The turning point for Destonee was a car ride.
She describes a scene of emotional abuse: Pregnant with her third child, her husband yelled at her while her older two kids listened in the car. “He would call me awful things in front of them,” she says. “And soon my son would call me those names too.”
She made up her mind to leave him, but when she went to a lawyer to file for divorce, she was told to come back when she was no longer pregnant.
Destonee requested she be identified by only her first name. She says she still lives with abusive threats from her ex-husband. She couldn’t end her marriage because Missouri law requires women seeking divorce to disclose whether they’re pregnant — and state judges won’t finalize divorces during a pregnancy. Established in the 1970s, the rule was intended to make sure men were financially accountable for the children they fathered.
Let me guess Missouri also assumes the father of a child is the husband, and even with modern DNA testing won’t change that even if it’s proven wrong. So the husband of a cheater that gets pregnant would be on the hook for child support for a child that was not his.
EDIT: I make a semi-related post pointing out other fucked up State marriage rights shit and somehow people try and twist that around as if I’m saying the OP doesn’t matter. No wonder nothing worthwhile gets fixed in this goddamned country while companies run roughshod over everyone. People are too busy arguing with each other over an opinion they disagree with, that they made up in a comment section of a website that doesn’t fucking matter.
What do you think is more important- that we stop cheating women trying to get child support from their ex-husbands or we allow women to divorce men who beat them?
Why does one of these things need to be higher priority than the other? They all need to be fixed. We don’t have to do one at a time.
Because one of those things ends up killing women. The other doesn’t generally end up killing anyone.
I’m not sure why this has to be spelled out to you.
Nothing needs to be spelled out. They are two separate issues. I never claimed one was better or worse than the other. I was just pointing out that there are other ass-backwards marriage related issues as well. We don’t have to focus on just one fucked up issue at a time to get things done in society.
Reading comprehension really has gone downhill online, people jumping to conclusions all over the place just because they want to be angry at something or assume everyone else is.
You sure implied it by suggesting they should be of equal priority:
I would suggest that most people in this world would consider stopping murder to be the higher priority than stopping fraud. I’m not sure why you don’t, but…
So prioritized things have a higher or lower precedence or importance. But if they have equal precedence, then there is no priority. Greater than and less than are not equal.
You might want to re-read my responses because your reading comprehension of them is lacking. I never said one issue was more important than the other. In fact, I never said they were equal importance either. I just made a comment pointing out there are also other marital law issues.
You are assuming I said or meant some sort of priority between issues, but I never said one was more important. I said they all needed to be fixed and we don’t have to do one thing at a time. That explicitly doesn’t put any sort of priority on anything.
Repeatedly insulting me does not make what you said any less an implication that fraud and murder are equally bad.
Furthermore, a compromise law such as the one you stated would take a long time to craft, whereas repealing this law would be fast.
So maybe just repeal the law and then work on your ideas?
And you claiming I implied something doesn’t mean I actually did. I never made the claim you seem so stuck on saying I did.
Ah yes, so fast it’s been done already right? Because trying to change it versus repealing it is clearly why it’s still on the books. It’s not at all because legislators want it to stay, or just don’t care.
Missouri does appear to have a way for citizens to petition statutory changes directly, so people could actually put together a repeal themselves if they wanted to, they just… haven’t I guess?
Well yeah, of course the problem here would be child support and not divorce is functionally impossible in Missouri.
I’m not saying it’s not an issue at all, only an idiot could read by previous post in that way. But I guess I just consider that a lower overall priority than the State forcing someone to pay for another person’s child for 18 years while the actual father gets off scot free. A lot of people live their lives separated from their spouse but not divorced every single day, even in states where divorce is easy.
But really I was just pointing out other ass-backwards laws various states have around marriage rights. Like the fact that even in 2024 there are several states that consider marital rape separate and treat it different than “regular” rape cases. Just because you’re married, if you are raped by your spouse it’s treated differently than if it were literally any other human on the planet. In some cases either with lighter sentencing or in a few cases, not a crime at all. In California for instance, even with the latest updates signed into law in 2021, sexual intercourse with a person who is “incapable of giving legal consent because of mental disorder or developmental or physical disability” is not rape if the 2 people are married. So it’s totally cool as long as the spouse is disabled, and unable to defend themselves.
I’d say that’s a pretty big issue as well, but I guess divorce is a bigger issue than the State forcing someone to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars through no fault of their own, or literal rape. Those are definitely tiny issues compared to a divorce, hardly worth even pointing out really.
Quick tip, if you call someone an idiot in the first lines, they’re absolutely not going to read what you have to say afterwards.
If someone jumps to a conclusion that I never actually posted, attempting to call me out for something I never said, I’m going to call it out, don’t really care what anyone else thinks.
This will get you far
Without the divorce, a pregnant woman may not have access to enough assets to move out and get into a safe and stable living situation. Women are most likely to be murdered while they are pregnant, forcing them to stay married to an abuser can be a life or death matter for them. Paying child support to provide for a child born to your spouse from an affair is a hardship, but it isn’t trapping someone with the person most likely to murder them during the most vulnerable time in their life. You also assumed based on nothing that men are forced to pay for their wife’s affair children for the duration of their childhoods, but a quick search shows that Missouri allows husbands to deny paternity and even provides free paternity testing through the Family Support Division.
You really do come across as a cruel and heartless person when you claim a true article about women’s physical safety during a vulnerable time in their lives is a lower priority than a completely fictional scenario revolving around non-existent laws and their fictional financial exploitation of men. There is a time and place to talk about grievances men have with our paternity laws, but choosing this story when your assumption was dead wrong is in exceptionally poor taste.