The Coming Attack on an Essential Element of Women’s Freedom

For the past half century, many women in America have enjoyed an unprecedented degree of freedom and legal protection, not because of Roe v. Wade or antidiscrimination laws but because of something much less celebrated: “no fault” divorce. Beginning in the early 1970s, no-fault divorce enabled millions of people, most of them women, to file for divorce over “irreconcilable differences” or the equivalent without having to prove misconduct by a spouse—such as adultery, domestic violence, bigamy, cruelty, abandonment, or impotence.

But now conservative politicians in Texas and , as well as a devoutly Catholic husband who tried to halt his wife’s divorce efforts in , are attacking no-fault divorce. One of the more alarming steps taken in that direction came from the Republican Party, whose 2022 platform called on the to “rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws and