In 2008, a media firestorm showcases the rash of teenage pregnancies in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Three months before, internet blogger Sidney Bloom (Thora Birch) returns to her high school alma mater to report on a suspected story on teen pregnancies. Everybody is ignoring the situation except nurse Kim Daly (Camryn Manheim). She is powerless to institute changes. Lorraine Dougan (Nancy Travis) leads the conservative locals and her daughter Sara has been trying to get pregnant to fit in with her friends.The story is ripped from the headlines. It's one of those Lifetime movies but I rather they fictionalize the whole thing to add more drama. Some of these girls are good actors but the characters are too annoying. The story has too many elements of a bad movie-of-the-week. There could be an interesting movie from this material. I like some actors but they don't add up to a great movie.

In voices steeped with shock, CNN's Anderson Cooper and some less-famous newsreaders report on a story involving high school girls who made a pact to get pregnant at the same time. The opening reveals, "This film is the story of a fictional 'pregnancy pact' set against actual news reports from June 2008, and although some of the locations and public figures are real, any resemblance to actual persons is purely coincidental." The young women have sex because they think raising babies at the same time will be fun. They want to dress them in cute little matching outfits and go to the park...Gloucester, MA graduate Thora Birch (as Sidney Bloom) hears about the rise in pregnancy at her old high school. She's a professional video blogger and decides the spiking pregnancy rate will be a good Internet story. Arriving home with a secret past, Ms. Birch befriends pretty 15-year-old Madisen Beaty (as Sara Dougan). The red-haired teenager decides to bag (okay, no bag) cute basketball player Max Ehrich (as Jesse Moretti)..."The Pregnancy Pact" is probably good in bringing topics up for discussion among young students and, hopefully, some trusted adults. As a story, it doesn't hold up well. It's difficult to believe events unfolded as they did on screen. We wonder, even though Mr. Ehrich appears mature for his age, how a 16-year-old has continued success with the withdrawal method. Their high school has "day care" for students' babies, but nobody seems to know much about how they got there. The leader of the group exclaims, "It hurts!" and doesn't even know what the word "pact" means...From the opening, the high school looks too sexy and unsupervised to be a special school. Birth control can be more than abstinence, condoms and the withdrawal method. The birth control pill would have given the girl's pan to "get pregnant" more credence. She's not responsible for the "gift from God," if he's the one deciding to "pull out." It doesn't make sense. However, since she lied about the pact, the basic story still works.***** The Pregnancy Pact (1/23/10) Rosemary Rodriguez ~ Madisen Beaty, Thora Birch, Jesse Moretti, David Clayton Rogers

What I expected from this LMN movie was a soap opera in which a happy family's daughter turns up unexpectedly pregnant. The scenario then calls for the husband to go ballistic, the teen-aged daughter to be buried under a mountain of contingencies, and the mother -- after overcoming her initial shock -- to straighten things out. It wouldn't have been a surprise if the baby's father had been a psychopath who left her behind to deal dope out West, but then there would have been the shy, studious, not unhandsome class brain who has always loved her from afar. The nerd would replace the delinquent in the daughter's affections and the future would begin to look pretty rosy overall.I'm reluctant to spin out more of this formulaic crap without a paycheck.Instead, although I caught this in only bits and pieces, I have to say it was rather better than that. It's roughly based on a real story of a pact among teen-aged girls in pretty little Gloucester, Massachusetts. All agree to get pregnant early in their teens so they can stay together, buy their babies matching outfits, and live comfortably with the fathers after they graduate.A young woman who makes a living by being a blogger (can you do that?) comes to investigate and finds much of the community complacent and in denial. The school nurse wants to introduce sex education and distribute condoms. Nancy Travis is the mother of a virginal teen and she's against sex education and all that filthy stuff for the same reason some of our legislators and governors oppose it -- it's like giving the kids a license to have sex. Some of us oppose the distribution of condoms in third-world countries where AIDS is rampant for similar reasons. Gee, if you give them condoms, they'll have sex! Nancy Travis bumps up against reality when her daughter becomes pregnant. At that point, the movie begins to examine the genuine difficulties attendant upon teen pregnancies. First, the kids are living in a kind of fantasy world in which a baby is a wind-up toy that loves you no matter what. The reality is that having a dependent child is more like attaching one of those ball and chain devices that we see prisoners wearing in cartoons. Unless, that is, you want to drop out of school and cut off your future, or you happen to have a grandma into whose lap you can conveniently drop your offspring. The movie examines these problems in some detail, and realistically.The photography around Gloucester is well done. I've always liked Cape Anne so I may be prejudiced. The seasoned actors, including Travis and the school nurse, deliver the goods. The girls, for a change, look exactly like ordinary high school sophomores. They're not thirty-year-old gussied-up starlets. They're plain for the most part, just like the girls I went to high school with. Of course, in this case, they're all sleeping eagerly with their boy friends, which MY high school dates never did, the uptight prudes.On the minus side, the musical score belongs to the genre. Much of the acting is poor. The plot has disjunctions. (I still don't know how you make a living as a blogger.) And the direction is watery and pedestrian.These teens aren't stupid, but they're inexperienced and they're missing half the evolutionary problem. I'm an anthropologist and I have slight doubt that they're hard wired to produce babies. But pregnancy represents an extraordinary investment on their part. Each girl is born with all the eggs she's ever going to have, a bit more than 300, and each month presents her with a complicated question about fertilization. The answers she comes up with will affect the rest of her life, and that's what these girls don't understand.The boys have no such problem. Every ejaculation contains millions of sperm cells, any one of them capable of producing a child. They're even ORGANIZED. After fertilization, the left-out sperm from the donor seem to form a barrier against the advance of alien sperm, just in case there was more than one partner, as in a gang bang. A man can afford to be profligate with his sperm. A woman has to choose a mate who will care for her and for the offspring, preferably one who is strong, healthy, powerful, and rich. I'm not being cynical. Those are just the facts of life.Well, anyway, I applaud this production, not because it's a gripping emotional experience but because we seem desperately in need of a little enlightenment along the lines that it provides. After all, it was NOT just the soap opera it might have been.

This movie was insulting to women and men. The entire film blames the girls for getting pregnant throughout. The only thing that comes close to addressing the role that the boys had in this was when Jesse says, "I should have pulled out or bought condoms!" Well, duh. These girls did not get pregnant by themselves, and yet the film treats them that way. Its moralistic overtones were also over the top agonizingly bad. Honestly, we all know teen pregnancy is bad. There is no real depth in why these girls got pregnant, what the town was like to live in, where they saw their futures being, etc. The dialogue was unbelievable, the characters stereotyped and sad. The music was dire--it was as bad as Secret Life of the American Teenager--probably by the same person. It was painful to listen to. In all, an awful movie. I can't think of a single redeeming element to this film.