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On Friday, advice columnist Carolyn Hax took on a strangely well-worn query for today’s relationship advice columnists. Here’s the situation (thanks to Heartless Doll for the tip): A woman is raped. She becomes pregnant. She decides to carry the pregnancy to term. Her husband decides he wants a divorce.
Question for the columnist: Is this guy a dick, or what?
If that very unfortunate scenario sounds familiar, it’s because last November, Daily Telegraph advice-giver Lesley Garner answered a question from a woman in an eerily similar situation. Garner failed.
Garner’s advice-seeker had been raped, become pregnant, and had the baby. Her husband split, leaving her to raise the child as a single mother. Her question: Should she attempt to rekindle a relationship with the man who had dumped her as a result of her sexual assault?
You may recall how Garner responded: She informed the woman that her rape “wasn’t exactly a rape but a situation between you and your boss that got out of hand.” Garner also insisted that a husband jetting after his wife is impregnated through rape is “a no-brainer . . . No man could contemplate this. He would have found your decision inexplicable.”
In my critique of Garner’s advice (in short, do not advise rape victims that they are not rape victims, and also, please refrain from informing women that their reproductive choices are thoroughly “inexplicable” to other humans), I noted that I was not an advice columnist, but that I suspected the husband in question to be a “dickwad.” Now that we’ve got a legit advice-giver in the form of Carolyn Hax to weigh in on the subject, we may finally learn the answer: Are you a dick for abandoning your wife after she is impregnated from her rape?
But first, the big wind-up:
Oakland, Calif.: Hello Carolyn. A friend’s wife became pregnant as a result of a sexual assault. She has decided to not have an abortion, and doesn’t know yet whether she wants to give the child up for an adoption. Would the husband be a [glass bowl] for refusing to raise this child, and divorcing if necessary? Thanks.
Essentially, the reader is asking Hax this: “Oh, hello Carolyn, my friend’s wife was raped. LONG STORY SHORT, now my friend has been seriously inconvenienced by this, so can you please let him know he’s not a dick for peacing? Thanks.”
Hax delivers a reasoned response that manages to give credit to the difficulty of the husband’s situation while still conveying the fact that, yes, he is a gigantic jackass:
Wow. I think the only happy outcome is one the husband and wife conjure together. Technically, this isn’t something the wife can force on the husband and expect him to agree to joyfully.
That said, technically, this pregnancy wasn’t something to be forced on the wife, and yet it was. So, in a rare case where bean-counting is the way to go, the husband needs to let go of any notion of an ideal outcome here, in direct proportion to the wife’s distance from her notion of an ideal outcome. This is the only fair and decent course.
Finally, there’s the child to be considered, who is obviously innocent, and deserves to enter the world with just as clean a slate as any other child’s.
I’m not saying this wouldn’t be a Herculean challenge for the husband, because it would—but embracing the innocent child strikes me as immeasurably better for the soul than leaving one’s rape-victim wife to be a single mom.
I trust Hax on this one. Here’s why: Observe how Hax refrains from suggesting that (a) perhaps this rape victim was not in fact raped, nor that (b) rape victims who carry their pregnancies to term deserve to be alone for the choices they have made. Incredible. It is thus resolved: abandoning your rape-victim wife is a dick move.
UPDATE: It’s worse than I thought. The rape victim’s husband’s friend weighs in to further contextualize the situation:
Oakland again: Thanks Carolyn. Obviously this whole situation is devastating for them. I don’t know if this make a difference, but the couple is white, and the assailant was Afircan-American, and the husband isn’t exactly progressive when it comes to race relations.