Pregnancy ruse leads to book by teenager

YAKIMA – Nine months after revealing to classmates that she had faked her pregnancy for a senior class project, a Washington state teenager is promoting a new book that details the experience and explores her reasons for taking on the project.

Gaby Rodriguez, of Toppenish, Wash., got headlines last April when she announced at a high school assembly that she had worn a faux baby bump for months to explore stereotypes about teen pregnancy.

Only a handful of people, including her mother, boyfriend and principal, were in on the secret. The rest of the Toppenish community, in central Washington’s agricultural Yakima Valley, had no clue.

The Yakima Herald-Republic published a story that was picked up nationally.

She’s 18 now and studying psychology at Columbia Basin College in Pasco.

Some critics still don’t understand what led her to take on the project in the first place, Rodriguez said in a recent interview, and she hopes that they’ll get that from her book, “The Pregnancy Project.”

The book was written with a ghostwriter. A movie about the experience, starring “Spy Kids” actress Alexa Vega, premiered Saturday on the Lifetime television movie network, and Rodriguez is making numerous TV and radio appearances to promote her story.

The book details her mother’s first pregnancy, at age 14, and marriage to the baby’s father – a 16-year union, troubled by allegations of abuse, that produced seven children. Their three daughters got pregnant as teenagers and two sons got their girlfriends pregnant.

Teen pregnancy was practically a family tradition, said Rodriguez.

“It’s hard to understand why they didn’t learn from each other; I guess they all needed to make their own mistakes,” she wrote in the book. “They have great kids, but it’s never easy to have children before you’re even fully grown yourself.”

The experiment took on particular significance in Toppenish, which is about 75 percent Hispanic. Latinas have the highest teen pregnancy and birth rate among any major racial or ethnic minority.

“Being a Hispanic girl from a family full of teen pregnancies meant that my odds of also becoming a teen mom were way higher than average,” she wrote. “If I gave people what they predicted, how would they react?”

Rodriguez believes the biggest message from her experience is: Things will be OK.

“It’s not the end of the road for them,” she said. “It’s going to be harder, but it’s not the end of the road.”