There is a reason politicians don't want pregnant women getting divorced

And no, it has nothing to do with the well-being of the child

In Texas, Alabama, Missouri, and Arizona, pregnant women cannot divorce.

There are no exceptions for domestic violence.

These laws are not new, but they’re back in the news because a lawmaker in Missouri introduced a bill to change the law in that state. It’s unlikely the GOP-led legislature will pass the bill. These laws also have abortion bans — a sort of catch-22 for people who can become pregnant.

These laws initially came about, as so many bad laws do, as a paternalistic measure to make sure a child was provided for after birth. But when you add in the context that these states have banned abortions, what these laws essentially do is force women into positions of financial or emotional vulnerability and into marriage and into lives of unpaid labor.

In 2022, researchers revealed the results of a decade-long study that examined outcomes for women who had been denied abortions and women who had not. Those who had been denied abortions had worse financial and career outcomes than those who’d been able to get them. The study’s lead researcher, Diana Greene Foster, spoke to NPR in 2022 and explained, “We see big differences … in socioeconomic well-being. This is not just about poverty, although we see that people who are denied abortions are more likely to live in households where there just isn't enough money for basic living needs... And they're more likely to be raising children alone if they are denied the abortion than if they receive one. They're equally likely to be in a relationship, whether they received or were denied an abortion.”

Laws that force pregnant women to stay married aren’t about the well-being of the child or mother. They’re about restricting women’s freedoms.

Earlier this month, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that an embryo is a person, entitling it to rights and protections under the law. Writing about the decision, Guardian columnist Moira Donegan observed, “For the foreseeable future, frozen cells in Alabama have the same legal status there as you or I do. Is this an absurd elevation of the status of an embryo, or an obscene degradation of human beings? The answer, of course, is both.”

Donegan argues the ruling’s logic may extend to banning IUDs and Plan B, which would inevitably force more women into pregnancy. Given Alabama’s law preventing pregnant people from divorcing, this will trap more women into unwanted marriages in place of providing any kind of social safety net, as the sociologist Jessica Calarco pointed out on Twitter,

Calarco’s forthcoming book Holding it Together, which will be published in June, documents extensive research in support of this point. “That work — the unpaid and underpaid care work disproportionately done by women — maintains the illusion of a DIY society,” she tweeted. “It makes it seem as though we can get by without a real social safety net. And means the engineers and profiteers don't have to pay.”

Pregnancy, as the law professor Caren Myers Morrison argued in 2022, is a new form of coverture.

Coverture was the legal doctrine in English common law that once formed the basis of American marriage laws. Essentially, it meant that in marriage a woman and man became one person, legally, and that person was the man. The woman was literally subsumed under the law. 

In her essay, published in the Virginia Law Review, Morrison explains, “Fetal coverture doesn’t even provide the contractual benefits that marital coverture did. Far from sheltering a woman from certain liabilities, it opens up a whole new world of health risks and legal peril, dovetailing with an idea that, while all life is sacred, some lives are more sacred than others. Just as marital coverture merged the identity of the woman into that of her husband, leaving only one person standing — the man — so fetal coverture merges the identity of the woman into that of her fetus.”

Forcing people into pregnancy forces them into a position of legal and financial subservience.

If politicians actually cared about providing for women and children, they’d ensure unfettered access to abortion and make divorce laws less restrictive. But this has never been about the well-being of children and families, only the subjugation of women.

And now, some book news

I just got news that my book, This American Ex-Wife went into a second printing! This means, the book is selling and you all are reading it. Thank you to everyone buying it for themselves, for their moms, for their friends, and also to all the husbands reading it too.

A long excerpt of the book went up in the Washington Post, today (gift link). Here is a sampling of it. (You can also hear me reading it!)

Michael Warner summed it up perfectly in his book “The Trouble With Normal,” when he called marriage “nothing if not a program for privilege.” Marriage, simply put, can’t be the solution to societal ills, because it isn’t accessible to all people in our society.

Compare the situation in the United States against the research evidence showing that countries with well-funded social safety nets have less divorce. A 2019 article on the Census Bureau website points out that in societies where divorce is relatively easy to access, “the number of marriages increases by at least 9%. Female suicides decrease by 8% to 16% and domestic violence decreases by around 30%. Women start working more outside of the home — up to 7 percentage points more — increasing their economic clout in a marriage by bringing income that they control into the home.”

Maybe instead of discouraging divorce and pressuring people to marry for financial security, we should make a more equitable society.