I have a question for betrayed spouses and spouses who have cheated. Here are the basic facts. In my wife’s first affair nearly a decade ago she had a one month affair with a “good” friend. She got pregnant, had an abortion, lost her “good” friend forever, and never told me until she was so trapped in her lies and deceit that she was forced to tell me this January.

My wife is politically pro-choice (believes that the woman should have the ultimate say and that outlawing abortion will only slightly reduce abortions and just make them unsafe) but personally pro-life (does not believe that the fetus was just an ordinary mass of cells like an individual egg or sperm). She has carried the guilt associated with the affair and abortion around for years. She also engaged in at least three more affairs in the years after the first affair (why would someone continue to do something if the first experience had such a terrible ending?).

I am not religious, my wife is not religious but spiritual, however I encourage both religious and non-religious people to respond. However, I am not looking for a debate on the morality of abortion.

However, I wonder if there are other people out there who have had abortions of fetuses that were caused by an affair and how that impacted your relationship.

Also, if there are women or men out there that have had abortions and have had trouble dealing with the loss of the fetus, those responses would also be helpful.

You explanation is kind of confusing.
Why not simply ask how to deal with an abortion?

Posting regarding dealing with an abortion would be helpful. However, there is plenty of literature out in the world about healing from an abortion. Since the abortion is complicated by the fact that the pregnancy was part of an affair and the amount of time the lie has been covered up, I was hoping for some insight from people with this perspective in mind.

In my case, my wife had a number of choices. She could have stayed with the man who got her pregnant (they were not in love), raised the baby on her own, told me the truth about everything, or hide the truth and come back to me. Her mom knew about the basic facts at the time and, after the truth came out this January, told me point blank that my wife choose me over the pregnancy.

I am hoping that anyone with any remotely similar experiences could share them with me. Or, if these issues have been discussed before, point me in the direction of those posts.

The first affair is bad enough, but you did not know. But how do you deal living with a woman who choses to lie and be unfaithful? Are you OK with her being with others?
Regarding the fetus, perhaps the guilt associated with her affair led her to make that decision. She did not want you to know that she was not the person you thought she was. How would have you reacted? Would you have raised that child?

How do we deal with a spouse who was unfaithful and has lied to us?
That is the question all of us WSs are dealing with. I have decided to give myself, my relationship with my wife and my wife a second chance. However, she must be faithful and honest. She must work on the problems that led her to lie and cheat. In the end, I must believe and trust (never 100%) that she will be faithful and honest in the future and the causes for why she cheated and lied have been addressed as best as humanly possible.

I am not ok with my wife being with other men. Her cheating and lying have caused me the most pain and angwish in my short life.

It is hard to know how I would have reacted if she had told me the truth at the time it happened. We had been together for a couple years, were still in college and had not married yet. We had no children of our own. Our relationship was very good and I was insanely in love with my wife. Obviously, she did not have the same commitment and love towards me (I more than once avoided opportunities to cheat—I had no interest). She cheated at the end of a semester abroad. Obviously I was not meeting her emotional needs, but we could not as we were apart.

It hard to look back ten years and be firm about how one would have reacted. I think that if she had brought back another man’s child that it would have most likely ended our relationship. We were not married and had not committed to each other forever and I was not ready to be a father. I think it would have been very difficult to raise someone else’s kid in that situation. I think she believed that, if she was to stay with me, that she could not have kept the kid. I am not sure if that caused her to be angry with me and then continue in her affairs once she returned?

If she had told me about the affair and the abortion I am also not sure what I would have done. I believe that it would not have ended things because I was so in love with her, but that I might have been less willing to work things out.

I get what you're asking, though I think the general answer is not about the affairs, but healing from an abortion and what the behavior is following one. I had one 7 years ago and from my own experience, the very thing that got me into the situation of an unplanned pregnancy was what I ended up doing after the abortion itself.

