Earlier this month, a 50-year-old man riding his personal electric scooter in Washington, D.C., was killed when he collided with a woman on a rideshare scooter.

In June, a 12-year-old Massachusetts girl died after her electric scooter slammed into a school bus in a suburb of Boston.

And in April, an Atlanta woman riding an electric bike was killed when she hit a curb and was thrown headfirst into a wall.

A string of high-profile deaths and injuries involving electric scooters and bikes is spurring states and cities across the country to crack down on them. As technology improves, e-scooters and e-bikes capable of motorcycle-like speeds have become cheaper and more popular. Some models — and the ability to modify them with aftermarket upgrades — are blurring the lines between bicycles, scooters and motor vehicles.

State and local regulations, many of which were originally written to manage the glut of low-speed rideshare scooters nearly a decade ago, haven’t kept pace, some experts say, and they’ve left city officials scrambling to do more.

The victim in the Washington, D.C., incident was Talib Shakir, who worked in the office of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. Police said neither Shakir nor the woman he collided with was wearing a helmet, and that Shakir’s e-scooter could reach speeds up to 55 miles per hour.

A few days later, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police launched a street safety initiative focused on educating e-bike and e-scooter riders about road safety.

In New York City, local leaders held a hearing in August to discuss a slate of new regulations for e-bikes and e-scooters. As of September, at least 28 New Yorkers riding electric devices have died in crashes, the city’s highest-ever total by that point in the year.

A month before the Massachusetts accident, Gov. Maura Healey proposed legislation to establish safety standards and other regulations for e-scooters and e-bikes.

Healey, a Democrat, called existing laws around so-called micromobility devices “unclear and inconsistent,” in a May 2026 statement announcing her bill, which is currently in committee.

“We are seeing too much reckless behavior, more crashes and close calls,” she said, “and too many people, especially pedestrians and young riders, are at risk.”

And after several highly publicized deaths in the Atlanta metro area, including the woman who died after she was thrown from her bike and a teen who died when his e-scooter collided with a tractor-trailer, local officials in surrounding communities have been under pressure to address safety issues.

States including Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania have enacted or considered new restrictions this year. The feds have been studying the issue, too: A report released earlier this year from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission found the number of fatalities from e-scooters and e-bikes has been steadily increasing.

Consumer Reports, a nonprofit that reviews consumer products, in August said it had tested 13 e-scooters and didn’t recommend any due to high speeds and an increase in injuries.

Despite the rush toward regulation, e-bike and e-scooter advocates and manufacturers say any new restrictions should distinguish between different types of devices that often get lumped under the umbrella of “e-bikes.” There’s a difference, they point out, between low-speed, motor-assisted bicycles and throttle-driven electric bikes that are essentially motorcycles.

They say states and cities should enforce tiered safety laws rather than outright banning high-speed personal vehicles, as lawmakers in states including New York and some municipalities have considered.

Most new research — as well as data from individual hospitals — shows that injuries and deaths from e-scooters and e-bikes are on the rise, particularly for children.

Johns Hopkins researchers found nearly half the e-scooter injuries they studied involving kids between 2020-2024 occurred in 2024.

“That was striking,” said the study’s author, Dr. Mary Beth Howard, a pediatric emergency medicine specialist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. “And, for us, it raises questions about safety policies keeping pace with the growth in e-scooter use.”

Skewing younger

One of the most significant — and surprising — takeaways from new research on e-scooter injuries was that children ages 11-14 have some of the highest injury rates, Howard said.

She and fellow researchers found nearly 1 in 4 e-scooter injuries in recent years happened to kids in that age group.

A few factors contribute to that overrepresentation, she said, including increasing access to e-scooters while kids’ motor skills and ability to assess danger are still developing.

And, too, they aren’t legally allowed to drive so they don’t have the experience older teens have in managing traffic and speed.

“That creates the perfect storm for that 11 to 14 or early adolescent group being at incredibly high risk for injuries from e-scooters,” she said.

