Are the Gloucester girls a symptom of moral decay or ray of hope?

Writing in Time, Nancy Gibbs asks us to give the Gloucester girls a break, noting that there is conflicting evidence over whether the 17 high schoolers decided together to get pregnant, or whether they decided together to have their babies after learning that they were pregnant.  She also notes:

While 750,000 teens become pregnant every year, that number is at its lowest level in 30 years, according to the Guttmacher Institute, down 36% from a peak in 1990. This does not suggest that we are witnessing a mass moral collapse, especially since abortion rates have fallen even faster. According to the CDC, since the late 1980s the abortion rate for girls 15 to 17 fell by 55%, and this year the overall US abortion rate was at its lowest level since 1974.

So maybe the Gloucester girls are indicative of a larger trend:

I wonder if some soft message has taken hold, when the data suggests that more and more women facing hard choices are deciding to carry the child to term. This has been the mission of the crisis pregnancy center movement, the more than 4000 centers and hotlines and support groups around the country that aim to talk women out of having abortions and offer whatever support they can. If not in Hollywood then certainly in Gloucester, teen parents and their babies face long odds against success in life. Surely they deserve more sympathy and support than shame and derision, if the trend they reflect is not a typical teenager's inclination to have sex, but rather a willingness to take responsibility for the consequences.