Sunday, December 4, 2011

Ronald Reagan and No-Fault Divorce

In an attempt to reduce the pain of divorce, Ronald Reagan (as governor) passed legislation in the State of California that was the nation’s first No-Fault Divorce. Because he was recently divorced, his hope was to “the divorce process less acrimonious, less contentious, and less expensive.” Regardless of his hopes, he later told his son Michael that the No-Fault Legislation was “one of the worst mistakes he ever made in public office.” The idea behind No-Fault divorce was that a married couple would be able to get a divorce without blaming fault on one of the individuals. Ideally this would lead to easier divorce. Yes and No. Passed in 1969, this legislation was passed in a decade where divorce rates hiked 80 in the United States. And this legislature, if anything, assisted in hiking the divorce rate. In the eleven years after Reagan’s No-Fault Divorce legislature, the divorce rate hiked another 86 percent. Micheal McManus of the Family in America Journal notes that “for every two marriages established since 1975, about one existing marriage was dissolved.” The divorce rate is not that about 50% of marriages end in divorce, but rather that one couple divorces for every two couples get married each year. This figure is still not settling. Divorce is still devastating to both individuals and the rates are still rising. McManus also comments that the suicide among divorced women is “triple that of married women” and “five times higher [among divorced men] than among married men.”

The effect of divorce on children is also devastating. Going back to Ronald Reagan and the example of his divorce, his son Michael, in his book Twice Adopted, writes about his experience as a child in the middle of a divorce. Michael Reagan writes that “divorce is where two adults take everything that matters to a child—the child’s home, family, security, and sense of being loved and protected—and they smash it all up, leave it in ruins on the floor, then walk out and leave the child to clean up the mess.” This image he creates here is devastating. Divorce may be “action or an instance of legally dissolving a marriage,” but what it is really dissolving is the family. In the cases where divorced individuals are parents, the children are also a part of what is being dissolved, and the No-Fault Divorce laws do not consider this. To show, statistically, the effects of divorce on children, McManus references a study by the Heritage Foundation. He writes that “children of divorced parents are three times more likely than their peers from intact homes to be expelled from school or to have a baby out of wedlock as a teenager, six times as apt to live in poverty, and are twelve times more likely to be incarcerated.” Surely governer Reagan did not expect this when he passed the No-Fault Divorce legislation in the United State and I can see why it was “one of the worst mistakes he ever made in public office”.

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