Divorce case may lead to change
OLYMPIA – When a woman wants to divorce an abusive husband, it shouldn’t matter whether she’s pregnant, women’s advocates told a legislative committee Friday.
But sometimes it does. In a highly publicized case in Spokane recently, Shawnna J. Hughes’ request to divorce her husband was denied because Hughes is pregnant.
“It is the policy of the state that you cannot dissolve a marriage when one of the parties is pregnant,” Spokane County Superior Court Judge Paul Bastine said last month.
In response, nearly a dozen state representatives want to change the law to prohibit courts from using a woman’s pregnancy as the basis to deny or delay a divorce.
“There is confusion about the current state of the law in this area,” said Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson, D-Seattle, prime sponsor of House Bill 1171.
Sara Ainsworth, of the Northwest Women’s Law Center, said the group’s hotline has fielded several calls from women facing similar rulings in both Eastern and Western Washington. The most recent cases, she said, were from King, Snohomish and Skagit counties.
“This is not a unique decision,” she said.
In March 2004, Hughes, a 27-year-old medical assistant, sought a divorce from her husband, Carlos Hughes. He was convicted in 2002 of beating her. The couple have two children. Their divorce was approved last October by a court commissioner.
By the time the divorce was approved, however, Hughes was pregnant by another man, a fact that was not mentioned in the legal paperwork given to her husband. Under the state’s Uniform Parentage Act, a husband is presumed to be the father of any child born up to 300 days after a divorce.
Bastine, saying that the paternity issue must be resolved before the divorce could take effect, rescinded the divorce in November.
“It is simply a matter of waiting for the child to be born so paternity can be established,” he said at the time.
The judge was unswayed by a letter to the court in which Hughes said she plans to marry the father of the baby, who has agreed to support the child. A court order prohibits Carlos Hughes from having contact with his wife.
Nonetheless, forcing a woman to stay married to an abusive husband makes no sense, regardless of whether she’s pregnant, said Shawnna Hughes’ attorney, Terri Sloyer. The case is being appealed.
Allowing judges to delay a divorce because of pregnancy, she said, could leave abused women facing a horrific choice: “A woman … may actually be forced to choose between her life and the life of the child,” Sloyer said, with the woman having an abortion to escape an abusive marriage. The top cause of death for pregnant women, she said, is homicide by an abusive partner.
Also, she said, an abuser could use the power of the state to keep his pregnant victim from leaving him. An abuser also could intentionally prevent a divorce by impregnating the woman, Sloyer said. Conversely, she said, a woman could trap a man in a marriage by becoming pregnant – even by another man.
Present law is not clear-cut, said Rick Bartholomew, a lawyer with the family law section of the state bar association. Some judges allow divorce for pregnant women and some don’t, he said. Others may first require paternity statements from the wife, the husband and the father of the unborn child.