Couples who live together before they get married are less likely to stay married, a new study has found. But their chances improve if they were already engaged when they began living together.

The likelihood that a marriage would last for a decade or more decreased by six percentage points if the couple had cohabited first, the study found.

The study of men and women ages 15 to 44 was done by the National Center for Health Statistics using data from the National Survey of Family Growth conducted in 2002. The authors define cohabitation as people who live with a sexual partner of the opposite sex.

“From the perspective of many young adults, marrying without living together first seems quite foolish,” said Prof. Pamela J. Smock, a research professor at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “Just because some academic studies have shown that living together may increase the chance of divorce somewhat, young adults themselves don’t believe that.”

The authors found that the proportion of women in their late 30s who had ever cohabited had doubled in 15 years, to 61 percent. ...

The survey found that about 28 percent of men and women had cohabitated before their first marriage and that about 7 percent lived together and never married. About 23 percent of women and 18 percent of men married without having lived together.

Labels: cohabitation, culture, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births

posted by Eve at 2:26 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Teenage pregnancies have fallen to their lowest rate in over 20 years, annual statistics published today show.

The 2008 ONS conception statistics show that, despite a slight rise in 2007, the action from the Government's teenage pregnancy strategy has led to a decline in pregnancies among under 16 and 18 year olds.

The statistics also show:

- The rate of under 16 year olds falling pregnant decreased by 5.7 per cent between 2007 and 2008.
- Since 1998 there has been a 13.3 per cent reduction in the number of under 18s conceiving, and encouraging reductions in more than 120 local authorities and at every age range.
- England's under-18 conception rate for final quarter 2008 was 5.4 per cent lower than the same quarter 2007 and is the lowest fourth quarter rate since 1993, showing promise for the 2009 data due next year.

Coinciding with the statistics and to further the progress made in recent years, Children's Minister Dawn Primarolo and Public Health Minister Gillian Merron today launched Teenage Pregnancy Strategy: Beyond 2010. This action plan outlines new measures to tackle the root causes of teenage pregnancy, building on the successes of the last 10 years.

A new scheme to pilot one-to-one sexual health and contraception consultations for 16 year olds along with more support for parents, increasing help for teachers and improving school-based health services are among the announcements being made today.

Labels: contraception, culture, out-of-wedlock births, sex education, teenage pregnancy, United Kingdom

posted by Eve at 1:39 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Rachel Downtain is a telecommunications project manager who says her friends would describe her as tall, slender, fit and active. Not someone you'd think would fail to find a mate. Yet, of late, Ms. Downtain has been sifting through sperm-donor Web sites. This is not her first choice for how to start a family, but at 35 she says she's quickly running out of options.

Ms. Downtain's story should sound familiar. In recent months the spike in college-educated women deciding to have a husbandless family has become a magazine staple. The New York Times Sunday Magazine devoted a cover story to the issue. There's been a 145% rise in unmarried births among college-educated women since 1980, more than twice the increase in such births among women without college educations. That's just births; adoptions are another outlet for women seeking families on their own. But there's a largely unexplored part to this story: Why is this happening?

Part of the answer is found in a Pew Research Center report released this week: A sea change in relationships is taking place as everyone adjusts to the new reality of women being better educated and in some cases more preferred than men in the workforce. Especially unsettling to some men is their role as second-best earner in the family. As the Pew report documents, 22% of men with "some college" are now outearned by their wives, up from 4% in 1970. ...

There's no single answer to the "why" question, but social scientists agree that the education mismatch Ms. Downtain experiences with men is a significant player behind the increase in college-educated women choosing single motherhood.

Labels: gender, gender differences, heterosexual couples, men, out-of-wedlock births, single parenting, women

posted by Eve at 10:34 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Today, National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) released Mama Says: A National Survey of Moms' Attitudes on Fathering, the first-ever national survey taking an in-depth look at how today's mothers view fathers and fatherhood.

