Inside Edition has caught up with one of the 18 teens and gets a definitive answer on whether there was even a pact to begin with.
A young girl has no clue she was at the center of a national uproar before she was even born.
Carly is one of the kids born out of the so-called “pregnancy pact,” the purported scandal that shocked the nation when it was reported that 18 high school girls in Gloucester, Mass., were all pregnant at the same time back in 2008.
Nearly a decade later, questions remain about whether or not there was a pact to begin with.
Brianne Mackey was just 16 when she found out she was pregnant with Carly.
“I took a test — I didn't tell anybody right away," she recalled to Inside Edition. "But after a day or two, I told my mom."
At the time, she was a junior at Gloucester High School. She later gave birth to Carly, who is now 9 years old and in the 4th grade.
Mackey said her senior year of high school was “very stressful."
The scandal erupted after a school official told Time magazine in June 2008 that the students had made "a pregnancy pact.” From there, heaps of unwanted attention piled on the small fishing town.
Nearly a decade later, the community remains haunted by it.
One resident said the story was like a black eye for Gloucester, telling Inside Edition, "Is this what we really want to be known for?"
Mackey, however, insists there was no pact.
"It was no, 'Hey, let's do this together,'" she said. "As far as I know, none of the girls who got pregnant were even friends."
That said, the 18 girls at the same high school did get pregnant in the same year.
Some blamed pop culture. After all, unwed teen mothers like Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin were in the news, and Juno, a film about a pregnant high school student, was nominated for several Oscars at the 2008 Academy Awards.
As for Mackey, she ended up marrying her high school boyfriend, Michael. The two have since had another child but recently separated.
Mackey says she didn’t know any of the girls that got pregnant at the time.
"I think that people are always going to sadly think there was some type of pact or some type of thing going on," Mackey said.
Inside Edition reached out to the school official who told Time of the pregnancy pact, but he refused to comment on our story.
