by Phil 14 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Has anyone have any information on can or will the WT forgive a girl that gets pregnant out of wedlock.
My daughter has just revealed that this happened to a girl she knows who went full term on the pregnancy and was forgiven by the WT. Would such a person be given good treatment by the other members in KH.
The answer is dependant on many different things; Is she from a popular family considered "pillars" in the cong? Has she been a "good" girl heretofore? Is it a fairly liberal congregation? Is she attractive? Does her baby's head spin 360?
Anyway it's conceivable (pardon the pun) that she could be treated well, though it's more often the case that she'd be treated like a mildly contagious leper.
I have never known an unmarried pregnant girl to not be disfellowshipped at least for a while. I f she's well connected, and/or willing to tow the line for a while, she can get re-instated.
I have. But she wasn't a girl. She was a widowed JW with several kids, who was dating a 'worldly but studying' guy. Her oldest son (I think he might have been living at home at this point...he was in his late teens or early 20s) was a MS.
I saw her at the meeting one night (this was when my husband was a JW but I wasn't yet) and said to my husband..."That's not fat! That's a baby!" (both she and the man were very overweight). Sure enough, within a week or 2 they announced she was on public reproof, or something...but not df'd. They got married right away (before the baby was born - talk about locking the barn door after the horse escapes). I don't remember when or if he got baptised, but he sure loved being 'head of the household'...he was a mean S.O.B. whose biological children from a previous relationship had been taken away by social services because of abuse &/or neglect. Which of course makes him the ideal JW husband and step-parent father.
I have never known an unmarried pregnant girl to not be disfellowshipped
In 2001 a girl I knew in a local hall got pregnant. Her boyfriend got df'd, but she carried on seeing him, and a few months later she fell pregnant. She was publicly reproved for this.
i've seen a few girls get disfellowshipped for having relations w/ a worldy b/f, but i've also seen a girl get peggy and have a baby and not receive any sort of punishment because her daddy is a good ole' MS microphone holder and sometimes a watchtower reader on stage......
I have known elders daughters who never got even on discipline publicly for getting pregnant.........
There was an elder's daughter at a hall that I attended who got pregnant as a teenager, but she was only an unbaptized publisher, so she was removed from the status of unbaptized publisher, and the elder, who incidentally was the PO at the time, stepped down.
Others baptized women were always disfellowshipped or reproved. The disfellowshipped were usually reinstated. Reproved and reinstated women who had babies out of wedlock always seemed to get the normal baby attention when the came to the hall for the first time with the new born.
She'd get publicly reproved if repentant, diffed and shunned if not.
How she was treated AFTER a reproving would greatly depend on the nature of the congregation. Especially the characters of the elders taking the lead. I remember one circuit overseer saying that women who bore a child out of wedlock shouldn't have a baby shower to show how repentant they are over the matter. But I also recall one elder saying from the platform that people make mistakes and that when they are reproved the matter should be forgotten and we should go out of our way to make them feel welcome again. So it greatly depends on the locals.
CZAR
It can go both ways. I've seen them get disfellowshipped and I've seen them reproved. As they say "it depends on their repentance".
One gal was going to be given a baby shower, and many in the congregation were horrified and said they wouldn't attend that one, until the CO came and his wife sat with the young gal, and spread the word "how nice it would be if someone gave her a shower". I thought that was showing love. The others want them to pay forever I guess.
I knew two girls in my old congregation... both were busted for sleeping with their boy friends. One got preg but the other did not. The one that got preg was DFed and the other was not.
The elders needed to make an example of her.
Cruel bastards... the last thing an expecting single mother needs is to be shunned.