The survey's most revealing findings deal with the enormous gulf between the assessments of fathers by mothers who are married to or live with their children's dads and those who do not. More than 8 in 10 mothers married to or living with the father of their children were satisfied with his performance as a dad, but only 2 of 10 mothers not living with the father were satisfied.

Furthermore, only 1 of 3 moms not living with dad reported a "close and warm" relationship between their child and the father, while nearly 9 in 10 married mothers classified the relationship as close and warm. A majority of mothers - 2 of 3 - agreed that fathers perform best if they are married to the mothers of their children. ...

The most troublesome finding for those who view fathers as playing unique roles in their children lives is the majority opinion among mothers that fathers are replaceable by moms or other men. More than half of the moms agree that fathers are replaceable by moms, and 2 of 3 moms agree that fathers are replaceable by other men. However, in a national survey of dads' attitudes on fatherhood, Pop's Culture, released by NFI in 2006, similar but slightly lower proportions of fathers agreed with these statements.

Therefore, it seems to be a majority view in the American public that fathers are replaceable despite near universal agreement that there is a father absence crisis in the United States - 93 percent and 91 percent of moms and dads, respectively, agree that such a crisis exists. The mothers who feel fathers are replaceable but feel there is a father absence crisis may believe that while possible, it is unlikely that an adequate substitute for a missing father can be found.

Labels: cohabitation, Fathers, Marriage, motherhood, National Fatherhood Initiative, out-of-wedlock births

posted by Eve at 11:58 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

It is a Chicago public school full of energy and spirit. It has about 800 girls, and 115 of them have something in common – something you might find disturbing.

CBS 2's Kristyn Hartman reports.

All those young ladies are moms or moms-to-be at Paul Robeson High School. It's not a school for young mothers, it's a neighborhood school. And all of the pregnancies have happened, despite prevention talk.

If you want to know why, the people closest to the situation say there's no simple explanation.

Chicago Public Schools says it does not track the overall number of teen moms in the district. But Robeson Principal Gerald Morrow knows the count at his school in Englewood: 115 young ladies who are either expecting or already have had children.

To put it in perspective, their school pictures would fill roughly six pages of their high school year book.

Why is it happening at Robeson?

"It can be a lot of things that are happening in the home or not happening in the home, if you will," Morrow said. Absentee fathers are another factor, he said. ...

One thing they might not know about their principal: His mom had him when she was 15. That's why accepting the problem -- and working through it -- is so important to him.

Labels: culture, out-of-wedlock births

posted by Eve at 7:12 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A ground-breaking series of studies, published next month, show liberal attitudes towards the make-up of the family, religion and cultural integration among the modern generation of girls and young women.

The survey, which questioned a representative sample of 1,109 seven to 21 year-olds across the UK, found that a third of girls in the younger age group thought they would be "grown up" by the age of 15, while 90 per cent of 16 to 21-year-olds regarded themselves as "grown up".

Girls were generally positive about marriage but less than half thought it should come before parenthood. One in four thought it was "OK to get married several times", rising to a third in the 16 to 21 age range.

One finding suggested that some teenagers actively plan to become single mothers. Of the girls questioned who had left schools and were unemployed, almost half (45 per cent) expected to have a baby before they were 21.

Labels: adolescence, childhood, children, culture, family structure, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, remarriage, United Kingdom

posted by Eve at 3:28 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

This is the last in my series of columns on out of wedlock births. By now you know that 4 in 10 U.S. births are nonmarital; this rises to 7 in 10 for African-American Women, and 5 in 10 for Hispanic women, our fastest growing minority population. Women in their 20s and 30s account for the lion’s share of the trend. …

Most of the state and private programs responding to nonmarital births over the last 40 years have poured their energies into “taking the baby out” of the sexual encounter via birth control. Abstinence programs, which are less common, try to teach young people how to avoid nonmarital sexual involvement. “Big-picture” efforts have aimed to boost young people’s educational and job attainments, in order to steer them toward a different future. While occasionally, policy experts have referenced the need to help young people think more healthfully about the meaning of their lives, including about the importance of their heterosexual relationships, no extensive efforts have ever been directed to addressing the intertwined issues I have surfaced above. For brevity’s sake, I would say these issues might be identified as: the moral weight of heterosexual relations; the public nature of heterosexual relations; the intrinsically parental orientation of heterosexual relations, and the crisis of fatherhood.

