State representative Ashley Aune is trying to fight it, but doesn’t have high hopes.
Something you might have picked up on over the last several weeks/years/centuries is that there are a disturbing number of people in power who will go to great lengths to control women in America. Not convinced? Thinking of citing the fact that in some countries, women are stoned to death (as though that makes what happens here okay)? Then we’d like to make you aware of a law in Missouri that says pregnant women cannot get a divorce finalized if they’re pregnant—even if said pregnant people are victims of domestic violence.
Honestly, the rules and laws on divorce are so wild across the country. I was married in California but my husband left after 6 months. I hadn’t see him in 9 or 10 years, had no idea where he was.
Because I was in the state of Kentucky when I filed, I had to go to a church run “divorce education class” on how to save my marriage and complete a little workbook.
Completely insane class, I stayed in the back and tried to stay silent, but the teacher forced me to participate and asked some leading question about how I could communicate better with my spouse to prevent a divorce or some shit.
Told her I had no idea where my spouse was, that he had left after 6 months and that I had to hire a private investigator (and a police officer!) to serve my divorce papers. The whole thing was nuts.
Okay, but have you tried praying to Jesus for salvation? Like, really tried? I don’t think you tried hard enough, sweetie. I’m going to fail you and make you repeat the class.
I’m sorry you had to go through that.
OBVIOUSLY he’s just playing hard to get because you don’t spend enough time cooking and bathing him. It’s actually your fault and if you accept sky Daddy hard enough he’ll come running back.
Horrific
Especially if they’re victims of domestic violence
Male or female, what other purpose could a law like this serve except to give abusers a route to legally trap their victim?
To stop fathers abandoning the family when the wife gets pregnant and using a loophole to get out of child support.
Last time this came up on Lemmy there was a comment saying that’s where the law came from originally.
It doesn’t stop you separating during pregnancy, just to complete the divorce you have to wait till after the birth.
How would that time actually prevent the scenario you described? You don’t have to be married to be a father.
I think some comments were saying it’s because of how laws used to work of assuming (to a certain degree) fatherhood of the husband in a marriage. I.e., in a time before DNA testing, if the father divorces while his wife is pregnant, then once the baby is born he’s out of the picture and escaped responsibility, but after the birth, his responsibility as father has to be discussed as part of the divorce settlement. (Other comments in this thread and before, had more detail, and some commenters seemed to have looked things up and know what they’re talking about!)
Another comment said it stops the mother from skipping out on the father and denying him joint custody/etc. Again, due to legal frameworks around marriage and family especially from a time before DNA testing. Obviously you (should) still have courts that can get involved to resolve cases that don’t fit the normal framework.
Another brought up more detail of just settling the divorce terms appropriately. I know the baby (in some countries at least) is not a legal person until born: so for some other parts of legal structure (other than this divorce issue), people involved can be aware there is a baby on the way, but the law has to wait until the birth to actually account for that new person.
One point I didn’t see mentioned, but that I can imagine, is that pregnancy is a time of new stress and much change, which could push one or other partner to divorce rashly and regret it later. As others pointed out, you can still separate, just not finalise the legal divorce. Then after the birth you have time to see if you want to be together as a family again, or if you do indeed want a divorce.
For those who don’t have time to read the title or the article:
Missouri insane
Its a two way street. Men cant get divorced either.
It’s there on the books due to child custody issues. A wife who’s married and gives birth has the husband put in as the father. If unmarried, a woman can put in “unknown” as the father and take away all of his rights to see his kid or have anything to do with his child until a nice lengthy and costly amount of court, which gets even more difficult if the mom leaves the state.
So short version is that the law prevents one parent from trying to prevent the other parent from having any form of child custody.
Brother, this law is just deranged. Trapping people in a marriage is not OK.
Divorce includes agreements over custody, why not consider an expected child into that as well?
Because nothing stops a woman from writing in “unknown” on the birth certificate. There’s also no “trap” of keeping a person into a marriage. It’s not the 1800’s. Being married or not doesn’t change virtually anything you can do.
Then make a law to fix that instead!!! What kind of logic is this???
