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By Amy Shearn | While America’s blamer-in-chief foments a culture of finding fault—blaming Democrats for the LA fires, “DEI” for plane crashes and immigrants for high housing prices—those of us who care about women’s and children’s rights are justly concerned about the future of no-fault divorce.
Although no-fault divorce hasn’t gotten to President Donald Trump’s chopping block yet, rumors have proliferated, and people are justifiably anxious. As Amanda Montei wrote in her newsletter Mad Woman, “No-fault divorce was one of many internet searches that surged in the days following the election. On TikTok, divorce coaches and influencers urged women to get divorced while they still could. Some divorce lawyers offered anecdotal evidence that divorce filings were already on the rise.”
I feel a cold chill reading about these things. My divorce five years ago was painful, but, because New York state has no-fault divorce laws (the last state to adopt this, phew), at least we didn’t have to codify our private struggles within a punitive framework. As of 2010, every state in the U.S. has instituted no-fault divorce, which does not require proof of wrongdoing.
No-fault divorce sets a legal precedent for ending a marriage without sinking into a morass of enmity. It’s a law that makes space, in other words, for divorce without blame.
For some, this is a matter of life and death. A 2006 study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that no-fault divorce “increases the likelihood that a domestic violence relationship ends and acts to transfer bargaining power toward the abused.” (In fault-based divorce, one of the parties can contest the other’s claims in court, a frightening possibility for a victim of abuse.) (Click here to read more) |