In Oregon, a 13-year-old girl died last month while riding an electric scooter; police say she was struck by a van in a hit-and-run. And in Florida, two children have been injured in the past year after colliding with school buses in two separate incidents.

The Johns Hopkins researchers found that 1 in 10 kids were injured severely enough while riding e-scooters that they required hospitalization.

“That’s important for policymakers to understand,” Howard said. “This isn’t just scraped knees.”

States step in

A new Illinois law taking effect in January will bar anyone under 15 from riding an e-bike of any type, and requires riders of high-speed devices — those that can travel more than 28 miles per hour — to have a driver’s license, registration and insurance. It also prohibits high-speed e-bikes from sidewalks and regular bike lanes. New Jersey also recently enacted a law requiring e-bike riders to be licensed and registered.

Illinois state Sen. Ram Villivalam, a Democrat, sponsored the bill, saying in an August statement that “without clear regulations for these devices, we are seeing increased injuries and accidents — jeopardizing community safety.”

The bill passed with bipartisan support and a handful of Republicans joined Democrats as co-sponsors.

More than two dozen states and Washington, D.C., have enacted or amended e-scooter laws with minimum age requirements, speed limits and other restrictions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

State lawmakers have been looking at ramping up the regulation in the face of injuries and pressure from physicians, law enforcement and safety groups.

This week, the Pennsylvania House approved a bill that would legalize and regulate e-scooters — it’s currently illegal in Pennsylvania to ride them on public streets, sidewalks and bike lanes — and would require riders to be at least 16. The bill also has speed limitations and helmet requirements. It next heads to the state Senate.

In Michigan, a Democratic-sponsored bill would require teens under 18 to have a license to ride e-bikes that can travel faster than 20 miles per hour. It would also set helmet requirements for teens; a companion bill would set new fines for certain e-bike violations. The bill comes after several towns in Michigan have banned or restricted e-bikes and other vehicles after crashes involving teens.

Earlier this month, Democratic state lawmakers in Ohio introduced legislation that would tighten existing state regulations on e-bikes and e-scooters, including banning children 13 and younger from operating them and requiring riders to wear helmets.

And in California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed three new e-bike laws this month that set age limits and other restrictions.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

This year’s statewide ballot measures are written, on average, at a graduate-school reading level, according to a new report.

The readability of 2026’s ballot questions — which ask voters to weigh in on issues as varied as abortion, property taxes, voter ID and firearms — varies by state, political data tracking nonprofit Ballotpedia found in its newest Ballot Measure Readability Report.

The report analyzes the level of education voters would need to understand the titles and summaries of the measures put before them. Because ballot measures are often lengthy and full of legal language, states write shorter titles to be published on the ballot for voters to read.

Many of this year’s ballot measures don’t include summaries to supplement the titles. And many voters don’t read beyond a measure’s title before deciding how to vote, Ballotpedia researchers note.

This year, 164 measures have been or will be on the ballot across 40 states. The titles average a reading level requiring 17 years of education, which corresponds to a first-year graduate student. The summaries average a reading level requiring 15 years of education. About 42% of the U.S. adult population ages 25-54 have a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to the most recently available data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Title readability ranges from a fifth-grade level for an Idaho question asking voters to choose an official state gun to a 48^th-grade level for a Colorado constitutional amendment that would establish a right to hunt and fish, Ballotpedia found. No formal education level corresponds to a 48th-grade level, but that rating indicates an extremely advanced language structure.

“The most significant factor driving readability differences isn’t the type or topic of the ballot measure, but which state it’s in,” said Ryan Byrne, managing editor of Ballotpedia’s ballots team, in a statement.

Kentucky, Massachusetts and Tennessee had the lowest average title readability grade level, at 10 years of education, while Colorado had the highest at 33 years, followed by Hawaii at 31 years and Nevada at 26, according to the report.

Research has found voters are more likely to skip ballot questions that have more complex language.

