If a married individual in Indiana wanted to get a divorce without any proof their spouse was cheating on or harming them, they could not legally separate until 1973.
A no-fault divorce means a spouse must only testify that their marriage is damaged beyond repair to get a divorce. Indiana is one of only 17 true no-fault divorce states, meaning married individuals can file for divorce and obtain it with no questions asked.
A bill authored by Rep. Timothy Wesco, R-Osceola sought to change the process of how an Indiana citizen can file for divorce. House Bill 1684 would have required parents of young children who file for divorce to present a witness to affirm the “irretrievable breakdown of the marriage.”
The measure was assigned to the House Judiciary Committee but Wesco withdrew it before it got a hearing. The StatehouseFile.com reached out to Wesco three times and received no comment on the bill.
Michael Auger, an attorney at Franklin Family Law in Franklin, said Hoosiers can get a divorce by filing a petition saying, “I don’t want to be married anymore,” a process that can take as little as 60 days. Wesco’s bill, he said, could have had a detrimental impact on Hoosier families.
“To me, it’s just going to create one more layer of potential conflict for these parties,” Auger said. “And divorces already cause enough conflict and that’s why many states, including Indiana, have gone to the no-fault based model.”
Meredith Clark-Wiltz, a history professor and the director of women’s studies at Franklin College, provided historical context for how Indiana arrived at its divorce laws.
“I believe the first state was California that moved to no-fault (divorce) and pretty quickly after that many states changed in the early 1970s,” Clark-Wiltz said.
Clark-Wiltz explained how coverture laws led to feminist movements and eventually equality within these divorce laws.
“So when those marriages happened, coverture was the way in which English common law said that upon marriage, men and women become one legal entity, and the woman’s identity is covered by the man,” she said.
“(Women) had to take their husband’s name, they can’t own property in most circumstances, they can’t contract without their husbands, they can’t testify in court without their husband’s permission,” Clark-Wiltz said. “It basically says under the eyes of the law, and state, (the married couple) are one person and the person in charge was the man.”
Indiana’s current divorce law stems from the feminist movement for equality within society.
“So feminists took on that battle,” so that wives would not be subordinate to their husbands, she said. “And so trying to figure out how to do that so that everybody is on the same page and treated fairly.”
Auger and Clark-Wiltz commented on what the motive behind the bill could have been and why it stalled.
“My guess is it’s just this tension between different visions of what marriage is supposed to be,” Clark-Wiltz said.
Auger believes Wesco’s legislative colleagues might have convinced him to drop the bill.
“It appears to me they are trying to make it a little more difficult, or maybe the word is ‘official,’ to get a divorce in cases where people have children,” Auger said. “But at the end of the day, again, it’s a crazy bill and it looks like it’s been withdrawn. So maybe he’s already had a bunch of his buddies say, ‘this is stupid”
