Pregnant? Abused? Stay Married.

A Spokane judge has ruled that a pregnant woman seeking a divorce from her estranged husband, who beat her, cannot have the divorce because it would make her child a bastard .

The case pits a first-year attorney who argues that state law allows any couple to divorce if neither spouse challenges it against a longtime family-law judge who says the rights of the unborn child in this type of case trump a woman's right to divorce.
"There's a lot of case law that says it is important in this state that children not be illegitimized," Spokane County Superior Court Judge Paul Bastine told The Spokesman-Review newspaper.

Amazing how those "unborn children" have rights that the rest of us don't have. Judge Bastine obviously believes that it is better for a child to grow up watching its mother being abused by the child's father than it is to grow up with a mother who is not married. Family values. Obey the father, even when he's an abusive jerk.

Ironically, the woman, who has been estranged from her husband for two years, is pregnant with another man's child and has sought the divorce so that she can marry the baby's father.

"It's not the child's fault that mom got pregnant," Bastine said. "The answer is, you don't go around doing that when you're not divorced."

So, the single woman's real crime was that she was a fornicator, or in this case, an adultress. Judge Bastine might prefer the biblical remedy for this sin, a remedy shared in the Koran. Perhaps the Spokane downtown area might be cordoned off for a good old-fashioned rock-throwing party, with Judge Bastine casting the first stone.