Dear Prudence,
More than 13 years ago, I got pregnant. At the time, I was finishing school and just beginning my career. My boyfriend “Ben” and I had been dating seriously for a few years. We had talked about marriage and children but hadn’t decided on when that would be. Ben assumed the pregnancy was a birth control failure. I told other people that it was an “unplanned but welcome surprise.” I never told another person this, but my pregnancy wasn’t an accident at all. I stopped taking birth control pills because I wanted to have a child. After I stopped I didn’t get pregnant for almost a year and got lulled into a false sense that it was never going to happen. From the moment I saw the positive pregnancy test, I knew what I had done was a horrible, dishonest, unethical thing and felt terrible guilt and shame. I seriously considered giving our baby up for adoption, but finally decided to raise her. Ben and I split up when our daughter “Holly” was 3 years old. He a