The Law That Quietly Destroyed the American Family

In 1969, then-California Governor Ronald Reagan signed the nation's first no-fault divorce law. He thought it would smooth things over for families who had to go through divorces. You know, save time, cut legal costs, and protect the kids from having to sit through ugly court battles. But we all know what happened next. Divorce rates soared 250% nationwide from 1960 to 1980. Reagan's own son, Michael, later wrote, Dad said signing that bill was one of the worst mistakes of his political career.

If your parents didn't divorce, your aunts and uncles, cousins, teachers, preachers, boyfriends, or best friends' parents probably did. And I know no one wants to talk about it, but maybe why we don't want to talk about it is because that might mean having to figure out how to fix it. Today's rate of divorce, and all the cultural and personal fallout that comes from it, would strike anyone from before 1960 as a nightmare scenario, but now, over half a century later, we've gotten used to the unthinkable.

When a law has the opposite effect its framers intended, and a 250% opposite effect at that, we would expect some backtracking. We would expect someone to raise his hand and say, hit the pause button here. We would expect voter outrage, or at least a public debate. But that didn't happen. Today, if a candidate even suggests divorce reform, the media sets itself on fire. Just ask J.D. Vance. But it's not just the media. In the last 20 years, most Americans have become a whole lot more permissive toward divorce.

The share who said it should be easier to get a divorce was just 29% in 2006. Today, 52%. Acceptance of divorce has become widespread and normalized among the very people most hurt by it, the adult children of divorce. The data is in, and we have a five-alarm fire. Children of divorce earn less over their lifetimes. They complete fewer years of education. They have poorer physical and mental health outcomes. They experience more instability in housing, jobs, and relationships. And these aren't just one-off tragedies.

They are predictable, measurable outcomes. And yet, the very children who suffered from divorce grew up to defend it. What is going on here? Let's dig in. But first, a word from our sponsor. We are called to pray for our enemies, but do you know how? New from Holy Heroes comes another prayer card to help. This large prayer card includes two prayers requested by Jesus himself. One, to pray for your enemies by name. The second, to pray to sincerely forgive all those who trespass against you.

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In 1969, Reagan's Family Law Act introduced the concept of irreconcilable differences. No fault, no blame, just an exit. By 2010, all 50 states plus D.C. had followed suit. New York was the last state to sign on. The pitch sounded sensible. Less acrimony, fewer lies. Cheaper courts.

Supporters of no-fault divorce are quick to point to a few key statistics they say prove that the legislation was a good thing. A University of Pennsylvania report claimed that states that enacted no-fault divorce laws saw an 8-16% decrease in suicide rates for wives and a 30% decline in domestic violence in the decade following. With no barriers to divorce, women in abusive situations could get out faster. Thank you for watching. But that's only part of the truth. Yes, married women saw a decline in suicides, but the National Institutes of Health also identified, quote, an alarmingly high risk of suicide for men and women enduring a marital separation and a status of being separated or divorced accounted for 13.6% of male and 21.8% of female suicides.

Divorce didn't suddenly become less depressing. And it didn't disappear from courtrooms. It just metastasized into American culture. Before 1960, fewer than a third of marriages ended in divorce. After no fault, half of them did. Today, we hover around 40%, but far fewer people marry at all, and then only at older ages than in previous generations. And look, things were not all white picket fences in the 1960s. Something was wrong. In Pleasantville, Gloria Steinem called family homes comfortable concentration camps for women.

That line was a radical lie, but she was arguably trying to describe a real pain. Marriage reformers saw women trapped in abusive homes with no way out, no-fault divorce promised an escape route. But instead, the legislation codified a radical new definition of marriage. Because when relationships became legally disposable, Lifelong commitment itself became negotiable, with massive ramifications that wounded all of society, and most of all, children. Think of it. Historically, marriage meant the lifelong union of a man and a woman.

It also bound them together as parents to their children, ensuring full support of all parties with the most at stake in the institution of marriage, not the state, but real men, women, and their kids. But if one spouse can unilaterally end a marriage, neither spouse has reason to invest fully. Economist Betsy Stevenson of the University of Pennsylvania found that after states adopted unilateral divorce, Couples reduced their investment in what she calls marriage-specific capital, meaning education, children, household specialization, and even home ownership.

There were clear costs. Writing in the New York Times, historian Stephanie Kuntz noted that unilateral divorce decreased the bargaining power of the person who wants the marriage to last. Translation, it empowers the one who wants out. No matter how trivial the reason. Yet, Kuntz and others accepted the trade-off. Weakening the marriage bond to near meaninglessness, they argued, was worth it, if it meant fewer cases of domestic abuse. But was that the answer? Here's the thinking. Bad behavior weakens the institution. We must end the bad behavior because it hurts people.

