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.
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.