Posted on 04/22/2011 5:53:46 PM PDT by CedarDave
Gaby Rodriguez would worry whenever anyone asked to touch her baby bump.
It wasn't because she felt shy or embarrassed. It was because the bulge -- fashioned from wire mesh and cotton quilt batting -- didn't actually contain a baby.
For the past 61/2 months -- the bulk of her senior year at Toppenish High School -- the 17-year-old A-student faked her own pregnancy.
Only a handful of people -- her mother, boyfriend and principal among them -- knew Gaby was pretending to be pregnant for her senior project, a culminating assignment required for graduation.
"At times, I just wanted to take it off and be done," she says. "I didn't want to go through this anymore."
But Gaby didn't give up the charade until Wednesday morning, when she revealed her secret during an emotional, all-school assembly.
The topic of her presentation: "Stereotypes, rumors and statistics."
"Teenagers tend to live in the shadows of these elements," she says.
Before taking off her fake baby belly in front of the entire student body, Gaby told her audience, "Many things were said about me. Many things traveled all the way back to me."
Then, she asked several students and teachers to read statements from 3x5 cards, quotes people actually said about her during the course of her experiment.
Her best friend, Saida Cortes, a 17-year-old senior who was sitting in the front row, read card No. 3: "Her attitude is changing, and it might be because of the baby or she was always this annoying and I never realized it."
It grew quiet in the gym as more and more quotes were read aloud. Then Gaby dropped her bomb: "I'm fighting against those stereotypes and rumors because the reality is I'm not pregnant."
(Excerpt) Read more at yakima-herald.com ...
Here is the video:
The comments at the article link and at the ABC video link are all over the map. Bottom line for most of us: Societal values have sunk so low that public acceptance of teen pregnancy is being pushed as normal. For parents, do what you can to educate teen and pre-teen girls (and boys too) that the consequences will affect them for the rest of their lives: Your childhood ends when you conceive and are faced with the reality of caring for the new life within you.
lesson:
it’s good to be a pregnant teen.
change society’s morals to allow for more unwed teen mothers
quality /s
Good God!!!
what happened to writing a paper or doing a little research online or at the library???!!!
( I can still see the little index cards with notes and references that I had for my senior project!ha).
What a horrible ‘prank’ to pull on everyone..who the h..l approved this ridiculous charade!!
Her mother, the school principal and the district superintendent.
I’m assuming that she got an A+ on her project.....
In reality this young woman stepped outside the hispanic stereotypes regarding a woman's place (pregnant, pregnant, and pregnant) which will probably help get these kids more Americanized.
Might keep you from getting beat up some night at a MD's taco stand or something.
I am left SPEECHLESS. ( a rarity)
I find this “project” disgusting.
So far it sounds pretty much like one of those low-level "test the market" sort of reviews that are very typical of what goes on to feel out the market for a new product.
By the time I was a senior, a half-dozen of the girls in the freshman class got pregnant. "No Big Deal" was the general attitude.
The downhill slide, at least in my small town school, was quick. This all happened in the mid 80s, BTW.
Were I a prospective employer, I would never employ her under any circumstances.
The boyfriend, when informed, should have immediately informed his parents, the police, CPS, and (with escort) her parents and brothers when he learned of her plan, and had no more to do with her. His reputation is at least as valuable as hers.
This stunt is a guaranteed ticket to admission at an Ivy League college. Guaranteed.
So, the purpose of her experiment was for her to prove that pregnant teens get talked about, and feel alienated???
I cannot describe how much I despise the term “baby bump.” The world continues to be dumbed down to a ghetto level.
Excellent point. The article states she apologized to students and teachers at the school assembly for misleading them. Although some teachers were relieved when she told them the day before the assembly, biology teacher Shawn Myers had a different reaction: "When you're running a social experiment, you're dealing with human emotions. The human person in me felt I had been lied to."
Washington High School Senior Fakes Pregnancy as “Research” — But to What End?
It’s difficult to know just how to assess the story of Toppenish, Wash. high school senior Gaby Rodriguez.The straight-A student basically tossed away her senior year by faking her own pregnancy for six-and-a-half months, all in the name of a research project on “stereotypes, rumors and statistics.”
Only a handful of people knew she was doing this, including her mother, boyfriend and the school’s principal. It’s unclear, however, what exactly Gaby was trying to prove or study with her fake pregnancy.
But really, was it necessary to fake a pregnancy to discover that teenagers can be mean? Don’t we and most high school kids already know that? The problem with her bit of gonzo journalism-slash-trolling dressed up as scientific research is that there doesn’t seem to be, at least by available reports, any bigger picture reasoning.
Fortunately for those not in on the secret, nothing bad happened, like her brothers beating up her boyfriend (man, would this be a totally different story if that was the case) and her close friends getting over the lie.
Regardless, it’s pretty clear that Gaby Rodriguez has a future in undercover gotcha journalism. James O’Keefe, you might have a new fake prostitute for your next pimp scam.
I wondered when someone would read the article and pick that up. A young radical activist.
Says more about the school and the administration as about her. How about a club whose goal is to familiarize and teach these students about the responsibilities of living in this country? They all ready know about the benefits.
The world continues to be dumbed down to a ghetto level.
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