In 2022 alone, 670,000 divorces were registered in the United States.
Photo: Getty Images – Brejeq
In 1969, Ronald Reagan – a conservative leader in the United States – forever changed the country’s position on divorce. He, as governor of California, signed the nation’s first “no-fault” divorce law, which allowed people to end their marriages without having to prove to a judge that the spouse had committed adultery, abandonment or abuse.
The measure by Reagan – who was also divorced – paved the way for other states in the country to adopt similar laws. What happened after? A change came that statistics show was positive for society. Since 1976, with more states joining the trend of making divorce easier, domestic violence rates began to drop by almost half. Femicides also fell, as did suicides among women, who also perceived themselves as more empowered in relationships. All this is the result of the decision of a conservative leader. However, the thinking of the American right today is different.
The Republican Party in states such as Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Nebraska, among others, wants to reverse the measures promoted by Reagan and reinstall a system in which it would be more difficult for couples to divorce. According to party figures, such as Oklahoma State Senator Dusty Deevers, divorce has destroyed the “social fabric,” which is why bills have been promoted to eliminate the possibility of no-fault divorce. Others, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson, have supported these measures.
“Unilateral no-fault divorce clearly violates the 14th Amendment,” Beverly Willet, co-chair of the Divorce Reform Coalition, said earlier this year at the Washington Examiner.
Do divorces have a negative impact? One of the main concerns is what happens to families. A 2019 study published in World Psychology and cited by CNN found that while children of divorced couples may face some negative repercussions, “most children whose parents divorce are resilient and do not present obvious psychological problems.” The study adds that there are countless other factors that could affect the well-being of a child of divorce that have nothing to do with the divorce itself.
Now, if these laws are approved—and they can be approved in states where the Republican Party dominates the Legislature and the Executive, such as Texas—it would produce an irreversible setback for millions of people in the nation. As noted by Kristen Marinaccio, a family law attorney at Vox, divorce laws in Democratic states require that the people involved in the separation reside in the state where the divorce will take effect. In this way, couples would not be able to travel to another state to avoid the restrictions — as some women have tried to do in the face of anti-abortion laws in the south of the country.
“This is part of an effort to re-establish conservative family values, encourage heterosexual marriage and motherhood, and disempower women,” says Marcia Zug, a family law professor at the University of South Carolina at Vox.
In 2022 alone, 670,000 divorces were registered in the country, indicating that a measure to restrict access to divorce would be highly unpopular, even in Republican-leaning southern states. That is precisely the most striking thing about this debate: that the states where Republicans want to boost barriers to divorce are the same ones where there are more separations, as the following map demonstrates. Even so, with a series of conservative victories to strengthen traditional family values, it is not unreasonable that they are encouraged to recover the divorce rules that governed before 1969 in certain states.
