A barrage of
recent
articles
claim the Republican Party is waging a
war on women
. The evidence? Alleged proposals to eliminate no-fault
divorce
in Texas, Louisiana, and Nebraska and comments by conservative pundits in support of such measures.
As a
lawyer
, I can tell you that the evidence that no-fault divorce is on its way out is thin. But as a
woman
, a registered Democrat, and a divorce victim, I wish the threat was real.
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All 50 states have no-fault divorce statutes. In all but
Mississippi
and
South Dakota
, the laws are unilateral, permitting spouses to divorce the other against their will and without cause.
Decades of research demonstrate that these laws have eroded
marriage and burdened families.
Yet, in all that time, no state has come close to eliminating them. This includes Texas, a state supposedly in the “
iron grip
” of Republicans, where I’ve been consulted about
failed
efforts
to reform the law. The
Nebraska Supreme Court has ruled the law constitutional.
As for Louisiana, I know a man who has been trying to get a bill passed there for 30 years.
Attempts to conjecture a conspiracy about no-fault divorce, then, serve no purpose but to sow further political discord and divert attention from the serious problems it causes.
After my own unwanted divorce, I co-founded
a volunteer bipartisan organization
to advocate divorce reform. Our modest
model legislation
and efforts like it have gained little traction even among Republicans, including in the red state of
Georgia
.
Regrettably, divorce is a
multibillion-dollar industry
whose stakeholders on both sides of the political aisle profit from family dissolution. On the other hand, family breakdown costs taxpayers
billions
.
Sure, some Republicans support eliminating no-fault. But too few have the courage to stand up and say so. Katha Pollitt writes that ”
divorce is part of the fabric of life
” for leading conservatives such as Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Lauren Boebert, Sarah Palin, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. (Let’s not forget Newt Gingrich.) She’s right and thus proves my point.
As she states, Ronald Reagan also signed the first no-fault statute into law. What she doesn’t tell you is that he later called it one of the
biggest mistakes of his career
.
Divorce rates
doubled
after the enactment of no-fault laws and remain
high
. At the same time,
marriage rates
have fallen to a historic low, with
married couples
constituting a minority of households. The laws have exacerbated poverty for
women
and spiked
suicide
rates among divorced men.
Children are suffering
on every scale of wellness and are
adversely affected
well into adulthood.
The hypocrisy of liberals is no better. When Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) spoke in support of the
Respect for Marriage Act
, he
recalled
a conversation between his daughter and her wife in which they wondered if their right to marry “could be undone.” What he conveniently failed to mention was that New York had already
codified
a guaranteed right of divorce on demand, allowing his daughter or her wife to undo their marriage easily, without the consent of the other, for any reason.
Prominent female Democrats used to be some of the most vocal critics of no-fault divorce. Former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia Leah Ward Sears, a Democrat on
President Barack Obama’s shortlist
for the Supreme Court, told me: “It concerns me greatly that with respect to one of the most important contractual obligations in society, no-fault permits one party to break his or her contractual obligation without due process.”
Even Hillary Clinton spoke extensively about no-fault’s negative consequences, especially to children,
advocating
the very sort of “mandatory “cooling off” periods, with education and counseling for parents, I’ve endorsed that policymakers have rejected.
As a senator, Clinton chastised other
legislators
on the Senate floor: “We should have been in this chamber trying to amend our Constitution to take away at the very first blush the idea of no-fault divorce.”
Speaking of the Constitution, unilateral no-fault divorce clearly violates the 14th Amendment. Too often in family court, defendants are deprived of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. That’s because no-fault divorce laws do not require any assertion of wrongdoing before spouses are forced to forfeit their marriage and marital property. They do not permit defendants their day in court — defendants may not oppose the divorce, offer evidence, or call or cross-examine witnesses. In every case, judges are required to enter divorce judgments in favor of plaintiffs, abrogating their constitutional and ethical duties to weigh the evidence and render impartial decisions.
Divorce reform is not about trapping spouses in marriages, as detractors claim. It’s about preserving what the Supreme Court calls
“[a] keystone of our social order
” and adhering to the Constitution. Over and over, the court has recognized the
fundamental right to marriage
, enumerating the sweeping benefits that denial of the right strips away, including the “stability important to children’s best interests.”
Conspiracy theorists ignore the wealth of research on the negative consequences of no-fault divorce, instead
cherry-picking data
about domestic violence that are not at odds with divorce reform. Domestic violence would remain a fault-based cause of action after the elimination of no-fault divorce; even modest reform efforts aimed at educating parents about divorce specifically
exempted
domestic violence victims. Most divorces involve
low-conflict marriages
. And batterers are far more often
boyfriends
than husbands. Besides, an extensive network of
state
and
federal
laws protects victims of domestic violence, independent of divorce laws.
If only there was a plot to eliminate no-fault divorce, I’d be in favor of it. So would millions of other divorce victims, no matter which party led the charge. Here’s to getting the conspiracy started.
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Beverly Willett
is a former NYC attorney and the co-founder of the Coalition for Divorce Reform. She is the author of
Disassembly Required: A Memoir of Midlife Resurrection
and a novel in progress called Nobody’s Fault.
