Right now couples in all 50 states who want to end their marriage can get what's called a no-fault divorce.

Neither side has to prove that the other did something wrong like committing adultery, abandoning their spouse or treating them cruelly.

But some Republican lawmakers in a handful of red states want to get rid of it.

They say it makes divorce too easy, and they say it's unfair to men since it's estimated that 69% of divorces in the United States are initiated

by women.

Joanna Grossman teaches family law at Southern Methodist University Deadman School of Law.

So Joanna, what's the history of no fault divorce?

Where did it come from and why did it come into being?

So California was the first state to adopt no fault in 1969 after about 200 years of every state using fault-based divorce.

And it came about because California studied it and found something that probably most people in the field already

knew which is that the system didn't work that fault-based divorces were

often involved perjury and fabrication that people were fleeing their

jurisdictions to get divorced and that it did very little to sort out between

good marriages and bad marriages. And what's been the result? What's changed because of it?

So when no fault was first adopted in California,

it then sort of started a revolution.

And within 15 years, every single state had either

switched completely to a no-fault system or added at least one no-fault ground.

We saw some early effects, one of which was that the system of divorce became less

troubled. There were fewer cases of obvious perjury and fabrication, etc. There were people who got out of marriages where they had been stuck. And then we also saw some real impacts on women. The female suicide rate went down dramatically, the female homicide rate by intimate partners went

down dramatically and the rate of domestic violence went down. Those were

somewhat unexpected results but very very clear impacts of the change.

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