About half of states have enacted laws designed to make ballot measure language easier to read. Earlier this year, Maryland enacted a law requiring ballot questions to be written in plain and clear language. Last year, Arkansas required ballot titles to be written at no more than an eighth-grade level.

But still, the average readability score for state ballot measures since 2017, when Ballotpedia began tracking it, is about 18 years of education, or the equivalent of a second-year graduate student.

This year, Kansas had the longest ballot question title, at 927 words for a constitutional amendment that would have authorized the election of state Supreme Court justices and abolished an existing nominating commission. Voters defeated it in August.

Alaska will have the shortest title, at just five words, for a measure to amend state law to allow only U.S. citizens to vote in elections.

Ballotpedia uses two formulas to calculate readability, which includes looking at the number of syllables, words and sentences in a text.

Readability scores for each of the 164 ballot measures this year can be found in Ballotpedia’s report.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

A court battle that began when conservative-led states sued to block protections for transgender people has ended in a rollback of protections for people with disabilities — a result disability advocates have feared for months.

At the end of August, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services joined the handful of conservative-led states suing it, and asked a court to strike language from a federal disability-rights regulation that directed states to prioritize serving disabled people in their communities rather than in nursing homes or institutions.

Last week the judge did so, ending the case, Texas v. Kennedy, by removing all mentions of community integration from the regulation that implements a piece of landmark federal disability law known as Section 504.

The Trump administration’s move — along with a June memo from the Justice Department that argued federal law doesn’t require states to provide community-based services for disabled people — marks a sharp about-face for the federal government, which has long been the chief enforcer of such protections.

The change to the Section 504 rule, disability rights advocates fear, will make it harder for disabled people to receive services they need to live in their communities — and to stay out of institutions.

“This affects children, this affects adults, it affects your elderly parents. It affects everyone,” said Charlotte Cravins, a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, attorney whose toddler son Landry was born with Down syndrome and has impaired vision.

Landry receives publicly funded therapies that have helped him learn to crawl, pull himself up to stand, and to use American Sign Language, all while being able to live at home with his family.

But Cravins worries the ruling threatens those gains. Her husband, who was Landry’s main caregiver, recently had to return to work, and so Cravins is now caring for their son while also working. They’re hoping to get Landry assessed for nursing services and other aids that can help with daily living.

“But those services are at risk now of being unavailable,” she said.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services told Stateline in an email that the department “remains firmly committed to protecting the civil rights of individuals with disabilities” and enforcing applicable disability rights law.

“Our commitment to ensuring that individuals with disabilities are treated with dignity, afforded equal opportunity, and are able to meaningfully access community services remains unchanged,” he said.

The U.S. Department of Justice, in an email to Stateline, said the court’s order “answered an ordinary-course request” about updated federal guidance and clarified the “proper scope” of Olmstead v. L.C., the landmark 1999 Supreme Court ruling that people with disabilities have a civil right to live and receive services in their communities rather than institutions.

Previous administrations have relied on Olmstead’s precedent to compel states to provide community-based services.

States that were plaintiffs in the lawsuit have told the court they don’t want federal interference: They said that Biden-era updates to Section 504 unfairly restricted how they’re able to spend money, and prevented them from deciding how best to care for their own residents. They said their budgets, strained by rising costs and workforce shortages, can’t always accommodate expensive services required by the law, and that with smaller Medicaid budgets they’re having to make hard choices. Removing the federal “integration mandate” would give them more flexibility.

“Florida joined this lawsuit to serve as a check on federal power, not to deny care,” Jae Williams, press secretary in the office of Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, told Stateline in a statement.

“Reclaiming state authority gives Florida the flexibility needed to address critical public safety and homelessness issues while ensuring proper care for individuals.”

The resolution of the case “achieves the right balance,” said Sam Curtis, information officer for the Alaska Department of Law, “by keeping historical Section 504 protections in place and vacating only the unlawful new provisions that threatened Alaska’s Medicaid program, home and community based services, and systems of care for Alaskans with complex needs.”

