It matters little if some or even all of the 17 high school girls in Gloucester, Mass., who got pregnant in the past school year made a pact to have babies. That many pregnancies in a single year in a school of only about 1,200 students is startling in itself.

Part of being a teenager is the propensity to make unwise personal choices. In a perfect world, this tendency is balanced by the desire of parents to protect their young from harm, creating a tug-of-war that results in young adults who both survive teenage-hood and achieve independence.

Gloucester, a fishing town that's home to 30,000 overwhelmingly white, working-class folks, is, at least this year, not that perfect world. The result has been a re-examination of the school's sex-education policies. One startling comment came from a Gloucester High student, not one of the expectant teens, to a Boston TV station. "I mean it's their decisions," she said, "whatever they want to do."

Really? Time magazine reported that none of the mothers-to-be is older than 16, hardly old enough to grasp the ramifications of their choice.

Only 63 percent of mothers 18 years old or younger finish high school, and only 5 percent complete even two years of college before the age of 30. They'll earn far less money than if they had a high school diploma or college degree. And the fathers probably won't take care of them because teen moms are less likely to get married. That makes teen moms more likely to live below the poverty line.

And the babies? Compared to the children of women who wait until their 20s to get pregnant, their babies will tend to have a lower birth weight and suffer other health problems, do less well in school, have more behavioral problems and be more likely to drop out and become a teen parent themselves.

Community leaders in Gloucester will spend months arguing over why this happened and what to do to prevent a recurrence. The bottom line is that unless teenagers actually hear the message -- and remember it in the heat of passion -- other Gloucesters are around the corner.