Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley (R) was caught on a recording pressing drastic changes to divorce laws [View all]

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Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley (R) was caught on a recording pressing drastic changes to divorce laws, according to a new report.

The recording was acquired by Rolling Stone and shared in a new report Friday detailing Hawley's views on no-fault divorce, the law that loosened the standards for dissolving a marriage.

Six years after his op-ed, Hawley, then a candidate for Senate in Missouri, was asked about no-fault divorce at a campaign event in the town of Arnold. “My family had a very hard divorce,” an attendee of the event told Hawley, who went on to ask whether Hawley believed ending no-fault divorce would “keep more families together.”

“You know, a lot of people have proposed changes to that,” Hawley reportedly said. “My view has always been: It’s a state issue … And states should, you know, do what they want and what they think works best. I think the main thing is it’s got to be something that’s good for women and for families.”


Divorce laws began to change in 1969, when California legalized no-fault divorce. Up until that point, a spouse had to prove that they had been abused, abandoned, treated cruelly or that their partner had cheated. Forty years later, all 50 states allowed for no-fault divorce.


Hawley has been a proponent of eliminating no-fault divorce since the early days of his work as an associate professor at the Missouri School of Law. Writing for National Affairs in 2012, Hawley penned a 4,500-word essay about the new conservative era of the judicial system where he didn't mention the words "abuse" or "domestic violence" once while talking about no-fault divorce.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/good-for-women-gop-lawmaker-caught-admitting-he-thinks-divorce-should-be-harder-to-get/ar-BB1pudzA?

If you ask experts, the evidence that no-fault divorce was a positive development for women and their families is overwhelming: A 2006 study by economists at the University of Pennsylvania found an 8 to 16 percent drop in the suicide rate among married women and a 30 percent drop in domestic violence in that states that adopted no-fault divorce.

Betsey Stevenson, one of the authors of that study, wrote that the decrease they observed “was not just because abused women (and men) could more easily divorce their abusers, but also because potential abusers knew that they were more likely to be left.”

A 2003 Stanford University study similarly found the rate of female suicides fell by between 11 to 19 percent, the rate of husbands convicted of murdering their wives dropped by 10 percent, and domestic violence overall declined by one-third in the first decade after states implemented no-fault divorce.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/josh-hawley-no-fault-divorce-missouri-1235051687/