That’d be fine, too. I’m just saying it’s a bit of a dumb law to go after because being married an extra 9 months or less doesn’t really limit much of anything besides being able to marry someone else. It’s close to a non issue. Some people never even mess with doing the paperwork and just stay separated for years on end.
Being married gives you the ability to make medical decisions among other issues.
Only if you can’t make them yourself (like you’re in a coma) and you have the ability to give anyone else you want a medical, financial, or both power of attorney for those decisions. The default is your spouse only if you don’t have a POA set up. It can be done with a signature and a notary. You can print out the documents for free and have it all done in 15 minutes. Your bank will notarize things for you for free. Otherwise it may cost you like $10.
So why not change the law to, when getting a divorce during pregnancy you have to sign a paper promising he is the official dad and let them divorce anyway?
I mean I get that it’s not up to the victim to decide if the guy is capable of being a father, there’s other systems in place for that. But you just can’t lock someone up with a partner they don’t want in any circumstance.
Probably nothing.
At what cost?
Filing and forcing paternity tests isn’t free. Especially if they’ve left the state. Many times you’ll have to pay a lawyer to process and get it done. Plus you have to find where they’re at to start the legal process. In the mean time you can go months without getting to see your child.
This is insane! I’m so confused about why a pregnancy and a divorce have to be mutually exclusive. What was this intended to prevent? Other than the obvious reason of controlling women.
I guess you can make an argument that a pregnant woman isn’t of sound mind, but I think it’s more about ensuring parenthood is established outside the divorce process.
Can’t read the entire article. Is this something new?
Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas. Lawmakers claim it’s to prevent issues with things like child support, visitation, etc, before paternity can be established. This article does a pretty good job summarizing the situations:
Paternity tests can be done during pregnancy…
I’m a paralegal, and Wisconsin is the same. We had a headache in one case a couple years ago where nobody knew the other party was pregnant, not even her attorney, until the final hearing and she was asked the generic question about pregnancy before finalizing. We then had to do a partial final judgment and schedule another final hearing a couple of months after her expected due date to fully finalize it.
Most contested divorces take more than nine months anyways, and you don’t need a divorce to separate and get into a safe space. Typically separation happens before the legal process starts, and even if you wanted to get remarried there is an intermediate ‘bifurcation’ step which can end the marriage legally before the divorce is finalized.
This is just a legal convenience for the court, but who doesn’t love a little rage bait?
I can’t even imagine how many things being legally married to someone who isn’t your partner would influence. From how you fill out taxes, to emergency contact forms, to power of attorney, to immigration sponsorship. A child should not be a weapon to keep people married together and if that means a tiny bit more work for some civil servant in a weird black dress then so be it.
Bullshit, this gives abusers direct influence over their victims’ lives. It isn’t “ragebait”.
Law is from 1973 and was amended in 2016.
I was hoping it was some old bullshit on the books nobody looks at anymore. Do people tho? I have been here in MO my whole life and this is the first ive heard of this. Is it something they actually enforce?
It sounds like this it is actively preventing people from getting divorced.
This is something that was brought to me by folks in my community who shared that it was a huge problem,” Aune said. In a committee meeting, she shared the story of a woman affected by the existing law, saying: “Not only was she being physically and emotionally abused, but there was reproduction coercion used. When she found out she was pregnant and asked a lawyer if she could get a divorce, she was essentially told no. It was so demoralizing for her to hear that. She felt she had no options.”
Yay. Another fucking reason to hate this shit hole state.
Hey we have some pretty parks though 😭
And the USA is supposed to be a first world country?
Oh no it’s not, it hasn’t been that for a while. Some states may look like it, but some are straight up third world.
First world country only if you’re in a certain percentage of income.
By original definition, USA is a first world country because they supported the USA and other Western countries in the cold war: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/first-world.asp
Hmmm. State is trying to live up to it’s name, and make people live in misery.
This is common. In Tennessee, a judge won’t divorce you if pregnant because it would effectively bastardize the child. By statute, there is a presumption that husband is dad if wife is impregnated during marriage. You can’t divorce without a parenting plan. So you have to wait until birth to rebut the parentage presumption. I had a client try to get around it by requesting a test of the amniotic fluid, but the judge wouldn’t allow it because of the potential harm to the child.
It’s probably more about preventing the state from becoming liable to help the child than anything about bastards.
