The length some women will go to in order to keep a man can be disturbing

By Nina Steele 

When you think you’ve heard it all, and that nothing can possibly shock you, comes a story to prove you wrong. I shook my head in disbelief and sadness when I heard the story of a Colombian woman who managed to fool her boyfriend, along with other members of her family, for a whole 9 months, by pretending to be pregnant when she wasn’t. Why did she do that? Because according to reports, she wanted to stop her boyfriend from leaving her.

Some women will stop at nothing to keep a man. And often, those men they are willing to go to extremes for, are not even worth the bother. This story beggars belief because of its very complexity. Not only did she lie for 9 months, but then, on the day she was expected to give birth, she came up with the most elaborate story to account for the missing baby. The story she came up with was that she had been the victim of an organ trafficking gang, and that the baby had been cut out of her womb. Wow!

She went into hiding soon after the story became public, but has now reappeared to ask for forgiveness. The police is keen to speak to her. She runs a real risk of being arrested for wasting their time. Goodness knows the state she must be in right now, knowing that her desperation to keep her man at all costs, has backfired spectacularly.

That’s what you get when in a society, women are led to believe that bearing a man’s child is the surest way to hold on to him. I don’t know what the social landscape is like in Colombia, but it sure sounds like it has a lot in common with what goes on in Africa. I have had interactions with women on the continent, in complete despair at not being able to give their man the child that they believed would save their relationship. And the sad thing is, in those cases, the people involved are so blinded by their desire to become parents that they fail to appreciate the very relationship they are in.

I wish stories like these were a thing of the past. But sadly, we still live in a world where the majority of people still believe parenthood to be the pinnacle of a person’s life. And this is not helped by the constant parading of pregnant celebrities in the media, which reinforces this message.