Competition was fierce for last week’s weirdest published opinion as New York Times pro David Brooks was pitted against upstart Luther Ray Abel at the National Review, with both writers pining for the good old days when children were rushed into adulthood.
Boomer Brooks’s “What Our Toxic Culture Does to the Young” opens: “In the early 1960s typical Americans were eager to get on with adult life. As soon as they could, they married, launched careers and started popping out kids. In those days, half of all women married before their 20th birthday.” Today’s teens are putting off sex, Brooks goes on to explain, because they are overly risk-averse. Abel’s piece is a paean to back-seat shenanigans, in which he, too, complains about risk-averse, sex-shy youngsters. It seemed a bizarre U-turn by conservative commentators.
Of course, these two don’t really want teens to have more sex. Brooks wants students to argue more (yes, it’s another campus free speech panic essay in disguise). Abel insists they should head to Lovers’ Lane to neck, which he imagines will drive them speedily into young marriage and carfuls of children.
Odd as they are, these pieces are part of a larger patchwork of efforts to re-impose a reactionary vision of family and society on the nation. Many of the efforts are meant to push more Americans into traditional marriages and keep them there, a surefire way to produce more miserable unions and more miserable families.
Fighting for child marriage
Though several states have in recent years raised their minimum age to wed, child marriage is very much a thing in the US, and one that extremists on the right wish to preserve. The Wyoming Republican Party is currently fighting a bill that would raise the age at which children can marry in the state. A Missouri state senator made a splash recently defending child marriage by insisting he knows a happy couple who were forced to marry at 12.
But, unsurprisingly, child marriage facilitates oppression and abuse:
A landmark 2021 study by Unchained at Last found that an estimated three hundred thousand children were married in the United States between 2000 and 2018, the vast majority of whom were girls married to older men. Approximately sixty thousand occurred at an age or involved a spousal age difference that should have constituted a sex crime. Some were as young as ten.
Surely this isn’t what more mainstream pundits are advocating when they bemoan later marriages, and plenty who wed in their late teens and early twenties go on to have long, happy marriages. But a broad return to earlier marriages would mean more unhappy ones — 20 year olds who marry are 50% more likely to divorce than their 25-year-old counterparts.
Eliminating no-fault divorces
A recently leaked video of right-wing commentator Steven Crowder verbally abusing his pregnant wife provided a horrific peek into a marriage and drew attention to comments he and others of his ilk have made against no-fault divorce. As Rolling Stone noted, eliminating the ability of spouses to file for divorce without the cost and conflict associated with traditional divorce has become a goal of the far right.
A piece last year in The Federalist outlining how conservatives should move forward after the fall of Roe called no-fault divorce “the original re-definition of marriage” that “has devastated the American family.” Meanwhile, research shows that over the long run, laws meant to make divorce easier did not lead to dramatically higher divorce rates.
The introduction of no-fault divorce did, however, lead to a drop in female suicide and murder and a reduction in domestic violence. Repealing no-fault divorce would mean more people stuck longer in miserable marriages — and vulnerable to tragedy.
Forcing births
The right may be hoping for a surge in shotgun marriages as a result of the GOP stripping women of choice. Regardless, abortion bans will lead to more misery as children can bind incompatible people together or the abused to abusers for decades. It will also harm some marriages where couples don’t want or aren’t ready for children or more children.
Banning abortion may not even provide the baby boom that the right seeks. Diana Greene Foster, the UCSF professor whose “Turnaway Study” followed women who had been denied abortions, explained the probable effects of Dobbs:
Over the long term, I anticipate only a modest increase in babies born and placements for adoption. Instead, by forcing some pregnant people to have a child under adverse circumstances – inadequate financial or emotional support, low-quality relationships, poor health – our country will make parenthood more difficult, increase financial strains on young families and adversely affect the long-term wellbeing of families and children.
What we know: When women have bodily autonomy and are able to decide “whether, when, and under what circumstances they become mothers, outcomes…reverberate through their lives, affecting marriage patterns, educational attainment, labor force participation, and earnings,” a Brookings economic analysis explains. Taking away that power harms the quality of marriages and lives.
The stakes, of course, go beyond. Legalizing abortion cut maternal mortality. A nationwide ban would lead to an estimated 24% increase in maternal deaths overall, with a 39% increase for Black women. Heart-rending stories like those of Brittany Watts and Amanda Zurawski, who nearly died and may now be unable to have children because she was denied care in Texas, make clear the dire threat state bans already present.
Restricting contraception
The fight against reproductive choice was all about saving the unborn until it also became about producing more people. My first idea of where we might be headed was an interaction a few years ago on Twitter, when a conservative writer (and not, as far as I could tell, a time traveler from a previous century) denied that contraception was healthcare and equated my using contraception to blinding myself.
Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Dobbs generated widespread fears that outlawing contraception would be next. And as Christina Cauterucci laid out last month in Slate, those fears are already being realized, as judges and legislators in various states move to restrict funding, availability, and distribution of emergency contraception and IUDs and require parental consent for contraception — which will not stop teen sex (only denying teens cars can do that!) but will increase teen births.
Increased access to contraception led to fewer abortions over recent decades. New restrictions will mean more illegal abortions, unequal access to abortions, and children that parents don’t want or aren’t ready for, including married women, whose share of abortions has been halved since the 1970s.
Banning gay marriage
Amid a tsunami of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation across red states, GOP lawmakers in Iowa and Tennessee have proposed bills to ban or restrict same-sex marriage. (As with contraception, Justice Thomas gave these moves encouragement.)
When landmark gay marriage case Obergefell was decided, E.J. Montini wrote that the Supreme Court had upheld, along with due process and equal protection, “the right to pursue happiness.” The well-being of LGBTQ+ Americans improved across the board in the ruling’s aftermath — as being provided the same rights as other citizens might be expected to do.
And same-sex marriages were shown in a 2019 study to have less “marital strain” than opposite-sex marriages, where gender norms often place a heavier burden on women. Everyone in these families also has a greater chance at happiness because “couples in same-sex marriages spend more time with their children, in part because they have a far lower percentage of children who are unintended or unwanted.”
Denying aid to families
Money issues are one key reason for household stress, strife, and divorce. And while many have highlighted the hypocrisy of claiming to be pro-life but failing to help infants and children, Republicans have continued to resist all manner of financial aid to parents that would make for healthier children and happier marriages and families. Not a single Republican voted for the Covid-related expansion of the Child Tax Credit that lifted 2.1 million children out of poverty. Even free school lunch can be too much to ask from extremists unable to see hungry kids.
Some Republicans are willing to give tax breaks to people with children, but only those legally married and never divorced. The goal: keep couples they deem worthy together and procreating.
The desire for love and companionship is why Americans get married. We marry for happiness, plain and simple. But when people stay in unhappy marriages, it is mostly for other reasons, including money, fear, children, shame, and hope. Worthy policy steps would work these levers to increase marital happiness. Forces on the right are moving instead to make both marriage and divorce harder.