SCANDINAVIA AND NETHERLANDS: M.V. Lee Badgett replies to Stanley Kurtz

[I'm cutting the footnotes but you can find them at the link at the bottom of this post, where it says "more." There's a summary here. --Eve]

...Marriage and child-bearing have become less directly connected over time in many European countries, including Scandinavia. But as we shall see, this separation hardly qualifies as the death of marriage, and it cannot be blamed on the passage of same-sex partner laws.

In fact, Denmark's longterm decline in marriage rates turned around in the early 1980's, and the upward trend has continued since the 1989 passage of the registered partner law. Now the Danish heterosexual marriage rates are now the highest they have been since the early 1970's. The most recent marriage rates in Sweden, Norway, and Iceland are also higher today than they were in the years before the partnership laws were passed. The slight dip in marriage rates in the Netherlands since 2001 is the result of a recession-induced cutback on weddings, according to Dutch demographers, and the actual number of marriages has gone up and down in the last few years, even before the legalization of same-sex marriage.

No research suggests that recognizing same-sex couples' relationships caused the increase in marriage rates. But heterosexual couples in those countries were clearly not deterred from marrying by the legalization of same-sex couples' rights.

Divorce rates also show no evidence of harm to heterosexual marriage from partnership laws. Scandinavian divorce rates have not changed much in Scandinavia in the last two decades. Danish demographers have even found that marriages in the early 1990's appear to be more stable than those in the 1980's.

Cohabitation rates are indeed on the rise, though, as is the likelihood that an unmarried cohabiting couple will have children. In Denmark, the number of cohabiting couples with children rose by 25% in the 1990s. Roughly half of all births in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, and almost 2/3 in Iceland, are to parents who are not married. From these figures, Kurtz concludes that "married parenthood has become a minority phenomenon."

In fact, however, the majority of families with children in Scandinavia and the Netherlands are still headed by married parents. In 2000, for instance, 78% of Danish couples with children were married couples. If we also include single parent families in the calculation, almost two-thirds of families with children were headed by a married couple. In Norway, 77% of couples with children are married, and 61% of all families with children are headed by married parents. And 75% of Dutch families with children include married couples. By comparison, 72% of families with children are headed by married couples in the United States.

How can this fact coexist with high nonmarital birth rates and cohabitation rates? The main reason is that in Scandinavia and the Netherlands most cohabiting couples marry after they start having children. In Sweden, for instance, 70% of cohabiters marry after the birth of the first child, most of them within five years. In the Netherlands, while 30% of children are born outside of marriage, only 21% of children under one live with unmarried parents, and by age five, only 11% live with unmarried parents. As a result, high rates of married couple parenting and rising marriage rates in Scandinavia are not incompatible with high nonmarital birth rates.

Kurtz claims that the rise in nonmarital births will hurt children since unmarried couples are more likely to break-up than married couples. And it is true that unmarried cohabiters' unions are more likely to dissolve in Scandinavia than are marriages, even when children are present. But when cohabiting parents marry in Scandinavian countries, as most eventually do, they are not more likely to divorce than are couples who were married when they had their children.

As a result, children in Scandinavia countries still spend most of their lives with their parents living together. In fact, they spend more time than kids in the U.S. do! Gunnar Andersson has calculated how much time the average child spent living with both parents in the same household in the 1980's, the most recent period that allows comparisons across countries. Of the countries he examines, the lowest average is in the United States, where the time spent with both parents is 67%. The highest is in Italy, where it is 97%. In Sweden the average is 81%, in Norway it is 89%, and in Finland it is 88%. In other words, combining the time that parents are cohabiting and married demonstrates that children are spending the vast majority of their young lives with their parents in the Scandinavian countries.

Did gay marriage widen the split between parenthood and marriage? ...

In a recent study, I compared the cohabitation rates (and other variables) in the nine countries that recognize same-sex partners with other European and North American countries that do not. Cohabitation rates were higher in the partner recognition countries before the passage of same-sex partner laws. Since higher cohabitation rates came first, it would be inappropriate to blame partnership laws for more cohabitation. ...

