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 percent.

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 counseling.
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
percent.

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 few 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 Sen. 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.