So, let's gut the institution. Domestic abuse weakens marriage. It even destroys people who enter marriage and the children born to them. Fixing marriage is hard because marriage is hard, intimate, and messy. So, the thinking went, let's fundamentally change how the law defines marriage.

This is the logic that codified the me-first culture. Everything liberalism gets wrong about the human person, applied by law, to marriages. Lifelong commitment between two people for the purpose of raising the next generation? No. Strike out lifelong. Anyone can leave at any point for any reason. But did it fix marriage? Did the divorce revolution end the suffering? Or, by redefining marriage? Did we just create a whole new breed of victims? This isn't a difficult question to answer. We have the data.

After 50 years of divorce revolution, we know that for children of divorce, teen pregnancy risk increases by 63 percent, incarceration risk by 43 percent, mortality rises by 35 to 55 percent, and adult earnings are significantly lower. Children who experienced divorce in the first five years of life earn about 9% less by age 25. By 27, that drops to 13% less. No-fault divorce elevates structural injustices against children by privileging parents over and against their own kids. And divorce isn't just a family affair.

It affects the broader culture, too. Society becomes poorer, more dangerous, And more depressed because of divorce. There is a fragmentation of social order that destabilizes whole communities. Now the rich can shield themselves and their children with purchasing power, tutors, nannies, therapy, safer housing. Lower income families can't, so they suffer more, and the inequalities only snowball down the generations. Marriage has been deconstructed, both legally and emotionally. Divorce, meanwhile, has become a multi-billion dollar industry.

The craziest days of the divorce revolution seem to be settling down. It's no longer true that half of marriages end in divorce, at least in most demographics. Marriage rates have returned to pre-pandemic levels, while divorce rates exhibit a downward trend. Cultural revolutions have a way of burning out. Revolutionaries get older, they're replaced. But the fact remains, no one wants to touch the decidedly divorce-centered culture that this revolution left behind. Redefining marriage broke down families, and when you break down marriage, you don't fix it.

You just stop forming families. That's the tragedy. Fifty-five years later, we have multiple generations who see it's a wonderful life as a fantasy and happy marriages as repression. Despite all the evidence of how bad it was, there is little appetite and no Republican plot to reattach children to marriage law. We still tell ourselves that no-fault divorce saved the day. We've adopted wholesale the worldview that marriage is a private contract between two autonomous adults. based on their feelings, not a public institution ordered toward children.

And that's the great mistake. The state never licensed marriage to protect love in the beginning, but to protect children. Marriage was meant to bind mothers and fathers to each other for the sake of the next generation. No-fault divorce may have cleaned up the courtroom, but it rewrote the covenant, turning a lifelong union into a temporary contract. And when marriage ceased to be durable, it lost its power to serve the common good. Ironically, family courts now entangle the state even deeper than ever into private lives and bedrooms, deciding which adults get interests in a child's life.

We flipped marriage upside down, centering on adults instead of asking, what is owed to the child? Children of divorce suffered a terrible injustice, so why doesn't anyone want to fix it? Are we just moving on? For decades, that's what those kids were told. This was an adult decision, no one's fault, life goes on. Except it doesn't. Lila Miller's amazing book, Primal Loss, cracks open that cultural cover story, giving voice to the children of divorce, what she calls the most under-reported story of our time.

One woman, now a 35-year-old mother herself, calls her parents' split amicable, and yet says, quote, a parent can start over, but for the child, the world splits in two forever. That's not a one-time heartbreak. It's a lifelong fracture. And maybe that's why we stay so quiet. Because deep down, we fear that we might want to exit a marriage someday, too. Or we don't want to hurt our divorced parents and siblings. Or hardest of all, we've learned to defend the very wound that broke us, a kind of emotional Stockholm Syndrome.

But silence doesn't heal anyone. It just keeps the wound open. So, where do we go? If our leaders won't fight for marriage, we have to. First, we must break the silence. Speak the truth, even when it's uncomfortable. Second, we have to rebuild our culture of commitment. Be honest about what marriage is. A lifelong covenant, not a contract. We need to find and celebrate strong marriages around us. Invest in your own marriage with more passion than your 401k, because the sooner we face the truth, the brighter the future will be for our kids.

And I've seen it myself. People who walked through the wreckage of divorce and became faithful spouses, loving parents, whole again by the grace of God. Healing is possible, and redemption is real. We all know people like this. And that's what marriage can still be. Not a casualty of our age, but the quiet revolution that saves it.

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