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CANBERRA, Australia—A weekend spent mothering a robot baby to mirror the “real experience” of parenting is meant to discourage teenage girls from getting pregnant. But so-called Baby Think it Over dolls don't cut teen pregnancy rates and in fact increase the risk, Australian research has found.
In a study published in The Lancet medical journal Friday, researchers found teenage girls who used the lifelike computerized dolls as part of a pregnancy-prevention program were more likely to become pregnant compared with girls receiving a less high-tech sex education.
“The program was supposed to put students off and then they would take extra steps not to get pregnant,” said study author Sally Brinkman, of the Telethon Kids Institute in Western Australia. “Unfortunately, and surprisingly for us, the intervention we can say definitely didn’t work and it actually seemed to increase the pregnancy rates. It just didn’t really work in putting the students off.”
The robo-babies, known properly as infant simulators, were developed 20 years ago by former NASA engineer Rick Jurmain, who with his wife founded U.S.-based manufacturer Realityworks. The company didn’t immediately respond to emailed inquiries from The Wall Street Journal.
Costing several hundred dollars, they have become a key part of pregnancy prevention programs in schools, churches and community groups in 89 nations, mimicking six-week-old infant behavior including crying when hungry or needing changing, or gurgling when rocked and burped.
Although normally used as part of school-based sex education, they have since been drafted into training programs for a wide variety of people including would-be nannies, new parents and future child-care workers.
As well as providing a realistic parenting experience, the simulators track their treatment, including whether they are left for long periods in a car seat or left without adequate care, or even whether they are handled violently or incorrectly.
But the Australian study, the first to try to gauge whether the robot dolls actually work in their chief purpose of cutting teen pregnancy rates and encouraging contraceptive use, found the opposite may be the case.
Looking at a Down Under adaptation of the U.S. Realityworks program, known in Australia as Virtual Infant Parenting (VIP), the researchers looked at nearly 3,000 schoolgirls aged between 13 and 15 in the state of Western Australia, diving them into two groups: one using a standard sex education and the other using robo-babies in their parenting exposure program.
Researchers were allowed to access medical records until the schoolgirls reached 20 years of age to determine whether they experienced a pregnancy. Those who used the VIP program had pregnancy rates of 17% by the time they turned 20, compared with 11% among those who didn't, which Ms. Brinkman said was a small but statistically significant increase.
‘It seemed to become quite a family thing to look after the infant simulators together’
Among the girls in the VIP group who became pregnant, 53.8% had abortions compared with 60.1% of girls from the control group, the researchers said. That could also indicate that teens who used robo-babies were more likely to go through with the pregnancy until birth.
The researchers, from both the University of Western Australia and the Telethon Kids Institute, said it wasn't clear why robot infants may encourage higher pregnancy rates, although Ms. Brinkman said anecdotally many of the girls reported that caring for them over a two-day weekend was a positive experience.
While some students frayed at the pressure and consigned their crying robo-babies “to the back of their father’s tool shed” for the weekend, or placed putty over the speaker to dull the noise, most reported enjoying their brief exposure to motherhood.
“It seemed to become quite a family thing to look after the infant simulators together,” Ms. Brinkman said. “It could be that positivity, but we don’t know what the actual mechanism is as to why the program failed.”
Melissa Kang, a Sydney-based expert in adolescent sexuality, said the findings weren’t surprising, as other factors were more likely to influence the sexual choices of teens than whether they had been exposed to a computer doll.
“The numbers are small, but it makes such intuitive sense that something like this wouldn’t work,” said Dr. Kang, from the University of Sydney.
“I think the reasons that young woman would choose to access contraception are far more likely about other reasons—the access to resources around her—being far more important than having time with a robot doll.”
Write to Rob Taylor at rob.taylor@wsj.com
