Girl Crushable: Gaby Rodriguez, the High School Senior Who Faked a Pregnancy as a Social Experiment

Teen pregnancy: Everywhere you turn, there’s a high-school girl with a swollen stomach and a misguided sense of what it means to be a mother. MTV capitalized on it with the reality shows 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom; Secret Life of the American Teenager owes its existence to the phenomenon; and Lifetime modeled a movie after a real-life pregnancy pact at a Massachusetts high school. But social experiment? That’s a new one.

Gaby Rodriguez, a senior at Toppenish High School in Washington, fooled her classmates and teachers into believing that she was pregnant for the past six months. As this was her senior project, only a select few were included in the plan: Her mother, her 20-year-old boyfriend, her best friend, one of her seven siblings, and the high school principal. It was laughably easy; when she told friends that she had had sex with her boyfriend at homecoming, people took her word for it. She faked the physical part by wearing baggy clothes and a baby belly made of wire mesh and quilt filling.

Rodriguez had always intended that this elaborate lie be a social experiment, but she was still surprised by what she encountered. Peers easily accepted that the straight-A student would give up her college dreams and become another statistic, a Latina teen mom. Over the six months of her fake pregnancy, she listened closely to whisperings in the halls and picked up chatter and rumors about her. At the assembly where she revealed her hoax, she first had teachers and students read from index cards printed with statements about her, like this: “Her attitude is changing, and it might be because of the baby or she was always this annoying and I never realized it.”

Bravo to Rodriguez for taking on such an emotionally draining project, especially as the results may have been things she didn’t want to hear about herself. She opened herself up to ridicule and discomfort and instead exposed the unguarded reactions and prejudices of those she lived and attended school with. As her principal said, she gave up her senior year.

The Frisky points out that Rodriguez’s experiment has its flaws, since she wasn’t actually making the preparations and financial sacrifices that a young mother would have to. But would any teen mom who’s not a reality star have her business that out in the open? Perhaps those reality shows have us assuming that we are entitled to every detail of a peer’s pregnancy. After all, even if she weren’t bemoaning her baby expenses in homeroom, Rodriguez fooled an entire high school for half a year.