Marina Adshade, an economics professor with an interest in “sex and love,” writes:
Today we will take a few minutes to show a little appreciation for an important right in Western society – the right to divorce. [...]
Economists Justine Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, in a 2006 paper, showed that these legal changes had significant impacts on the quality of life of women. Taking advantage of in state-by-state variations in the time in which these laws were put into place they found that freer access to divorce brought with it an 8 –16% decline in female suicide, a 30% decline in domestic violence and 10% decline in the murder rate of women.
You may argue that these benefits to unilateral divorce laws come at significant costs – hardship for children and female poverty, just to name two – but that would only be true if the change in divorce laws increased the rate of divorce and that has not been proven. In fact, the best evidence suggests a very small positive effect on divorce rates only in the ten years after divorces became easier to obtain. And even then, that effect was only among those who were married before the laws were put in place.
The explanation for why easier access to divorce has not increased divorce rates is simple – men and women enter into marriage more cautiously when they know that divorce is easier to obtain. This is because while the laws may have made divorce easier from a legal standpoint, they have not made marital dissolution emotionally or economically painless.
It is this fact that explains why women marry later in life when it is easier to divorce.
A second explanation, which also explains the fall in domestic violence and suicide in states that support unilateral divorce, is just knowing that your spouse can divorce you without your consent encourages married individuals to treat each other better.
In the article, Adshade also argue that the use of “covenant” marriage agreements doesn’t actually make people less likely to divorce, but they do make the divorces harder on the people involved (“Anecdotal evidence suggests that even when abuse has been proven judges strictly enforce separation periods of up to two years.”). Those costs fall disproportionately on women:
The purpose of a covenant marriage is to increase the cost of divorce, significantly, and as a result give parties an incentive to stay in a failing marriage. If women are lower wage earners than men, or are out of the workforce all together, then the imposition of these costs falls disproportionally on women making it difficult for them to leave a bad marriage. That part of the arrangement is significant since in the majority of divorces it is the wife who wants the marriage to end.
I pretty much agree with Adshade on all of this. Married life was not a paradise in the 1950s, and the people I know who got divorced did so only after a lot of anguish and thought. Contrary to what the marriage-rescuers seem to believe, most Americans take marriage very seriously; trying to make it even harder to divorce is punitive, it is anti-liberty, and it will not actually improve anything.
Categories: Marriage
[...] [Crossposted at Family Scholars Blog] [...]
The conclusion that divorce is good for reduced female suicides is invalid from the article you have quoted. There are some errors in the article, which is strange since it was written by an economics professor, but more importantly there are wrong conclusions in the original study she cites.
Please read the following quote from the original study. “Note that the dependent variable is the suicide rate of all persons, not just those who have been married.” (pg 275) Therefore, they have included the suicide rates for never-married people as well, in which case the decline in suicide rates may be have nothing to do whatsoever with the married/divorced cohort or no-fault divorce. They have mistaken correlation for causation. Another speculation that is equally as valid is that the suicide decline could also be explained by greater social acceptance of single motherhood and teenage girls having more agency in choosing to give birth to and keep their out-of-wedlock babies, which is just one more significant social trend occurring at the same time as no-fault divorce.
Even if you choose to feel that the study has some merit in spite of it’s lack of scientific rigour, Marina Adshade has incorrectly inflated the numbers and incorrectly quoted what the authors have stated. The study states the decline in suicide rates in women “suggests an aggregate decline of 5–10 percent” on pg 270. I do see where she may have found the upper limit of 16% in Table 1, but honest reporting then compels her to include the lower limit, which is 1.5%, in which case you may wish to edit your sentence to read “freer access to divorce brought with it an 1.5 –16% decline in female suicide” I guess that wouldn’t look so compelling though….
Women need to have accurate information when deciding to divorce or not and articles such as this serve them well. However, authors need to realize their responsibilities and take time to make sure the conclusions they present are factual and do not lead our sisters astray.
Why are only the rights of the plaintiffs to file divorces against their spouses important? What about the rights of defendants to protect their parenting time and property against unreasonable and unjustified no-fault divorces? Also, what about rights of children to be able to live with both parents?
Also, even if the decline in female suicides after divorce is real, why is that more important than the increase in suicide rates of divorced men? Aren’t female and male suicides equally undesirable?
Does the linked article include that state, or do the studies that it cites? Or are you hypothesizing here?
It’s a reasonable point to make, I’m just not sure if it is supported by data.
The higher suicide rate for divorced men is one of the facts summarized in the “Why Marriage Matters” publication from this FamilyScholars.org website. I don’t have the new 3rd edition of it yet, but in the 2nd edition that was #21 of the 26 facts, backed by references to four social science findings. Barry Deutsch was posting on FamilyScholars.org, and I expected that he would be familiar with the couple of publications that it has. I’m new here though.