Woman's 'Grieving' Husband Abandons Her At The Hospital & Then Files For Divorce While She Recovers
The nurses had to rally around her to give her shelter because he locked her out of their house.
KieferPix, zimmytws, John Danow / Shutterstock A woman has left people shocked with her story of her husband's unbelievable cruelty in the wake of the loss of their baby.
Pregnancy loss is a devastating experience for both partners, of course, but many feel there is no amount of grief that could ever justify her husband's actions, and it's got people issuing a single piece of advice: "get a lawyer."
A woman's husband abandoned her at the hospital after the stillbirth of their baby.
While far more rare than miscarriage, which happens in approximately 1 in 4 pregnancies, stillbirth is still more common than most people believe, occurring approximately 21,000 times per year, according to the CDC. Though it shouldn't need to be said, pregnancy loss and stillbirth are almost never the mother's fault.
Judging from his response to her stillbirth, it seems this woman's husband is confused about all of that at best.
In a post to Reddit's women's issues subreddit "r/TwoXChromosomes," she wrote about just how much difficulty she and her husband have had conceiving, and how she now feels her husband was manipulating her the entire time.
Photo: Reddit
After two previous miscarriages, she found out her husband had been cheating on her. She wrote that one of the reasons they stayed together was their mutual desire to have children. "He apologized, begged, and cried that if I stayed with him we would get serious about a baby," she said, and he seemed to deliver on his promise.
"He allowed me to stop working so I could dedicate everything to having a full-term pregnancy/healthy baby," she added, and she did everything in her power, from watching her diet to wearing a mask in public, to ensure her pregnancy went off without a hitch.
She went into labor a week early. "I can’t even describe how happy and complete I felt walking into the hospital," she wrote. Naturally, the stillbirth was devastating. But her husband's reaction was totally shocking. "He wasn’t crying," she said. "My husband let go of my hand and left the room."
After her husband abandoned her at the hospital, he then filed for divorce and locked her out of their house.
At first, she thought her husband just needed "some fresh air," but he never returned. "One of the nurses was so upset for me that she stayed the entire time with me," the woman wrote, and when they contacted her husband they received an astonishing response. "He told them he wasn’t coming and to tell me I wasn’t able to go home because he wasn’t there."
Photo: Reddit
She was finally contacted by her mother-in-law, who informed her that "he was filing for divorce, our bank account was frozen until court, and that I needed to give him space." She was estranged from her own family after a lifetime of abuse, so she was left truly alone.
The nurses arranged for social services to assist her with shelter, and she ended up in a motel for two weeks with $100 to her name. She again heard from her husband's mother-in-law, who told her that her husband "was grieving and that I can’t 'hold it against him'" for divorcing her because he wants to "get serious about having a baby and a family."
To top it off, her mother-in-law then said she probably lost the baby because of her past addiction struggles, despite the fact that she has been sober for 12 years. "I don’t know what to do or where to go," she said. "I’m f--king traumatized."
People online urged the woman to get a lawyer and charge her husband with spousal abandonment.
Cases like this woman's certainly sound surprising, but they're more common than many of us might think — so much so that psychologists have identified a condition called "Spousal Abandonment Syndrome," wherein a marriage abruptly ends without warning and seemingly without the slow accumulation of conflicts that typically lead to divorce.
Therapists like Mary Jo Rapini in the TikTok below report that cases of the syndrome seem to be on the rise, and it is usually men who choose spousal abandonment. Rapini recommends therapy and refraining from self-blame as ways of dealing with the shocking trauma of spousal abandonment.
On Reddit, people had similar advice, but they also urged the woman to take things several steps further, especially since her husband seemed poised to take advantage of her via the legal system.
Photo: Reddit
Many also felt that her husband is unlikely to prevail in their divorce proceedings once a lawyer and a judge catch wind of the wife's experience. Some urged her to also contact law enforcement and report that her husband had locked her out of the house and frozen their assets.
Others focused on just issuing an encouraging word. "You're going to win this battle," one Redditor told the woman, "it just might be a long road." Here's hoping that's true, and the road is as short as possible.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers culture, social justice and human interest topics.