…The approval drew an outcry from members of the “First Wives Advocacy Group,” a coalition of mostly older women who receive permanent alimony and who assert that their lives will be upended without the payments.
“On behalf of the thousands of women who our group represents, we are very disappointed in the governor’s decision to sign the alimony-reform bill. We believe by signing it, he has put older women in a situation which will cause financial devastation. The so-called party of ‘family values’ has just contributed to erosion of the institution of marriage in Florida,” Jan Killilea, a 63-year-old Boca Raton woman who founded the group a decade ago, told The News Service of Florida in a text message Friday.
I guess where I disagree is that the working parent presumably benefits from the non working parent’s labor. They decide together how their lives look, agree together that less income is worth it for the other benefits of the person staying home, and then afterwards the partner who stayed home has permanently lowered earning potential. Those are fine decisions to make together, but if you split up, the parent who kept working financially benefits and the other is fucked. I don’t think the goal should be to maintain the same lifestyle, because that is going to be impossible (though if there are kids, their lifestyles should change as little as possible), but trying to equalize their changed earning potentials makes sense to me.