The post Republicans Are Trying to Ban No-Fault Divorce in Texas, Oklahoma, and 3 Other States first appeared on Crafting Your Home.
Conservative lawmakers in five states are now advancing measures to repeal or restrict no-fault divorce, the legal pathway that lets a spouse end a marriage without proving wrongdoing.
Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arkansas and Louisiana have each taken a swing at it in some form this year.
Texas and Oklahoma have gone furthest with formal bills
Texas state Rep. Cole Hefner filed House Bill 3401 during the 89th Legislature in 2025, aiming to strike insupportability as a ground for divorce under Texas Family Code Section 6.001, the provision that resolves the overwhelming majority of divorces in the state. The bill stalled in a House subcommittee and died with the session.
The party didn’t drop the idea. On June 13, the Republican Party of Texas approved its 2026-2028 platform at its state convention in Houston, adding language under a Protect Texas Kids plank calling for an end to no-fault divorce and promoting covenant marriage. The next regular legislative session, the 90th, convenes in 2027.
Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers, a pastor from Elgin, filed Senate Bill 1958 in January 2024 to remove incompatibility as a statewide ground for divorce. Family law attorney Nikki Edwards told Oklahoma Voice that roughly 99% of the state’s divorces during her 25-year career were filed on incompatibility grounds alone.
That means the bill would have forced nearly every filing into a fault-based court fight. It never made it out of committee, and Deevers returned in 2025 with a related package that included Senate Bill 829.
Three more states are testing narrower versions of the same idea
Nebraska’s state Republican Party platform states directly that no-fault divorce should be limited to couples without children, according to language posted on the Nebraska GOP’s own website.
Louisiana Republicans have weighed carve-outs targeting parents of minor children.
At the same time, Arkansas lawmakers have floated making covenant marriage the state’s default form for new unions rather than an opt-in choice, per Divorce.law’s tracking of the five-state effort.
Arkansas and Louisiana already permit covenant marriage as an alternative to standard marriage, alongside Arizona, requiring pre-marital counseling and limiting exit to fault grounds or lengthy separation.
The fight traces back to a law Reagan signed in 1969
California became the first state to adopt no-fault divorce in 1969, when then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, himself divorced, signed the reform into law. New York was the last state to follow, in 2010. The policy grew out of the era’s women’s rights movement, intended to free people, disproportionately women, from marriages they could not otherwise prove were abusive in court.
University of South Carolina family law professor Marcia Zug told Stateline the current push marks a shift in how seriously the idea is taken. She said opposition to no-fault divorce is now actually gaining some traction, a change from years when it was dismissed outright.
Zug ties the momentum partly to the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned the constitutional right to abortion, which she says shook confidence that other family-related rights are settled law.
Red states post some of the country’s highest divorce rates
Four of the five states with the highest divorce rates in the country, Oklahoma, Nevada, Mississippi, Wyoming and Alabama, lean Republican, according to the most recent data from Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family and Marriage Research. Nevada is the exception, with a Republican governor but a Democratic legislature.
State divorce laws have little bearing on whether couples actually split.
The bigger predictors are:
- personal circumstances and relationship dynamics,
- not statutes, and
- religious and conservative-leaning regions tend to see more divorce mainly because people there marry younger, one of the strongest known risk factors for marital breakdown regardless of politics.
Related: The 5 U.S. States Where Divorce Rates Are Highest
Domestic violence groups call the timing especially risky
Leaving an abusive relationship is already the most dangerous point for a survivor, and that requiring court proof of abuse adds a barrier many cannot safely clear. Documentation such as police reports or medical records is often unavailable, she said, because most survivors don’t disclose abuse to anyone until they’ve already decided to leave.
Iowa itself saw a related bill this year, letting couples opt out of no-fault divorce when they apply for a marriage license.
State Sen. Jesse Green, a Republican, argued during a February hearing that permissive divorce law has bred what he called the ‘circus of pure no-fault divorce.’
The bill died in committee.
No repeal has passed, but the debate keeps resurfacing
Every bill filed so far, from Oklahoma’s SB 1958 to Texas’s HB 3401, has failed or stalled.
What’s changed is where the idea now sits: written into two state party platforms, filed as formal legislation in two statehouses and debated in at least three more, a pattern absent from Republican politics a decade ago.
Whether any version becomes law will likely depend on the next legislative sessions in Texas and Oklahoma, both of which meet again in 2027.
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