But the change to how the feds enforce Section 504 means states may no longer have a federal monitor ensuring they provide community services, disability advocates and experts told Stateline.

“It’s part of this bigger effort from the federal government to walk away from their longstanding commitment to the right to community living,” said Alison Barkoff, director of the Hirsh Health Law and Policy Program at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University.

Disabled people still have a legal right to receive community-based services, she said, “but the right is only as good as the enforcement.”

Gender dysphoria to disability rights

The case began back in 2024, when 17 Republican-led states sued the Biden administration over its inclusion of gender dysphoria as a protected disability under Section 504.

But then the suit morphed into something different.

After Trump was reelected and his administration made clear it would not enforce the Biden rule, several states pulled out of the lawsuit. Their attorneys general scrambled to distance themselves from it, amid a swift backlash from the disability community that warned the suit imperiled federal protections for all people with disabilities.

But in a surprising move, a handful of states chose to stick with the lawsuit. In January, they amended their complaint to ask the court to strike down the Section 504 rule that directs states to provide disabled people services in their communities whenever possible, rather than in institutions such as nursing homes and state hospitals.

By September, more states had dropped out, leaving five — Alaska, Florida, Louisiana, Montana and Texas — when the Trump administration joined them in asking the court to strike the integration provisions.

In  an email to Stateline, a spokesperson for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, connected the lawsuit and its resolution to the original complaint about the inclusion of gender dysphoria, saying it defeated a “woke” rule that “would have endangered disability funding for the sake of promoting the radical trans agenda.” He did not address the removal of the integration mandate.

“This resolution ensures that Texans who rely on Section 504 and disability assistance are fully protected,” he said. “It supports family choice, ensures healthcare providers are able to provide the best possible care to Texans, and guarantees that all protections that existed prior to the 2024 Biden rule are upheld and permanently preserved.”

Barkoff emphasized that the ruling doesn’t change disability rights protections that are baked into other federal laws, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, and precedent-setting cases such as Olmstead.

“These rights still exist, and people need to understand that,” Barkoff said.

M. Geron Gadd, a senior attorney at the National Health Law Program who focuses on disability rights cases, agreed that the ruling doesn’t eliminate states’ legal requirement to provide community-based services to disabled people.

However, she said, “it can make it much harder for people with disabilities and their families, who often are already struggling, to obtain needed services.”

States get a boost

One practical result of the judgment in this case — and the Department of Justice’s June memo that reinterpreted federal disability law and the Olmstead decision — is that disabled people may have to go to greater lengths, including suing states, to get services if they’re denied them.

The department has already retreated from disability rights cases against states including Florida and Texas, which have long pushed back against Olmstead’s scope in the hopes of persuading the feds to narrow their interpretation of disability law.

In 2023, a U.S. district court found that Florida had kept children with complex medical needs unnecessarily institutionalized in nursing facilities, violating federal disability rights law and the Olmstead integration mandate. The Justice Department filed the lawsuit during the Biden administration. The department shifted its stance this year and asked the court to vacate its decision.

The Justice Department also dropped out of a long-running case centered on claims Texas has been illegally placing thousands of disabled people in nursing homes for decades.

Disability rights groups and advocates have called for protection of federal integration requirements. Late last month, a bipartisan group of congressional representatives cosponsored a resolution to reaffirm Olmstead and the right of disabled people to receive services in their communities. A group of 100 Democratic members of Congress also signed a letter in July calling on the Justice Department to rescind its memo.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

A growing number of states are making an equal split between parents the default child custody option in divorce cases.

Louisiana and Mississippi this year joined at least five other states that have adopted the so-called 50-50 standard — four of them since 2021, as more legislators rework divorce-related laws that remained mostly unchanged for years.

The 50-50 custody issue does not break down cleanly along partisan lines: The Mississippi bill was sponsored by Republicans, the Louisiana legislation by Democrats. Both states’ laws explicitly codify a custody guideline that many courts in other states follow.

