AMONG LAST TO OK DIVORCE, CHILEANS DEAL WITH IMPACT: From the Boston Globe

After allegedly enduring more than 20 years of beatings, insults, and infidelity -- including a decade in which Chile's Congress fought over a law that would allow the dissolution of marriages -- Maria Victoria Torres recently became the first person in the country to apply for a divorce. ...

In updating its marriage code of 1884, Chile became the last country in the Americas to legalize divorce. Malta and the Philippines are the only nations that forbid it.

Critics of legalizing divorce, including the Catholic Church, have warned that the new law will fuel a host of societal ills, from broken homes to delinquent children. They cheered the recent news that only 1,035 divorce petitions were filed from mid-November, when the law took effect, through the end of December, a fraction of the tens of thousands that the Justice Ministry had predicted would file. Legal analysts say many people may be waiting to see how much bureaucracy is involved in the early petitions before filing their own.

Yet even before the divorce law, marriage was becoming an endangered species in this predominantly Catholic and traditional society, with the annual number of new legal unions plummeting from about 105,000 in 1990 to fewer than 58,000 in 2003, according to civil registry figures.

More striking in a country in which most prominent Catholic schools do not admit "illegitimate" children, and in which until 1997 there was no law granting child support or inheritance rights for children born outside wedlock, more than half of children in Chile now are born to unmarried parents -- one of the highest rates in the world, according to national statistics. Abortion and the morning-after pill are illegal in Chile.

Proponents of the divorce law say it could serve to reinforce rather than extinguish the institution of marriage, by allowing cohabitating couples who could not dissolve prior unions to remarry and by encouraging skittish young people to tie the knot, secure in the knowledge that there is a legal escape route.

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