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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Dear Cary,
I hope you answer this because I don't have anywhere to turn and I really don't know what to do.
I'm very happily married.
One night, which I wish I could take back with all my might, I drank too much with a male friend and made the mistake of my life by sleeping with him. Sorry to be blunt, but it's important: He didn't ejaculate inside me, but we did not use a condom. The next day, I slept with my husband.
And now I'm pregnant, and I seem to have conceived within those few days. If it's my husband's, I'd be nervous and scared but still happy to have a child. My husband wants to keep it. It would be a financial strain, and it's not what we planned, but many parents have had to deal with worse. On the chance that it's the male friend's, though, that makes me sick. It's bad enough I did this, but how could I do something like this to my husband, who is the wronged party in all of this? I know the chances are better that it's my husband's, but there's still a chance that it's my friend's. I just picture a 5-year-old carbon copy of the friend, and I get sick.
I'm thinking about getting an abortion and saying it was a miscarriage. That seems very wrong too. Please help.
Confused in Colorado
Dear Confused,
I wouldn't say or do anything yet. You don't know how it will turn out. Chances are it is your husband's baby. It might be that you never have to say a word. If you are careful and wise the only damage will be to your ego, and you will eventually be able to put the incident out of your mind and move on.
But no matter whose genetic material made the baby, morally your husband is the father; he's the one who has committed himself to raising children with you, not this other guy. In my mind, the child belongs to you and your husband no matter whose sperm made it. The genetic facts may be legally and scientifically relevant, but I don't believe they are morally relevant. Morally, the child deserves to have parents who raise him unequivocally as their own, and if that means one of the parents doesn't know the whole truth of the child's paternity, so be it. If it should come to light one day that the child, genetically, is from the other guy, I would try to keep that secret until the child is grown, and then only reveal it after grave and careful deliberation. Such knowledge could only cause the child confusion. As an adult, surely he could reasonably assert his rights to know his paternity, but I would not lightly volunteer such information unsolicited. Your foremost obligation is to love and care for this new life, wherever it came from.
You are probably imagining the worst: What if the newborn looks so strikingly unlike your husband that on first sight he can't help feeling it isn't his? I would still pretend that the baby is your husband's at least until you have had some time to recover from childbirth. After all, it's not easy to judge with certainty how the features of a baby correspond to those of its presumed relatives. Your husband might think it was merely odd, particularly if it's his first child. But here it gets dicey. If your husband has clear misgivings about the child's paternity and insists that you tell him the truth, then I think your moral obligation is to give your husband the truth. But not in the presence of the baby. It might be superstition, but still, I would not utter such truth in front of the baby.
According to Fairfax Identity Laboratories it is possible to determine the paternity of the fetus as early as 10 weeks into the pregnancy, and you might feel that such knowledge would put your mind at ease. However, it might also add a whole new layer of moral complexity. For instance, having taken such affirmative steps, would you not, in the one case, feel under a greater obligation to disclose the baby's outside paternity to your husband, and would he not feel a stronger sense of betrayal if you did not? And would you not in the other case feel compelled to share with him your sense of profound relief and thus disclose your infidelity? I think anyone might feel these things strongly and perhaps act on them, and the stress and disruption that would cause might not be in anyone's best interest. At any rate, however, if you carry the fetus to term and then suspect that it is not your husband's, you should consult your doctor privately about any genetic conditions that would affect your care of the baby.
The bottom line, morally, it seems to me, is avoiding harm to the ones you love and protecting the innocent and the powerless from the consequences of your own mistakes. If you keep that in mind as you make your decisions, you will have done your best, no matter what happens. And if you have any sense of the miracle of life, if you have any faith at all in the mysterious forces of nature that shape our lives, you may feel better simply accepting the fact that a new life has begun, and while you have responsibilities toward it, its final course is now and forever profoundly and inexorably out of your hands.
Apart from the agonizing moral dilemma, I must say that what fascinates me about this is the possibility that whoever the child is, whether from your husband or from this one-night stand, he or she might one day come to know the circumstances of her birth and realize how strange and wondrous are the ways we come into existence. How profoundly are we all just children of a dice roll, the unknowable payoff of a passionate gamble!