Supporters say a formal 50-50 custody standard makes divorce proceedings more equitable for fathers — who historically have been awarded less custody time than mothers — and encourages them to maintain an active role in their children’s lives.

And it can reduce friction between separating parents by signaling they’re both starting the custody process on an equal playing field, said Don Hubin, board chair of the National Parents Organization, an advocacy group that has pushed for more states to adopt legal presumptions of shared parenting.

Without that presumption, Hubin said, one or both parents may feel like they have to paint each other in a bad light in order to ‘win’ more time with their children.

“It’s not just about the practice of shared parenting, but about the law signaling to parents that this is going to be the outcome unless something special is going on in your case,” he said. “It reduces the anxiety of the parents, which reduces the conflict between the parents.”

But critics say the standard might harm vulnerable women and children by making it more likely that children must spend time with a parent who isn’t safe. They fear that for women in abusive marriages, the knowledge they would have to cede 50% of their child’s time to an unsafe parent could push them to remain in a marriage just to protect their children.

Kimberly Rummage, who lives in Kentucky, calls her state’s 50-50 custody standard “absolutely diabolical.” She’s had a lengthy battle in court with her ex-husband over custody of their child.

“I think that parents should have to prove why they get that 50-50,” she said. “You should have to show what you’ve done in that child’s life, what you know about that child, how you’ve participated and supported that child.”

Some critics also argue that the 50-50 standard doesn’t account for the needs of children at different ages. Mississippi state Rep. Dana McLean, a Republican, warned her colleagues the state’s new law could harm breastfeeding infants who need to spend most of their time with their mothers during their first months of life.

Mississippi’s new law requires family courts to use equally-shared parenting time as the default in custody cases. Parents seeking more time must present evidence showing why a 50-50 split isn’t in their child’s best interest. It also changes how child support is calculated: The new formula for 50-50 custody can lower child support payments for the parent with the lower income.

Louisiana’s new law says child custody “shall” be divided equally, rather than “should,” which was the language under the previous law.

In both states, as in others that have adopted the 50-50 standard, a judge can override the rule if the court finds credible evidence for awarding more time to one parent.

But in Mississippi, several judges spoke against the bill before it passed, saying the old system — in which custody was awarded on a case-by-case basis using a specific set of factors — was the most fair.

At least five other states have similar laws, and all were approved with bipartisan support: Kentucky (2018), Arkansas (2021), West Virginia (2022), Florida (2023) and Missouri (2023).

Effects on divorce rates

Proponents of 50-50 laws say one positive side effect is that they could save some marriages. In Kentucky, the state’s divorce rate dropped 25% between 2016 and 2023, compared with an 18% decline nationwide.

But Krista Westrick-Payne, one of the researchers who studied the rates, told Stateline it’s impossible to tie Kentucky’s drop directly to the state’s 2018 50-50 custody law because too many other factors in that timeframe influenced it.

“There’s no one cause, no one single driver for these rates,” said Westrick-Payne, who is the assistant director of the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University in Kentucky.

The data shows that factors like state laws or local economic conditions tend to have a minimal effect on whether a couple divorces, she said.

“The more significant things that affect whether or not a couple decides to divorce have much more to do with their relationship and their personal situation.”

Westrick-Payne said she believes divorce and custody-related law should be crafted with the effects on individuals and families in mind, rather than as a way to affect widescale, population-level changes.

“When it comes to something like divorce, something that’s so personal, I think the focus needs to be more on the individuals going through it,” she said, “as opposed to some big policy to affect just whether somebody divorces or not.”

A growing effort

Hubin expects to see more states moving to codify the equal custody presumption in their laws in the coming years, as parenting norms change and more households become dual income. Fathers have taken on more caregiving responsibilities than a generation ago, he said.

“Fathers who’ve been involved with their kids, they’re not happy with being consigned to an ‘every other weekend’ visitor in their kids’ lives,” he said.