“Bastardize” is a term of art, essentially meaning having no legal father at birth. The whole reason the state cares about preventing bastards is because they typically require more state services than non-bastardized children.
Possibly related note: Jesus’s rules on divorce do not permit a woman to leave an abusive marriage.
Depending on which gospel you’re reading a man may either leave an adulterous wife(Matthew)or not under any circumstances(mark, luke).
It’s a bit annoying that they wrote it up so literally decades after he was dead.
Dude was also allegedly regularly referring to death and the afterlife using marriage metaphors of bridegrooms and bridal suites.
But yeah, the idea divorce is impossible had to do with actual marriage and not the whole ‘dying’ part.
(Though I suppose the sect that believed a dead body came back as opposed to the sects that denied physical resurrection would have preferred interpreting it as referring to actual marriage and not death…)
It’s a bit annoying that they wrote it up so literally decades after he was dead.
It took a while to create a myth from scratch. Go read the early Batman and Superman comics, you can see how they struggled. In any case the restricted divorce rules probably came from Paul and the author of Mark’s pathetic attempts to read the OT Song of songs and Zeke 29.
How do you think Song of Songs or Ezekiel 29 relate to the divorce prohibition?
The erotica was reimagined and partially rewritten as an analogy for the relationship between Israel and God. In that context the idea of divorce becomes a seperation from God. Paul is not a fan of divorce unless of course the partner wasn’t a member of the church i.e. they were commiting adultery against God. He repurposed baptism to make it part of the marriage to Christ which wasn’t a big leap since Judaism already had a ritual like baptism prior to getting married. Then he flattened humanity, telling people that all were equally the same to the son of god making it acceptable for higher class, lower class, males, slaves, and all ethnic groups to be married to the same person.
All these vague ideas merged later when the Gospel writers needed to fill in the plot.
Possibly related note: Jesus’s rules on divorce do not permit a woman to leave an abusive marriage.
Citation needed por favor.
Sermon on the Mount. It is right there in Matthew. Most famous speech he supposedly gave.
If you are curious both it and the Sermon on the plain probably came from the same document that is lost to us.
Matthew 5? Yeah, it doesn’t say that.
But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
Sure. I’ve read it. You may want to take a look into what divorce and adultery meant in First Century Judea.
Not sure why I would considering that the man who wrote that gospel wasn’t from there and wasn’t of that religious group. Especially considering that “look at the context” is something only done by non-religious who haven’t yet finished cutting ties with their birth religion and is never a demand that the religious honor.
But yeah go right ahead. Explain how divorce and adultery really means exactly what you want it to me in “context”.
Sorry, 0 for 2 (or 3–you’re probably wrong about the author of Matthew too). Some folks are deeply religious and care a great deal about context and history, but something tells me you already know that.
The books are deeply flawed, but if you want to criticize them, you have to bother to read and understand them first. Making shit up because you have a chip on your shoulder doesn’t advance your position. All it does is prove the assumption of religious people, wise and ignorant alike, that you will readily lie if it serves your aim to paint their faith in a negative light.
When you engage in bad faith, you shouldn’t be alarmed when someone calls you on it, and it should come as no shock that people aren’t going to want to spend time correcting your errors.
Horrifying. Fucking barbaric shit you see in other countries where women have no rights.
So glad I signed up to vote this year. Missouri I’m disappointed in you so much right now
As an AFAB Missourian I’m fucking terrified.
Missouri is a toilet bowl!
A few years ago, right before the pandemic in fact, I came very close to moving to Missouri.
At the time, turning the job down because of the incredibly low final offer was one of the hardest things I’d ever done.
Ended up finding a much better job and moving back to my home town in a decidedly blue state, really dodged a bullet on that one.
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marriage is a complicated mess of a contract that married people don’t usually understand. it’s not consistent across state lines and the number of absurd legal situations it can lead to is crazy
I swear, marriage would be easier dealt with if both parties opted to incorporate a business, and put their relevant assets in the name of the corporation. Then at least separation would be pretty clean cut and dry. The Irony is - this is basically what marriage is.
No, marriage has a few more important rights, ranging from being able to make certain important medical decisions for the other (e.g. life support related) to being able to refuse to testify against each other.
Slavery
