The Missouri House chamber (Tim Bommel/Missouri House Communications).
I’ve written twice about the dangerous misunderstanding that you can’t get a divorce in Missouri while pregnant.
Though I’ve yelled about the fact that Missouri’s law is not unique and there is no current law barring a judge from granting a dissolution during pregnancy, I’m in favor of the legislature making that more explicit in our divorce statute because some judges are not granting dissolutions during pregnancy and some lawyers are afraid to ask them to.
But the bill passed in the House Thursday will accidentally make things worse for pregnant parties in divorce proceedings.
The problems with the bill are twofold.
First, it goes beyond clarifying that judges may grant a divorce during pregnancy to saying that they must when all other issues are resolved. It reads: “Pregnancy status shall not prevent the court from entering a judgment of dissolution of marriage or legal separation.”
This is bad.
You do not want a husband to be able to divorce his wife in the middle of her pregnancy against her will. He should not be able to force her to come back to court after the child is born if she prefers, as most people do, to establish paternity and have child support ordered when the divorce decree is granted. Also, he should not be able to unilaterally disqualify her from being on his health insurance.
The second problem is that the bill maintains and reinforces the requirement that a petition for divorce must state “whether the wife is pregnant.” This is unnecessary and dangerous. By my rough count, half of states do not require disclosure of pregnancy status at the time of filing in either their statutes or their standard divorce petition forms.
This requirement is dangerous because pregnancy significantly increases one’s risk of being the victim of abuse or homicide. And in abusive relationships, the time of filing for a divorce or an order of protection is a particularly dangerous moment. There is no justification for increasing the risk by requiring a party to tell her spouse she is pregnant at the same time that she tells him she is divorcing him.
Furthermore, the disclosure requirement has been widely misunderstood and misreported to mean that filing for divorce when pregnant either isn’t allowed or isn’t worth doing.
No, Missouri law does not require a pregnant woman to stay with her husband
The bill was first introduced by now Minority Leader Ashley Aune in 2023. I shared my concerns about the bill with Rep. Aune after she introduced it again last year and wrote about them for The Independent. She told me and other outlets that she was working to improve her bill.
However, the same flawed bill she introduced in 2023 and 2024 was introduced this session by two state representatives and one senator.
I shared my concerns with state Sen. Maggie Nurrenbern, who introduced the bill in the Senate. She understood the issues and was receptive to addressing them.
The bill’s sponsors in the House, Republican state Rep. Cecelie Williams of Dittmer and Democratic state Rep. Raychel Proudie of Ferguson, who are both survivors of domestic violence, held an emotional hearing in the House Children and Families Committee in which it was clear that their hearts are in the right place.
Yet they have been unwilling to answer my questions about the unintended consequences their bill as drafted could have for women in abusive situations that are different from what they experienced.
During the hearing, Williams waved away concerns about husbands being able to kick wives off their health insurance during pregnancy. She noted that pregnant women in Missouri can receive Medicaid. But getting on Medicaid is no small feat due to Missouri’s dysfunctional system, and even if one succeeds it is likely to result in her losing her obstetrician because few accept Medicaid. And finding a new obstetrician is no easy task in a state covered in maternity care deserts.
The pregnant party should be permitted to ask the court to delay the divorce.
At the end of the hearing, Republican state Rep. David Dolan of Scott noted that there isn’t anything in current Missouri law that prohibits a judge from granting a dissolution during pregnancy so this might be an education issue. Williams and Proudie agreed.
Dolan is correct, but at this point it is extremely important to enact something that clarifies the law because the bad practice of judges not finalizing during pregnancy when warranted can only have been hardened by the media narrative that judges are currently barred from doing so. And, we now have a viral misunderstanding that Missouri law is so bad that it isn’t worth attempting to leave your abusive husband while pregnant. That is a misunderstanding that could get someone killed.
Though the problematic bill passed unanimously in the House on Thursday, Sen. Nurrenbern can fix it in the Senate.
We have rare bipartisan support for making the divorce process better for pregnant individuals in Missouri. This is a solvable problem. Let’s get a bill that actually solves it.