Also for brevity’s sake, as well as to get at the conceptual nub of my proposals, I would suggest that any response to these issues must “put the baby back into sex.” By this I mean that men and women need to acknowledge the overwhelming importance of heterosexual relations’ orientation to the procreation of children – helpless creatures who require decades of intensive labor, a lifetime of interaction, and who apparently come into the world with an inbuilt desire to remain connected to both their father and their mother. No matter the heights and depths of couples’ romantic aspirations and experiences, these can never be divorced from the crucial reality that heterosexual relations are procreative. The law has always known this. Most churches did or still do. And now couples must acknowledge it too, with help from every possible governmental, religious and other social institution. Once the baby is re-introduced into couples’ sexual consciousness, they can better understand that nonmarital sex has its own intrinsically public significance; the door is also opened for women and men to understand the “giftedness” of the other precisely in connection with procreation. They might further be open to the realization that men and women were literally “meant for each other,” meant for “communion,” and that what they can do together is more than the sum of its parts. This is a fundamental approach to helping men and women internalize a view of one another that is more respectful, more elevated, than what obtains today, especially among the most disadvantaged. Motherhood and fatherhood have not lost their fan base in these communities; were each sex to be helped to see the other, beginning in adolescence, as potential mothers and fathers, leaders of their children, of the next generation, and of their community, this might help to transcend current gender mistrustful stereotypes. Tantalizing indications of the possible beneficial effects upon young men and women of learning about their mutual procreative capabilities have come from “fertility awareness” programs like TeenStar.[6]

Who might act on the goal of “putting the baby back into sex”? And how might they proceed? The most likely actors are of course families themselves, churches and governments.

Labels: babies, culture, Helen Alvare, heterosexual couples, out-of-wedlock births, pregnancy, premarital sex

posted by Imapp Staff at 1:23 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Hell doesn’t freeze over, the land is not engulfed in floods or flaming brimstone, and the participants are not struck dead by lightening. Neither do married straight people rush to divorce court to end their association with the now-sullied institution or reform their behavior to prove that they really are better than gay people. Instead, at least in the case of the Netherlands which has allowed gay marriage since 2001, gay people get married for much the same reasons as straight people while the marital behavior of straight people scarcely changes at all.

This is the conclusion of When Gay People Get Married, a refreshingly even-tempered and well-researched book by M.V. Lee Badgett, a Professor of Economics and director of the Center for Public Policy & Administration at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and research director of the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the UCLA School of Law. ...

So gay marriage seems to be good for gay people: how does it affect straight people? According to the conservative commentator Stanley Kurtz, it hastens moral decline by separating the act of procreation from the act of marriage. He points to decreasing marriage rates in the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, the increase in unmarried heterosexual couples, and increasing numbers of children born outside of wedlock as evidence that straight people take legal recognition of gay marriage as a sign that parenthood and marriage need no longer be connected.

But Badgett refutes these conclusions by looking at marriage rates in six countries, five of which have a long history of granting rights to same sex couples: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, the Netherlands, and the United States. All six have seen a decline in marriage rates since the 1970s, but several of the countries which allow gay marriage have seen an increase since the ‘90s (while the US has not). She doesn’t attribute the increase to the influence of gay marriage (the trend started earlier) but points out that the historical data offers no support for Kurtz’s opinions. Similarly, divorce rates and nonmarital birth rates showed little change after the legalization of same-sex marriage.

Labels: cohabitation, Europe, gay marriage, M.V. Lee Badgett, Marriage, Netherlands, out-of-wedlock births, Stanley Kurtz

posted by Eve at 4:19 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Insisting on their religious and academic freedoms, Catholic educational institutions are seeking exemption from a provision in the new Magna Carta of Women banning the dismissal of unwed mothers from employment or school.

