Every year at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts, three or four girls get pregnant. But not this year. This year 17 did. When Time magazine alleged that some of the girls had a "pregnancy pact", reporters and cameramen from around the world descended on the fishing port. Whether the pact was a teenage dare or a practical arrangement by the girls to give each other moral support has been hotly debated. No one disputes, though, that many were delighted to discover they were pregnant. "Sweet!" one of them shouted in the school nurse's office. The school superintendent admitted: "They were not trying very hard not to get pregnant."

"Every child a wanted child" was the old slogan of the movement for birth control. But it is part of the folklore of feminism that no teenager ever wants a child. "Profoundly shocking," wrote the Gloucester Daily Times. "The idea of 15- and 16-year-old girls wanting to become pregnant, wanting to make such a life-altering choice so early in their lives - and others being 'disappointed', not relieved, when learning their pregnancy tests proved negative - is a notion that seems absolutely contrary to most of our psyches." This is untrue. Having babies at 16 is perfectly in line with our psyches, as a look at other cultures and our own history shows. What it is contrary to is our ideology. Pact or no, the Gloucester pregnancies are some kind of a rebellion.