You Can Get Your Teen A Virtual Baby So They Won’t Get Knocked Up For Real

Do Something is launching a new initiative to raise awareness about teen pregnancies with a campaign called Pregnancy Text which will be available on March 25. The campaign involves adding your mobile phone number to their website and you, or your teen, receive incessant text messages from your phone baby for 12 hours. They compare it to the project you had to do in high school with a sack of flour or an egg where you pretended it was a baby, except the sack of flour didn’t text you a lot informing you that it needed something like a diaper change. From The NY Daily News:

Teens have to sign up for the project, which involves answering incessant text messages from a “baby” whose needs range from diaper changing to feeding.

The texts are “fun and lighthearted, sassy without being mean,” Ruderman said — key to keeping teens interested.“I know you’re running late bu-GRRGLEBARFFFF. Oops, sorry about your shirt. Rappers spit rhymes, I spit up,” a sample text reads.

I’m sorry but as someone who has had many a baby I can tell you that they never announced in a clever fashion they were going to spit up.

Students can personalize the experience by responding — “I love you” or “I’m not ready to get up yet” are past examples — and the baby will write back.

The goal is to get teens discussing teen pregnancy and sharing the information with their friends, but I’m sure you can see the potential for hilarity in this, the goal is for all of us to sign up and complain about our virtual babies with each other, and you can join me here.

I also signed my teenager up for this, because I’m obnoxious. I think this will be an amazing program that will get teens thinking about the consequences of unwanted pregnancies and what a total pain actual real life babies are, and even more importantly, I can probably demand gifts from everyone I know because I’m expecting a fake baby. Let me know if you would like to send me a present. If there is enough interest in the comments, I’ll make an open thread for us on the 25th so we can all discuss our fake babies.

(Image: do something. org)