A teen pregnancy group has started a campaign to turn student's cellphones into virtual babies to give them a taste of what it's like to be a parent, the New York Daily News reported.
The nonprofit DoSomething.org started a school project where students monitor their cellphones much like how parents care for a baby- text messages with phrases like "feed me" or "rappers spit rhymes, I spit up," are sent to the phone, then the student sends an answer back to the digital baby.
Students can send affectionate responses or texts like "I'm not ready to get up yet."
"It's kind of like in middle school when you had the egg baby, but with a modern twist," Alyssa Ruderman of DoSomething.org told the Daily News.
The Pregnancy Text project began three years ago, with 125,000 students across the nation signing up in 2012. Even though teen pregnancy rates have been on the decline, they are still high enough to cause concern. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 30 out of every 1,000 girls ages 15 to 19 become pregnant.
Other texts from the electronic baby include requests for a diaper change and alerts of sudden throw up.
"I know you're running late bu-GRRGLEBARFFFF. Oops, sorry about your shirt. Rappers spit rhymes, I spit up," a baby's text reads, the Daily News reported.
The goal of the project is to get teenagers to talk about pregnancy. The text messages will be sent to the student's phone for a period of 12 hours. Though the experiment only lasts a day, Ruderman said it's enough to get students thinking about teen pregnancy.
"Our goal is just to start a conversation," Ruderman told the Daily News. "There's no real way for us to know if teens are using more condoms or if they're having safer sex, but we do know they're engaging in a conversation and they're sharing this with their friends."
DoSomething.org marketing associate Colleen Wormsley said their research suggests that talking about pregnancy is the best way to prevent it among teenagers.
"Shame and fear tactics don't work," Wormsley told the Daily News.