...[T]he nonmarital birth rate began rising in the 1970's, long before any legal recognition of same-sex couples, and it has actually slowed down in Scandinavia in recent years. From 1970 to 1980,the Danish nonmarital birth rate tripled, rising from 11% to 33%. It rose again in the following decade, but by a much smaller amount, to 46% in 1990, before ending its climb. Denmark's nonmarital birth rate did not increase at all when the Danish partnership law was passed in 1989. In fact, it actually decreased a bit after that date!

Norway's big surge in non-marital births also occurred well before the passage of its registered partnership law in 1993. In the 1980's, the percentage of births to unmarried parents rose from 16% to 39%. In first half of the 1990's, the nonmarital birth rate rose more slowly, leveling off at 50% in the mid-1990s.

Kurtz argues that the main impact of partner registration laws in Norway was to discourage couples from marrying after the birth of their first child. But the data on second, third, and later babies born to unmarried parents tell the same story as the overall trend. In 1985, 10% of second and later babies had unmarried parents, a number that tripled to 31% by 1993. From 1994 to 2003, though, the number only rose to 41% where it appears to be leveling off. If the partnership law had "further" encouraged nonmarital births of first or later children, these rates should have increased faster after 1993, but in fact the increase slowed down (for second and later births) or stopped (for first births).

The Netherlands show a slightly different pattern, but here, too, there is no correlation between recognition of same-sex partnerships and rising rates of non-marital births. Despite high rates of cohabitation, the Dutch have traditionally been much less likely than Scandinavians to have babies before marriage, with fewer than one in ten births to unmarried parents until 1988. Kurtz argues that legal recognition for same-sex couples kicked Holland into the Scandinavian league with respect to nonmarital parenting. It is true that the Dutch nonmarital birth rate has been rising steadily since the 1980's, and sometime in the early 1990's the nonmarital birth rate started increasing at a somewhat faster rate. But that acceleration began well before the Netherlands implemented registered partnerships in 1998 and gave same-sex couples the right to marry in 2001.

Another helpful perspective is to compare the trends of countries that have a partner registration law with those that do not. If recognizing gay couples contributed to the increase in nonmarital births, then we should see a bigger change in countries with those laws than in countries without them. Data from Eurostat shows that in the 1990's, the eight countries that recognized registered partners at some point in that decade saw an increase in the average nonmarital birth rate from 36% in 1991 to 44% in 2000, for an eight percentage point increase. In the EU countries (plus Switzerland) that didn't recognize partners, the average rate rose from 15% to 23% -- also an eight percentage point increase. The change in rates was exactly the same, demonstrating that partner registration laws did not cause the nonmarital birth rate trends.

...Nonmarital birth rates have soared in in Ireland, Luxembourg, Hungary, Lithuania, and several other eastern European countries--all countries that do not allow same-sex couples to marry or register.

Only one piece of evidence supports Kurtz's argument that partnership created a new wedge between parenthood and marriage, and that piece of evidence directly contradicts Kurtz's ideas about the cause of such a separation. Contrary to what many observers believe, Scandinavian parliaments did not give same-sex couples the exact same rights as heterosexual couples. Quite deliberately, the various Scandinavian parliaments chose to provide legal ties for same-sex couples through a special new legal relationship, not by the simpler path of extending the right to marry to same-sex couples. And the parliaments denied same-sex couples the right to adopt children (including their nonbiological children raised from birth) or to gain access to reproductive technologies. Thus Scandinavian governments did create a wedge between marriage and reproduction, but they did so by design and they did so only for same-sex couples. Despite some loosening of those prohibitions over time, registered partners who want to have children still face legal hurdles that heterosexual married couples do not.

In the end, the Scandinavian and Dutch experience suggests that there is little reason to worry that heterosexual people will flee marriage if gay and lesbian couples get the same rights. This conclusion is even stronger when looking at the United States, where couples have many more tangible incentives to marry. Scholars of social welfare programs have noted that the U.S. relies heavily on the labor market and families to provide income and support for individuals. In the United States, unlike Scandinavia, marriage is often the only route to survivor coverage in pensions and social security, and many people have access to health care only through their spouse's employment. Scandinavian states, on the other hand, are much more financially supportive of families and individuals, regardless of their family or marital status.

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posted by Eve at 7:01 PM | link

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