A decades-old system that allows one spouse to end a marriage without proving wrongdoing is becoming a new front in the nation’s fight over family policy. Republican lawmakers and state party platforms in places including Texas and Nebraska have called for limiting or ending no-fault divorce. Bills introduced in South Carolina and South Dakota would make the process more difficult, while an Iowa proposal would have allowed couples to opt out of no-fault divorce when they obtained a marriage license. That measure later stalled in committee. The debate has gained urgency after the fatal shooting of Cerina Fairfax, a Virginia dentist and mother of two, by her estranged husband, former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, according to police. The couple had spent nearly two years in the same home while pursuing a divorce. A judge had granted Cerina Fairfax sole custody and ordered Justin Fairfax to leave; police said he killed her and then himself weeks later, with the couple’s teenage children in the home. No-fault divorce emerged from the women’s rights movement. California became the first state to adopt it in 1969, and New York became the last state to do so in 2010. The system permits a spouse to cite irreconcilable differences or incompatibility rather than prove adultery, abuse or abandonment in court. Marcia Zug, a family law professor at the University of South Carolina, said the significant change is that restricting no-fault divorce has moved from the margins into mainstream political debate. Proposals to limit divorce now appear in Republican platforms and legislative agendas, she said. Iowa state Sen. Jesse Green, a Republican who backed the opt-out proposal, told colleagues that no-fault divorce had contributed to the breakdown of marriage and discouraged people from marrying. Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers, also a Republican and a pastor, introduced legislation in 2024 that would have eliminated incompatibility as a ground for divorce. Domestic violence advocates oppose efforts that require people to establish fault before ending a marriage. Lindsay Pingel of the Iowa Coalition Against Domestic Violence said leaving an abusive relationship is often the most dangerous point for a survivor, and many people lack police reports, medical records or witnesses to document abuse. “For someone experiencing domestic violence, leaving is already incredibly complicated,” Pingel said. “We have to stop asking why survivors continue to stay in unhealthy relationships when we continue to put barriers in place that prohibit them from leaving.” Some states continue to move in the opposite direction. Maryland adopted a purely no-fault divorce process in 2023. Virginia recently made narrow changes, including an option to accelerate some divorces, and created a legislative work group to study whether fault-based divorce should be eliminated altogether. Missouri enacted a law clarifying that a pregnancy cannot prevent a divorce from being finalized. The national push to restrict divorce also comes as conservative lawmakers and party organizations pursue limits involving contraception, fertility treatment and pregnancy loss. The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion has heightened concerns among advocates that protections affecting women’s autonomy may depend increasingly on state politics. Research does not show that making divorce harder reliably reduces the number of divorces. Krista Westrick-Payne, a marriage and divorce researcher at Bowling Green State University, said relationship conditions and personal circumstances are more important than legal rules in determining whether couples split. Divorce rates have declined in the United States for more than 40 years. Yet several states with high divorce rates, including Oklahoma, Mississippi, Wyoming and Alabama, are led by Republicans. Westrick-Payne said those states also tend to have higher rates of younger marriage, one of the strongest predictors of divorce. The competing approaches reflect a central question in the policy debate: whether strengthening families means making marriages harder to leave or ensuring that people can safely end relationships that have become harmful. “Children benefit from safety and stability,” Pingel said. “Keeping someone legally tied to a person who is causing harm doesn’t necessarily create a healthier family.”