OOPS!

Remember this story, from last week's Time magazine, "Pregnancy Boom at Gloucester High":

As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there's been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town. School officials started looking into the matter as early as October after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, "some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. "We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy," the principal says, shaking his head.

The story created a blogstorm of comment, and we confess to having been tempted to join in. But there was something about the story, despite its source in the increasingly irrelevant legacy media, that sounded fishy.

Turns out we were right. The Associated Press now reports:

GLOUCESTER, Mass. -- The Gloucester, Mass. principal who claimed that some of the 17 pregnant girls in his school had made a pact to become pregnant will not attend a meeting of city leaders on the subject.

Mayor Carolyn Kirk did not say why Principal Joseph Sullivan would not be at the meeting she called for Monday with other school, health and city leaders.

Kirk said she and the superintendent have been in close touch with the principal. She reiterated they had no independent information to back up his assertion that some of the 17 girls who became pregnant this year had planned to become pregnant and raise their babies together.

Sullivan has not returned calls for comment since a Time magazine article last week.

The moral of the story? Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.