There's a growing Republican movement to restrict women from obtaining divorces in the U.S. And Trump's pick for his Vice Presidential candidate,
J.D. Vance, is among the prominent voices pushing to limit divorces.
Their goal? To entrap women and deny their ability to have autonomy and leave a situation that isn't working for them.
Right now, divorce laws primarily come down to each individual state. Sign the petition to demand that the U.S. Congress pass a law to protect people's rights to seek and access no-fault divorces nationwide!Right now,
it is incredibly easy to enter into a marriage in the U.S. - a legally-binding contract.
Yet it is already so hard to leave. Divorces require paperwork, and often lawyers and great deals of money. It involves heartache and disappointment and grief.
And that's just under the current system. But many right-wing extremists in the country, including J.D. Vance, want to make this process 10x harder.
Since 2010, every state in the U.S. has allowed a process called "no-fault" divorces. This type of divorce allows individuals to end a legal relationship without needing to prove to a judge that someone was to blame. Before that point, in many states, divorce was a much lengthier process, in which
an individual usually had to prove adultery, requiring a witness to finalize the divorce. The task was so difficult that women especially were often left feeling trapped in a bad marriage.After the passage of no-fault divorces,
rates of suicide, intimate partner violence, and intimate partner homicide dropped dramatically - saving countless women's lives, and even those of their children, too.But some Republican men want to glamorize the idea of removing the possibility of no-fault divorces.
J.D. Vance has gone even further, by suggesting that any divorce, for any reason, is a bad thing.Vance has glowingly - and openly - written about how his own grandparents had a violent, chaotic marriage, yet he was proud of them for not divorcing anyway. During a speech several years ago, he claimed that "one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace" was the idea that people could leave a marriage if they're unhappy - or subjected to violence.
No-fault divorces are a life-saver that keeps children protected as well. We must keep this option available. Sign the petition to demand that Congress pass a federal law enshrining the right to no-fault divorces! 