No-fault divorce and legally sanctioned child support were put in place to give women more choices. I don't think we need to return to a time where women and children are effectively chattel. The overall effect of these policies has been positive.
There is an untested assertion here that Bangladesh has better outcomes for marriages because the practise of religion is higher. Yet you should also see lower levels of violence against women in Bangladesh from all these happy families but it seems that isn't so. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2740706/
I'm not sure how far we are going to get trying to work out whether the chicken/egg situation regarding dysfunctional families and poverty in the US is causal. All we really know for sure is that poverty is a reliable cause of family breakdown.
We shouldn't force people to stay together because some religious folk think that piling further misery on unhappy people is OK.
> I don't think we need to return to a time where women and children are effectively chattel.
This is very much factually wrong description of the position of women in America before no-fault divorce. In fact, I consider the suggestion that women in America completely lacked agency before 70s to be rather reprehensible.
> Yet you should also see lower levels of violence against women in Bangladesh from all these happy families but it seems that isn't so.
I don’t think anyone argues here that family life in Bangladesh is better than in America in all aspects. Violence against women is obviously bad thing, just as all violence is. It is a good societal goal to reduce violence against any of its members.
At the same time, this is only one of the goals the societies might want to pursue. Often, you might encounter hard trade offs to make. For example, is it better to have a bit more violence, but much fewer children raised by a singe parent? Or, is it better to give the members of the society more choices, at cost of the society failing to choose to procreate, leading to ultimate decay and dissolution of the society in a few generations? One of the problems in the secular society in the US is failure to acknowledge these trade offs, and deciding that more choice of, less violence towards, and more workplace empowerment of women as always preferable at all circumstances.
If anyone thinks it is a straw man, just look at how responses to this comment will claim that I want to enslave women and promote violence towards them, which I of course do not, but the mere suggestion of the trade off existing, and potentiality of choosing something other than liberal women empowerment is an idea completely outside the overton window of secular, liberal discussion within educated, professional community.
I don't quite understand this argument. Are you saying this is all women's fault for wanting to participate in the workforce and leave bad relationships?
Suppose you were a stay at home dad married to a high earning wife. You then meet a new woman you find more attractive. Under most Western countries' laws you can divorce your wife for no reason other than you no longer find her attractive, and she has to pay you alimony and child support to maintain your lifestyle while you're dating your new, hotter partner.
What's the downside to you? Seems there isn't any.
It seems obvious that a system setup like that will increase divorces initiated by stay at home parents, and hence increase single parent households.
So, the no fault divorce system has to be absolutely perfect to be acceptable?
To be honest, I don't see anything wrong in your scenario. People fall out of love for lots of reasons, making them miserable by making it harder to split up doesn't seem like a particularly good solution to me. The scenario you've raised would have to involve a very emotionally shallow individual whom the other partner would be better off without anyway.
This is exactly the kind of refusal of admitting the existence of trade-off I was speaking of. To pursue a noble goal of reducing abuse and violence to zero, other noble goals are sacrificed. This sacrifice, while very real, is not acknowledged, because the narrative claims we can satisfy all of our goals perfectly at the same time. This might even be possible, but, quite apparently, not using the currently proposed approaches. Nevertheless, the narrative rejects the idea of admitting that the current approaches are anything less then perfect, because it would mean admitting the existence of the trade off.
There is an untested assertion here that Bangladesh has better outcomes for marriages because the practise of religion is higher. Yet you should also see lower levels of violence against women in Bangladesh from all these happy families but it seems that isn't so. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2740706/
I'm not sure how far we are going to get trying to work out whether the chicken/egg situation regarding dysfunctional families and poverty in the US is causal. All we really know for sure is that poverty is a reliable cause of family breakdown.
We shouldn't force people to stay together because some religious folk think that piling further misery on unhappy people is OK.