How divorce affects marital partners (1)

Will women be worse off with Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando’s divorce Bill? I believe they will.

The divorce law will force a woman into a divorce that she may not even want. It will allow a married man to divorce his wife, possibly in exchange for a younger, more attractive woman. He will be able to just walk out on his marriage and family to get a divorce – no questions asked. I have never heard of anyone being allowed to negate on a legal contract without incurring penalties. Not until Dr Pullicino Orlando presented his no-fault divorce law that is wholly geared against women.

A divorced man may choose to remarry and have another child. Provided that he is able to demonstrate that he cannot financially support his new family and at the same time pay maintenance in respect of his first marriage, he may quite possibly apply to the courts to request that he stops any child maintenance allocated to his first wife and children. This is a travesty.

The divorce movement claim that a battered woman should be given a second chance. Who in their right mind wants a woman to undergo such abuse anyway? Of course, the wife-beater was kept conveniently out of sight in their billboard that depicted the grim looking woman with a black eye.

The truth is that the wife-beater will also be set free with divorce. Freed to remarry and in all likelihood continue to abuse another wife. How then did divorce solve the issue of wife beating? Simply, it did not solve anything. It just shifted the problem onto another woman.

The proposed divorce law is perfectly crafted to suit men with the divorced women of Malta and their children becoming poorer and even more dependent on men.

This is of course the worst possible kind of divorce as it favours one sex over the other and the siblings of the second marriage over those of the first. This divorce law will create a subgroup, a new minority class of divorced women and their fatherless children.

The anti-family movement have gone to enormous lengths to disguise the implications of this law by reframing it and calling it “responsible”. I feel that the women of Malta deserve far better than a divorce law that places them at a disadvantage to men.