There's been such an uproar, such expressions of shock, over the possibility that a group of girls at a high school in Gloucester, Massachusetts may have entered into a pact to get pregnant and help each other raise their babies.  It strikes me as a perfectly reasonable proposition, given the world these young women are living in.  They obviously have no expectation of finding young men willing to be committed husbands and fathers, so they are doing what female elephants do — they are organizing for a matriarchal social order.

In the social order of elephants, young males are forced out of the herd as soon as they attain sexual maturity.  The males wander about singly or in small groups, getting into all sorts of trouble, fighting with each other and destroying things, and are let back into the herd only long enough to mate with sexually mature females — at which point they are forcibly ejected once again.  The young are raised exclusively by females.  It's a kind of pregnancy pact.

Male elephants have not made the case to female elephants that they could be useful for something other than impregnating them, and female elephants have responded in the only logical way possible — they have taken responsibility for organizing their society along lines that ensure both stability and the perpetuation of the species.