Logic Behind the Personal Responsibility and Work

¶ … logic behind the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act "and a U.S. House resolution in 2004 dealing with strengthening the original law's emphasis on promoting marriage "was based upon the idea that by "encouraging marriage the marriage rate will increase and the poverty rates will go down and the individuals on welfare will decrease...The original Welfare Reform Act linked the decline in two-parent households to an increase in poverty levels" (Kickham & Ford 2009). However, the question arises as to whether such a bill treats the root causes of poverty. Single parent households may be more common in underprivileged environments, but that may be more due to a lack of hope amongst all residents rather than a unique feature of single parent households. Children being born to unwed mothers may be more of a symptom than a cause.

The idea that government should 'engineer' the life of the poor, particularly in the private sphere of marriage, seems like a potential violation of individual rights. Incentivizing wedlock does not necessarily mean incentivizing positive marriages. "In the ideology of promoting healthy marriages, divorce is seen as the antithesis of that goal. Lowering the divorce rate, as suggested by state policy makers, is assumed by those same entities as an important component of the overall effort to stabilize marriages" (Kickham & Ford 2009). However, the effect of such laws is that all marriages are presumed to be better than a severed union, regardless of whether the marriages are truly 'healthy' and promote the welfare of all. Is a marriage where one spouse is abusive healthy? Incentivizing a woman to remain in a marriage that is harmful to herself or her children is a potentially horrifying result of such policies, given that women are often already feel emotionally and economically unable to leave such unions. Although children of divorce may score less well on indicators of social health than children from two-parent homes, once again the question of correlation vs. causation arises -- children from divorced homes may have had a less stable, more contentious upbringing, even before the divorce.

Race and class also are implied in the rationale behind these laws -- it is assumed that individuals on public assistance should be compelled by the law 'for their own good' to remain married, while middle-class and upper-class individuals have no such compulsion. Treating the root causes of social inequality and broken homes like poor educational systems, a lack of jobs, and a lack of affordable houses would be a more effective way to address the stresses young people and their families in underprivileged environments must face. This is confirmed by studies of childhood poverty, which "find no reliable effect from marriage initiatives... [and] address one dimension within the complexity of factors that perpetuate childhood poverty" (Kickham & Ford 2009). The only positive relationship that was found was that as "unemployment rates increase, so does childhood poverty. With respect to divorce, however, the unemployment rate is not a powerful predictor" (Kickham & Ford 2009). Focusing on marriage does not create jobs, reduce child poverty levels, or the social and physical stresses poverty imposes upon children. Focusing on job training, rather than marriage, is likely to be the more empowering emphasis in welfare reforms (Bitler et al. 2004).

Q2. Before the widespread acceptance of no-fault divorce, couples were forced to 'create' reasons for the cause of their divorce, such as providing false evidence of one or both parties' infidelity. Since the widespread adoption of no-fault divorce, many have argued that making marriage easier to dissolve has reduced respect for the institution. There is statistical evidence of this fact. For example, young people are apparently more willing to enter into marriage since the creation of no-fault divorce: "Controlling for state-level heterogeneity and for time trends, the standard deviation of the log age at first marriage drops by approximately 5% with the introduction of no-fault divorce...the mean age at first marriage increases slightly, suggesting that the mean person is slightly worse off with no-fault divorce" if marital stability is presumed to be the goal of public policy (Allen 2006: 547).

No-fault divorce was thought to be a particularly significant development for women, as women tend to fare less well, economically speaking, after a divorce than their male counterparts. While no-fault divorce was heralded by many feminists for its ability to free women from loveless and confining marriages, it can also rob women of the security and protection women with small children may expect from marriage.