Making divorce harder could save Government billions, US group says

Reforms aimed at making it harder for couples to obtain divorces in
the US are being touted as part of the solution to runaway government
spending.

According to figures from the University of Virginia’s National
Marriage Project, a new single-parent family with children, created as a
result of divorce, can cost the government $20,000 to $30,000 a year.  

Given that more than four in ten of every US marriage ends in divorce,
family breakup costs the US taxpayer $112 billion a year total in
divorce-related social-service subsidies and lost revenue.

Chris Gersten, founder and chairman of the nonpartisan Coalition for
Divorce Reform told The Washington Times that the US is “absolutely”
ready for divorce reform.  

His group is promoting reforms that aim at
cutting divorce rates by a third in five years.  If the measures are
passed, he says, “the savings to taxpayers will be pretty dramatic.”

Even a “modest reduction” in the U.S. divorce rate likely would
benefit 400,000 children and save taxpayers significant sums, wrote
retired Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears and
University of Minnesota professor William J. Doherty, proponents of a
new Second Chances divorce reform.

“We have to rethink this ‘easy-to-divorce’ strategy,” added Michael
McManus, founder of Marriage Savers, which promotes a community marriage
strategy that has been shown to reduce divorce rates by an average of
17.5 per cent.

Polling data has consistently shown that Americans support more restrictive divorce laws.

For more than 30 years, the General Social Survey, one of America's
most authoritative regular surveys of social attitudes, has asked
Americans if divorce should be “easier or more difficult to obtain than
it is now?”  

The most popular answer is always “more difficult.”

Despite this, however, the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey
(ACS) showed that there were 1,087,920 divorces and a divorce rate of
8.2 per 1,000 population in 2008.  This is higher than other federal
figures because ACS has data from all states.

Serious divorce reform was last tried 14 years ago when Louisiana
passed a ‘covenant-marriage’ law. 

Covenant couples agree to premarital
education and marriage counselling. 

However, only three states have
adopted a covenant-marriage law, and only a tiny number of couples opt
in.

Meanwhile, last year, New York lawmakers passed a law allowing
no-fault divorce. 

In the first seven months after the law went into
effect, divorces rose 12 per cent. 

Divorce lawyers have come out against reforms making divorce tougher
for couples. 

Pamela J. Waggoner, chair of the family law section of the
Minnesota State Bar Association says, “I don’t understand the
necessity,” she said, “of putting a reconciliation component into
divorce-related or parenting programs.”

Figures show that family breakdown leads to higher levels of child poverty.

If the U.S. “enjoyed the same level of family stability today as it
did in 1960,” there would be 750,000 fewer children repeating grades,
1.2 million fewer school suspensions, about 500,000 fewer acts of
teenage delinquency, about 600,000 fewer children receiving therapy and
70,000 fewer suicides every year, writes W. Bradford Wilcox in a 2009
paper, referring to research by Pennsylvania State University professors
Paul Amato and Alan Booth.

That longevity data is “the most devastating analysis that we’ve seen
… of the impact of divorce on children.  They don’t ‘get over it,’ ”
said Mr Gersten, who was a Department of 

Health and Human Services
official in the George W. Bush administration. 

Reformers have achieved some progress.  

In the state of New Mexico,
State Senator Mark Boitano introduced the Parental Divorce Reduction Act
this year.  Activists expect lawmakers in 12 more states to do so in
2012.

The legislation requires parents of minor children who are
contemplating divorce to first attend six hours of ‘divorce-reduction’
education.  

They would then enter an eight-month reflection period with
access to marriage-strengthening materials and workshops.  

After that,
they can go ahead with a divorce, “and we let the lawyers take over,”
said Mr Gersten, who added that couples in certain circumstances, such
as domestic violence, would be exempted from the program.

 

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