My friend is pregnantfor her mother’s lover

Dear Pastor,

I am having a problem and it is haunting me. I have a friend; we grew up together. We went to the same high school.

We had our boyfriends and we went out together. We are the same age, 22. I got pregnant when I was 19 years old. I got married. My mother encouraged me to get married to the man who got me pregnant because she did not want me to have a child outside of wedlock. The man who got me pregnant was living abroad. So he came to Jamaica and we got married. I went up to America with him because I had a visa. My girlfriend also has a visa. Last year she visited me, and this is where trouble started. Her mother is in Jamaica, but her mother has a man who came up to America to do business. He picked her up from where we are living. She came here just for a short visit. He picked her up the Friday evening and they went out. He brought her back on Saturday afternoon. She told me she had a great time with him. Mark you, this man is her mother's boyfriend. She said that he was going to fly out on the Monday and they planned to go out again. I said okay. I wasn't thinking of anything bad.

This man took her to a hotel and they spent the whole night there. My husband asked me how I could agree to my friend spending the night at a hotel with her mother's man. I told him I did not know that she would do such a thing. When she came home, I confronted her and she admitted to having sex with this man. She said she is feeling like a dog, but this man persuades her to have sex with him. She told me that she told him she would not say anything to anybody about it. But, as a friend of many years, she had to confess it to me. When the man was at the airport about to fly back to Jamaica, he called her and told her to hurry up and return to Jamaica.

Now, Pastor, my friend is pregnant for her mother's man and she is asking me what to do. The question is, how could she carry a child for a man who is having a sexual relationship with her mother? He is encouraging her to terminate the pregnancy. Every day she is calling me. She said the sex was not planned and he told her that he was going to withdraw and not ejaculate in her. This girl and her mother are like sisters. She has done everything for her. Her mother is not aware that she is pregnant. She wants to come back to America, but my husband does not want her at our home.

What should I tell her?

N.D.

Dear N.D.,

Do not encourage this young woman to have an abortion. If she wants to make that decision to abort, she should do so without your encouragement.

Let her have her baby; and if she does not believe that she should keep the child, she should give up the baby for adoption. At the risk of having folks cursing me, I would say that she is a worthless young woman, and her mother's man who got her pregnant has behaved like a mongrel. Both of them should have known better. How could she be so close to her mother and go to bed with her mother's man? Shame on both of them!

Pastor