terrified of taking off their clothes in front of each other. (I realise it's a generalisation but I have no interest in qualifying it because I think it is the rule rather than the exception.) There is a frightening sang froid displayed by today's teens regarding matters of sex. This, despite the fact that there is actually now more to fear than simply teenage pregnancy, what with your aggressive sexually transmitted diseases and whatnot.

Having been a teenager myself I know this one thing: teenagers are sexual beings. Admittedly, this is hard for parents to hear. It's nevertheless horribly, excruciatingly, nauseatingly true. And you can quit bellyaching about abstinence. Like adults, teenagers desire the dark side of the moon. Teenage boys are the same horny, sperm-spewing little bastards they always were, and teenage girls are still inclined to sacrifice their virtue in order to be loved by a boy. That's just how it is, how it's always been. The difference these days is how far teens are willing to go to explore their nascent sexuality. The best a parent can hope for is for their teenagers to make responsible decisions despite the raging hormones; decisions about which they must be straightforward with their teenagers. In 1982, the very idea of anything beyond French kissing and maybe some minor exploratory frontal groping was unthinkable. In 1982, most of my girlfriends would have felt the same thing. We were guided by self-imposed boundaries that we knew we'd reached whenever we felt the stomach-churning sensation that we would identify as the point-of-no-return. At this point - and this point occurred approximately every few months for a 16-year-old girl as she constantly refined her idea of what Mr Right actually looked like - we'd know, most of us anyway, to stop. But that was a lifetime ago. Today, in an age marked for its over-the-top consumerist excesses, lack of boundaries and general bad examples we set for our children, the question health-care practitioners, guidance counsellors and parents need to ask is: why should teenagers be expected to practise restraint?

Trousers in Denim

Cream of the 'Crop'

Cheeky's World