Nationally, mothers of children under 6 spend about seven and a half hours a day with their children, compared to a little over five hours for fathers, according to the latest available data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The time gap shrinks as kids get older: Mothers spend 3.8 hours a day with their teens and fathers spend about 3 hours.

Earlier this year, a 50-50 custody bill in Oklahoma, sponsored by both Republicans and Democrats, sailed through the House but died on the Senate floor. Similar bills have been proposed in Alabama, Idaho, Indiana and North Carolina.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

Cerina Fairfax, a Virginia dentist and mother of two, spent nearly two years living in the same house as her husband while she was trying to divorce him.

Virginia state law required couples with children, like the Fairfaxes, to wait a year before being allowed to file for divorce. Cerina’s husband, former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, had also tried different legal tactics to prolong the process.

In March of this year, a judge granted Cerina sole custody of their children and ordered Justin to move out.

A few weeks later, with just days left before his move-out deadline, Justin fatally shot Cerina and then himself, police say, while their two teens were also in the house.

The tragedy focused national attention on state divorce laws, which have remained mostly static since 2010, when New York became the last state to allow no-fault divorce. In the years since, most of the states that have tweaked their divorce laws have made it easier, not harder, to get one. Virginia, for example, relaxed some of its requirements just days before Cerina Fairfax’s death.

Now that could be changing.

In recent years, more conservatives have turned to divorce as a “family values” talking point, with some pushing to make it harder for couples to divorce. By doing so, they’ve relaunched a national conversation that would have been nearly unthinkable just a few years ago.

In 1969, California became the first state to allow no-fault divorce, which allows one member of a couple to file for divorce without proving that the other person engaged in wrongdoing such as adultery, abuse or abandonment. No-fault divorce emerged from the women’s rights movement of that era, promising women greater freedom to escape from unhappy or abusive marriages.

But the loss of that freedom suddenly seems more plausible, particularly for those whose confidence in federal protections for women’s rights was shattered after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022. And as state lawmakers ramp up restrictions around birth control, fertility treatments and pregnancy loss, new limits on divorce seem less far-fetched.

“What’s different now is that it’s actually gaining some traction,” said Marcia Zug, a family law professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law whose work focuses on the legal history of marriage. “Simply the idea that we’re talking about it seriously, that it’s part of some Republican party platforms, that it’s not just laughed out of the room.

“Even if we’re not anywhere near eliminating it, that is the major change.”

Earlier this year, for example, an Iowa Senate subcommittee approved a bill that would allow couples to opt out of no-fault divorce when they’re registering for marriage licenses.

“In the last generation, we have seen the chaos of — the circus of — pure no-fault divorce, (and) the ugliness of divorce and the breakdown of marriage,” Iowa state Sen. Jesse Green, a Republican, told his colleagues during a February hearing on his bill, which later died in committee.

“A lot of people are not getting married anymore because maybe, in some cases, they feel the lack of support and accountability with our law,” he said.

Oklahoma bill would end incompatibility as grounds for divorce

In Texas and Nebraska, the official state GOP platforms call for ending or limiting no-fault divorce. Other state Republican parties, such as in Louisiana, have considered similar party planks.

Republican lawmakers in states including South Carolina and South Dakota have filed bills to limit no-fault divorce or make the process harder.

Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers, a Republican and pastor, filed a bill in 2024 to abolish no-fault divorce, after saying he wanted to see public shaming for those who cause divorce.

At the same time, some prominent social media influencers have been using their platforms to call for streamlining divorce laws.

Hadley Vlahos, a Mississippi registered nurse with 2.2 million followers on TikTok, used her platform this summer to talk about her three-year-long divorce, which included an 11-day trial and hundreds of court filings. She has called for changes to Mississippi’s divorce law, one of only two in the country that doesn’t allow a no-fault divorce if one spouse objects. Her petition to change state law has more than 30,000 signatures.

Jen Hamilton, a nurse and content creator North Carolina who has 7.2 million followers across TikTok and Instagram as well as a bestselling book, called for changes to the divorce laws in her state after separating from her husband.

