Marriage Policy, No-Fault Divorce, and Welfare Reform Debate

Introduction: Marriage Policy and Welfare Reform

The logic behind the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act — and a U.S. House resolution in 2004 dealing with strengthening the original law's emphasis on promoting marriage — "was based upon the idea that by encouraging marriage the marriage rate will increase and the poverty rates will go down and the individuals on welfare will decrease. The original Welfare Reform Act linked the decline in two-parent households to an increase in poverty levels" (Kickham & Ford, 2009). However, the question arises as to whether such legislation treats the root causes of poverty. Single-parent households may be more common in underprivileged environments, but that may be more due to a lack of hope among all residents rather than a unique feature of single-parent households. Children being born to unwed mothers may be more of a symptom than a cause.

Problems with Government-Engineered Marriage

The idea that government should "engineer" the lives of the poor — particularly in the private sphere of marriage — seems like a potential violation of individual rights. Incentivizing wedlock does not necessarily mean incentivizing positive marriages. "In the ideology of promoting healthy marriages, divorce is seen as the antithesis of that goal. Lowering the divorce rate, as suggested by state policymakers, is assumed by those same entities as an important component of the overall effort to stabilize marriages" (Kickham & Ford, 2009). However, the effect of such laws is that all marriages are presumed to be better than a severed union, regardless of whether those marriages are truly "healthy" and promote the welfare of all parties involved.

Is a marriage in which one spouse is abusive a healthy one? Incentivizing a woman to remain in a marriage that is harmful to herself or her children is a potentially dangerous result of such policies, given that women often already feel emotionally and economically unable to leave such unions. Although children of divorce may score less well on indicators of social health than children from two-parent homes, the question of correlation versus causation once again arises: children from divorced homes may have experienced a less stable, more contentious upbringing even before the divorce occurred.

Race, Class, and the Root Causes of Poverty

Race and class are also implicated in the rationale behind these laws. It is assumed that individuals receiving public assistance should be compelled by law — ostensibly "for their own good" — to remain married, while middle-class and upper-class individuals face no such compulsion. Treating the root causes of social inequality and family instability — such as poor educational systems, a lack of jobs, and a lack of affordable housing — would be a more effective way to address the stresses that young people and their families in underprivileged environments must face.

This conclusion is supported by studies of childhood poverty, which "find no reliable effect from marriage initiatives... [and] address one dimension within the complexity of factors that perpetuate childhood poverty" (Kickham & Ford, 2009). The only positive relationship that was found was that as "unemployment rates increase, so does childhood poverty. With respect to divorce, however, the unemployment rate is not a powerful predictor" (Kickham & Ford, 2009). Focusing on marriage does not create jobs, reduce child poverty levels, or alleviate the social and physical stresses that poverty imposes upon children. Focusing on job training, rather than marriage promotion, is likely to be the more empowering emphasis in welfare reform (Bitler et al., 2004).

The Rise of No-Fault Divorce

Before the widespread acceptance of no-fault divorce, couples were often forced to fabricate grounds for divorce — for example, providing false evidence of one or both parties' infidelity. Since its widespread adoption, many have argued that making marriage easier to dissolve has reduced respect for the institution. There is statistical evidence bearing on this concern. For example, young people appear more willing to enter into marriage since the creation of no-fault divorce: "Controlling for state-level heterogeneity and for time trends, the standard deviation of the log age at first marriage drops by approximately 5% with the introduction of no-fault divorce... the mean age at first marriage increases slightly, suggesting that the mean person is slightly worse off with no-fault divorce" if marital stability is assumed to be the goal of public policy (Allen, 2006, p. 547).

The 1960s and 1970s saw the widespread introduction of no-fault statutes across the country. This development did not make much of an impact in some states, given the previous "easy availability of no-fault divorces in neighboring states" and because of "a legal system that had already implemented no-fault divorce de facto... [but] for 25 of the 32 states which passed no-fault between 1965 and 1974... divorce rates [were] higher than predicted by reasonable projections from the pre-implementation years" (The Cost of No-Fault Divorce, 2000, Society, 37). This suggests that when no-fault divorce was made available to those who could not previously obtain it, it did facilitate the dissolution of marriages.