This story, concerning a supposed pact between a group of US teenage girls, is interesting, far less for the scurrilous details (they used the same 24-year-old homeless guy! We blame Juno!), than for the conditions of the pact. This was not merely a bid to individually break the boredom of adolescence, but a desire to raise the babies 'collectively'. Aside from any supposed moral repugnance at such a project, this isn't actually such a stupid idea. If you're going to have kids, you must as well have them young, and you might as well divide up the labour. What's the point of individually washing 1 sick-covered baby outfit when you could wash 20 at once? And the madness of the nuclear-family-sleep-pattern-broken-by-baby. My Ma still can't sleep well, and she had her last kid more than quarter of a century ago. How much better it would be if one took it in turns to get some kip.

When girls at my school started getting pregnant, at 14 and 15, the reasons they gave themselves were almost all universally heart-breaking: 'I want someone to love me', 'but I love [the father]', 'school is boring'. If you were middle class, you had an abortion; if you were working class you kept it, in some kind of Dickensian mixture of Tiny Tim-humanism and pre-destroyed aspiration. But there is a moral/biological paradox here: physically it makes much more sense to have a kid when you are still relatively fit. 30/40-something mothers with decades of boozing, dieting and stress may be better placed financially, but they sure as hell aren't as able to bounce back from weeks of sleeplessness like a 15-year-old netball playing girl would be. But no nice middle class parent is going to put university on hold for the kid of their kid. Just as the school superintendent said of the girls in the pact: "They are young white women. We understand that some of them were together talking about being pregnant and that being a positive thing for them." The horror! But, but...they're white!...And they want to do it! It's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the death of the nuclear family...

UPDATE: Bill sent a link to this 1989 Toni Morrison interview which includes the following very interesting exchange:

'Q. This leads to the problem of the depressingly large number of single-parent households and the crisis in unwed teenage pregnancies. Do you see a way out of that set of worsening circumstances and statistics?

A. Well, neither of those things seems to me a debility. I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.

Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community -- everybody -- to raise a child. The notion that the head is the one who brings in the most money is a patriarchal notion, that a woman -- and I have raised two children, alone -- is somehow lesser than a male head. Or that I am incomplete without the male. This is not true. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why we are hanging onto it, I don't know. It isolates people into little units -- people need a larger unit.

Q. And teenage pregnancies?

A. Everybody's grandmother was a teenager when they got pregnant. Whether they were 15 or 16, they ran a house, a farm, they went to work, they raised their children.

Q. But everybody's grandmother didn't have the potential for living a different kind of life. These teenagers -- 16, 15 -- haven't had time to find out if they have special abilities, talents. They're babies having babies.

A. The child's not going to hurt them. Of course, it is absolutely time consuming. But who cares about the schedule? What is this business that you have to finish school at 18? They're not babies. We have decided that puberty extends to what -- 30? When do people stop being kids? The body is ready to have babies, that's why they are in a passion to do it. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.

Q. You don't feel that these girls will never know whether they could have been teachers, or whatever?

A. They can be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We have to help them become brain surgeons. That's my job. I want to take them all in my arms and say, ''Your baby is beautiful and so are you and, honey, you can do it. And when you want to be a brain surgeon, call me -- I will take care of your baby.'' That's the attitude you have to have about human life. But we don't want to pay for it.

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black -- or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about. We don't care whether they have babies or not.

Q. How do you break the cycle of poverty? You can't just hand out money.

A. Why not? Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich get it handed -- they inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network. That's shared bounty of class.'