She recently appeared at a fundraiser with North Carolina state Sen. Woodson Bradley, a Democrat who co-sponsored a bill that would shorten the required separation period before divorce in certain circumstances. That bill remains in committee.

Hamilton’s goal, she told her followers, “is to do everything that I can to get North Carolina law changed to protect women — and some men — from these archaic, paternalistic laws that keep people trapped in marriages that are either unhealthy or dangerous.”

A paradox

Divorce has been declining in the U.S. for more than 40 years.

Four of the five states with the highest divorce rates — Oklahoma, Nevada, Mississippi, Wyoming and Alabama, as of the most recently available data — are Republican led; Nevada has a Republican governor but a Democratic-controlled state legislature.

But state laws aren’t an effective way to raise or lower the number of divorces, said Krista Westrick-Payne, a marriage and divorce researcher and assistant director at the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University.

“The more significant things that affect whether or not a couple decides to divorce has much more to do with their relationship and their personal situation,” Westrick-Payne said.

Religious areas tend to see higher divorce rates, according to her research. So do areas that are more politically conservative.

“That feels like a paradox,” she said. But those areas generally see more people marrying at younger ages — one of the biggest predictors of divorce.

“So it’s not to say religious people are divorce prone; it’s just they have all these other risk factors, and underlying population dynamics that affect this.

“People like to get on social media and make these overarching statements, flattening a very complex issue,” she said. “And I don’t think that serves anyone very well.”

The most dangerous time

The Iowa proposal to allow couples to opt out of no-fault divorce faced strong opposition from domestic violence advocates, who said such laws especially burden people fleeing domestic violence — who are overwhelmingly women — and can leave them stuck in a dangerous marriage while they try to prove to a court that they’re being abused.

“For someone experiencing domestic violence, leaving is already incredibly complicated, and for a lot of survivors, it is the most dangerous time,” said Lindsay Pingel, director of community engagement at the Iowa Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which represents 25 victim service provider organizations across the state.

Then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan, himself divorced, signed the law that made his state the first to allow no-fault divorce. Prior to that, a person trying to divorce had to prove in court that his or her spouse did something wrong. But such things are difficult to prove in court, and subject to a judge’s interpretation.

“We know that domestic violence doesn’t always come with the kind of documentation that someone who’s never experienced an unhealthy relationship might expect,” Pingel said. “There might not be a police report, or medical records, photographs or witnesses.”

Most survivors of domestic violence don’t talk about it with others until they’ve decided to leave, she said. And many don’t feel safe involving authorities in a situation that could make it more dangerous.

“We have to stop asking why survivors continue to stay in unhealthy relationships when we continue to put barriers in place that prohibit them from leaving.”

Cerina and Justin Fairfax tragedy underscores new Va. laws that could help prevent similar violence

Women who talked to Stateline about their divorces described years-long court battles with convoluted rules, fraught custody arrangements and uneven protections in cases of abuse.

Some states require months- or years-long waiting periods where a couple must be separated before they can file for divorce. At least three states — Arkansas, Arizona and Louisiana — allow so-called “covenant marriage,” a legally binding agreement that comes with additional requirements and is harder to end through divorce. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, who is from Louisiana, is in a covenant marriage with wife Kelly.

Recently, some states have made it easier for couples to divorce. Maryland, for example, moved to a purely no-fault divorce process in 2023.

Virginia’s new divorce law includes some narrow changes, including an option for speeding up the divorce process. It also created a legislative work group to study whether the state should eliminate fault-based divorce entirely.

And in Missouri, Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe in April signed a new law clarifying that pregnancy can’t prevent a divorce from being finalized.

Pingel, of the Iowa domestic violence coalition, said supporting healthy marriages and protecting vulnerable people from dangerous marriages aren’t competing goals.

“Children benefit from safety and stability,” she said. “and keeping someone legally tied to a person who is causing harm doesn’t necessarily create a healthier family.”

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.