I was very close to my best friend's mother when I was in high school. When I had the misfortune of becoming pregnant after a sexual assault she shared part of her story with me. She had been raped when she was 15 and given birth to a son and gave him up for adoption. She didn't want to, but she was underaged and her parents made her.

Fifteen years after she shared this story with me my husband and I moved to where we are now, about 350 miles from our home town. I started working at the largest company in the area and met a man. We started talking as you do when you meet someone, he wasn't from this area either. He eventually asked where I was from and I told him a tiny town in the neighboring state that he's never heard of, when I told the name he said "my mother lives there!!!"

Now this is a small town, population less than 300 and 200 of them are my relatives either through birth or marriage. I assumed that his mom was one of the new people that had moved in after I left. Turns out his mother is my best friend's mom. I knew instantly who he was. He asked me if I knew the circumstances surrounding his birth and I really thought I did so I said yes. I didn't know the WHOLE story though, it turns out that the man that raped his mother was her own brother.

After his parents died he found his birth mother he of course asked her who his father was. She wouldn't tell him for a long time. He has a rare medical condition called Tangeires (sp) that had plagued him his whole life so he wanted answers. Eventually she did tell him. When he learned the truth it broke him mentally. It damaged their relationship so much that he had little to do with her either after that point.

By the time he met me, this had all taken place. I was extremely upset to learn such an intimate detail about someone that I'd loved, even though we'd lost touch over the years. He felt comfortable talking to me about these things, and eventually I stuck my nose where it didn't belong. I asked him why he was punishing his birth mother for something beyond her control. He said he just couldn't deal with the "truth", while he knew he'd pestered her to find these answers he wished she'd just told him that she didn't know who raped her. He looked at her family in a different way now.

As for genetics, we rarely know when we carry some rare recessive gene until something happens.

This is a difficult situation, things were different in the past than they are now. There is a possibility that the man that fathered her had no choice about being removed from her life. Men didn't have the rights then that they have now.