For many women (not all), abortion is a very traumatic experience and it causes very disruptive, abusive, and sometimes suicidal behavior. No, it may not make sense that she went and did the same thing that caused the pregnancy to begin with, but you have to understand that she may be spiraling out of control, emotionally. And the fact that she is personally Pro Life may add to her emotional distress over her decision to abort. That is a hard pill to swallow if you believe you just allowed your own child to die for whatever reason. She also may feel selfish and irresponsible for her decision, as alot of post abortive women do.

She may also feel very alone, like she is the only woman in the world who has aborted/is mourning her lost child. And that feeling alone cause very low self esteem and distructive behavior because of it.

There are many emotions she could be feeling right now and my own guess would be that the subsequent affairs are due to her feelings over her decision to abort, though I could be wrong. What she needs now is someone to confide in and to listen to her and understand what she's going through. She doesn't need someone who is critical and will only bring her down lower.

There is a site for post abortive women of all circumstances that I use to go to for support and understanding, it's non religious and not political at all, but offers healing from a past abortion. I highly recommend it if she is hurting over her decision, it's a great place with women AND men who are healing from abortions.

PASS Support Boards

Good luck to you both! If either of you ever need to talk about this, please feel free to email me anytime, I understand what she's going through with the abortion!

phoenixorion@adelphia.net

Sometimes the emotions of an abortion don't come up until years later. It can be very tramatic. Yes, I know I've been there. I had an A with a married man when I was 17. I believed all his lies. At this age I didn't know what to do and my parents pressured me into that decision. It was a very hard thing. I never thought I'd ever stop crying! It just about ruined my life. Well, in a way I feel like I'm being punished. WS and I were going to have a baby together until I got deathly sick and had no choice but to abort. I never got pregnant after. This was 14 yrs. ago. It has literally destroyed my life because WS left me for OW because she is pregnant. Another blow I want to die over at times. I can't speak for anyone else but the emotional hurt I feel will never go away. Do I ever cry over the first one. No. I know now I was never in love with this married man and I made the right decision at the time. I mourn and grieve for the child WS and I didn't have every single day of my life.

Thank you for your posts. Very thoughtful.

Phoenix may be correct that her affairs were very related to my wife’s abortion. My wife claims that she did not fully understand or feel pain about her abortion until she had our first child over four years ago and subsequently had a miscarriage. Yes the abortion was traumatic for her, but I do not think she really connected the abortion with a potential life until she started the baby making process again.

On the point of what she needs, while I agree that she does not need to feel bad or someone who will bring her down, that is pretty difficult for me in that she just confided in affairs years ago, affairs recently and years of lying. It is a difficult process for both of us to heal, to try and work out the root causes of her affairs, but to do so in a manner that does not cause additional depression or anger. One “nice” aspect is that in telling me about the abortion and past affairs my wife feels like a weight as been lifted off her shoulders and, while she still grieves, part of her pain has been lifted. The truth as, in part, set her free. Showed me that I was living a lie and have been betrayed numerous times….

I hope that my wife looks at some of the websites related to abortions, replies to Phoenix or does something else. I have let her know about this website, but she is not quite ready to read the posts or write. Maybe the postabortion website will be less threatening.

It is hard to directly reply to Cin’s post. Short, simple and very touching and almost made me cry. One, of many responses it evoked from me is Cin’s response varied tremendously regarding the surrounding relationships and reasons for the abortion. My wife’s abortion occurred with a man she claims she did not love. I think that she repressed some feelings regarding the abortion afterwards because there was no love in the relationship, no hope of a real future, at the time she never considered the fetus a potential child, etc.

When she had the miscarriage she was thinking of the fetus as kid and it would join our family. The miscarriage then brought back memories and feelings related to her other lost child, that she now (maybe for the first time consciously) thought of as a potential child that would be over ten years old.

It is weird how knowing about affairs or past lies makes you see your past in a different light. Occasionally, in the past my wife would make comments about how weird it was that another period our age (early 30s) had a kid that was ten years old or that so and so had a kid when as a teen ager or in their early twenties. I never had even an inking of what was really going on in my wife’s mind regarding so many issues for so much of our life….