Protect landlords? I work in property management, and I can tell you this does NOTHING to protect landlords. There are plenty of laws in place to protect landlords, but they're all connected with, yanno, landlording.
Are abortion-havers (or, more relevant to the law at hand, birth-control users) more likely to skip out on the rent? Are they more likely to trash the place? Are they more likely to cook meth in the rented space and thereby risk explosions or seizure by police? Do they throw loud disturbing parties at 3:00 AM? These are the kind of things that landlords are protected against (with some variation by state, of course).
Renters, on the other hand, have (again, with variation by state), protections of their own. If the place becomes uninhabitable for reasons beyond their control (say a storm knocks a tree through the roof), the landlord is tasked with providing suitable substitute housing until the rental property is back up and running. Rental properties have to be safe, so no lead paint, no asbestos, no mold, etc. They need electricity and running water. They need HVAC sufficient to keep tenants from dying of cold or heat (depending on where you live). And one major one: they're protected from descrimination based on (along with the standard race, religion, etc) family status. Now, in the most common scenario, this protects families with children. It's understandable why some landlords might not be too keen on renting to people with kids, children are, after all, noisy, messy, and often destructive... but any landlord who denies rental space to someone because they have children is going to be in deep doodoo.
How is it more justifiable to deny rental space to someone because they don't have children and are taking steps to remain that way? Even more to the point, what business is that of the landlord's?
