The Pregnancy Pact

2010 "Teen pregnancy isn't always unplanned."
4.8| 1h27m| en| More Info
Released: 23 January 2010 Released
Producted By: Lifetime
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
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Synopsis

Inspired by the true story of teenagers at Gloucester High School who agreed to get pregnant at the same time.

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Reviews

Kattiera Nana I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.
SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie
Executscan Expected more
ShangLuda Admirable film.
novamarkseattle Can anyone understand the mind of a teenager? Why don't teenagers better understand consequences, and why are so many in such a hurry to grow up? These questions burn in the mind of every parent of a certain age, and this movie, short of providing concrete answers, is one of the best treatments I've seen on the subject. Many movies ask the audience to accept extraordinary circumstances: a flying elephant, for example. Screen writers call this "suspension of disbelief," and are careful not to exceed the ability of the audience to wrap their mind around a premise. This movie is more difficult than others because the premise hits very close to home; it invites challenge. Did four teenage girls in Gloucester, Massachusetts intentionally try to get pregnant? We'd like to think not, but the possibility makes an excellent theme for a movie, and the writers leapt at it, taking full advantage of this opportunity to give full treatment to the important subject of teenage pregnancy. The temptation will be to view the teenage characters through a rational perspective and dismiss the movie as being just as stupid. Yes, the main characters were stupid, but there's much more to it than that. You will enjoy the movie much more if you exercise your empathy skills and try to identify with the characters. The writers made it easy to do so; my compliments to them. The result was both clinical and artful. And while the movie, at times, lacked drama and emotion, I was able to identify with the main character, which is an accomplishment in and of itself. The other components of the movie were satisfactory. The plot was sufficiently unpredictable, and the ending did not disappoint. After watching this movie, you will have learned the most important lesson in parenting: Children are born without knowledge. Parents (and in my opinion, teachers, too) must explain things over and over again in a variety of ways and in a variety of voices. What works for one kid, may not work for another. The important thing is to keep trying and don't just assume that the child gets it.
Robert J. Maxwell 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.
celestial_princess With all the hype, I was hoping that "The Pregnancy Pact" would finally be able to put a realistic spin on the seriousness of teen pregnancy. I can give it credit for almost succeeding.It starts out well enough. The school nurse (Camryn Manheim) has administered over 150 pregnancy tests during the school year, with 18 positive results. Her answer is to administer contraceptives, but head of the church committee Lorraine Dougan (Nancy Travis) says that contraceptives at school only encourages sex. Little does Lorraine know that her teenage daughter Sara has agreed to be a part of a 'pregnancy pact': She and her friends agree to become pregnant deliberately when their friend Rose becomes pregnant on accident 'so that our babies can grow up together'. Before long, a young reporter named Sidney (Thora Birch) returns to her hometown to get the scoop on the pregnancy spike. Then, we find out that Sidney has a skeleton in her closet, as well.It's not that this movie is that bad, but it isn't great. The cluelessness of the teenagers is accurate, and so is Mrs. Dougan's optimism that her daughter would never get herself into such a predicament. Thora Birch's Sidney is a welcome breath of fresh air as the enterprising reporter who reveals the ignorance of these girls and the importance of 'choice'. The fact that this movie dared to touch on the option of abortion was what I thought made this movie different, because whether you're pro-life or pro-choice, abortion is just as open an option as keeping the child or putting the child up for adoption.What brought this movie down was that it copped out halfway through on everything that could have made it stand out. By the second half, when the truth finally comes out, it becomes very predictable: Sara's relationships with her parents and boyfriend hits the skids; the town is scandalized; Rose, the 'bad girl' who hatched this crazy scheme, gives birth to a sick baby; Sara drinks herself into a near-coma after her boyfriend Jesse says he wants nothing to do with a 'liar' like her; and Sidney reveals to her boyfriend and the world that what he thought happened all those years ago with them, didn't. The closing shots (Rose and Sara as teenage mothers...they didn't include the fates of the other participants of the pact) were what irritated me most. Even though the voice-over from Sidney was about the difficulty of choices to be made and the rigors of teenage motherhood, the message on the screen seemed to be "Bad girls get bad babies; good girls get good babies", and that is at best misleading since even people who follow the baby books to the letter get babies with problems. See it if you must, but don't expect any Emmy-nominations for this one.
sally jessy 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.