Monsignor Gerardo Santos, national president of the Catholic Educational Association of the Philippines (CEAP), said the CEAP would ask that a provision on such an exemption be inserted into the new law’s implementing rules and regulations. ...

Women’s rights activists have said that under the new law, unwed mothers who are kicked out can file a civil case and sue for damages while government officials who dismiss them can be sanctioned under administrative and civil service laws.

Santos insisted on the Catholic schools’ right to have an unwed pregnant student or employee go on leave “after due process,” or to enforce other disciplinary action.

Labels: Catholic Church, culture, discrimination law, gender differences, out-of-wedlock births, Philippines, religion, religious liberty, single parenting

posted by Eve at 3:54 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The Church of England is offering couples a two-for-one service - marriage for them and baptisms for their children.

The church says it is recognizing the changing reality of British families. Statistics show that 44 per cent of children in Britain are born to unmarried women. ...

The church said it was responding to demand, but still believed the best place for sex was within marriage.

Labels: Church of England, culture, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, religion, sex, United Kingdom

posted by Eve at 7:21 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

With Father’s Day almost upon us, expect a host of media stories on men and
family life. Some will do a good job of capturing the changes and continuities
associated with fatherhood in contemporary America. But other reporters and
writers will generalize from their own unrepresentative networks of friends and
family members, try to baptize the latest family trend, or assume that our
society is heading ceaselessly in a progressive direction. So be on the lookout
this week for stories, op-eds, and essays that include these five myths on
contemporary fatherhood and family life.

Labels: cohabitation, culture, divorce, Fathers, out-of-wedlock births, parenting, W. Bradford Wilcox

posted by Imapp Staff at 4:40 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Anyone wishing to understand inequality in contemporary America should consult the latest data on nonmarital births, as compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). “Childbearing by unmarried women has resumed a steep climb since 2002,” the NCHS reports. Between 2002 and 2007, the birth rate among unmarried women increased by 21 percent; since 1980, it has increased by 80 percent. In 2007, almost 40 percent of all births in the United States were to unmarried women. The out-of-wedlock birth rate among blacks was just under 72 percent, while the rate among non-Hispanic whites was nearly 28 percent. ...

We believe that any sea change in cultural practices must be driven by America’s elites — the same elites who have done so much to pollute the culture while remaining insulated from the consequences. Yet such a change won’t happen quickly, if it happens at all. In the meantime, we agree with University of Chicago economist James Heckman that programs designed to help disadvantaged children “should respect the primacy of the family.” As Heckman writes, “The family plays a powerful role in shaping adult outcomes that is not fully appreciated by current American policies.”

During the Bush years, liberals often attributed rising inequality to Republican economic measures. In fact, the growth of inequality since the early 1980s can be explained by structural changes in both the U.S. economy and American society. The most important social shift has been the deterioration of middle- and lower-income families. Over the long term, strengthening those families is the best way to reduce inequality.

Labels: Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, poverty

posted by Eve at 5:03 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Earlier this month, Bristol Palin turned herself into a poster child for the nation's continuing effort to prevent teenage pregnancies. She made the rounds on the morning TV show circuit and spoke at town hall meetings to drive home the point that other teens shouldn't make the same mistake she did. Ms. Palin's campaign could not have come at a better time. According to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. -- after witnessing a 14-year decline in teenage childbearing from 1991 to 2005 -- saw the number rise from 2005 to 2007. In 2007, the latest year for which data are available, about 450,000 adolescents gave birth.

Labels: cohabitation, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, W. Bradford Wilcox

posted by Eve at 4:16 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The percentage of births to unmarried mothers is increasing worldwide, according to a new federal report that shows a universal upward trend over the last 25 years.

Among 14 countries analyzed in the report by the National Center for Health Statistics, the percentage of all live unmarried births in the USA -- 40% in 2007 -- ranks somewhere in the middle. That's up from 18% in 1980. The sharpest rise was from 2002 to 2007, the report found.

Countries with a higher proportion of births to unmarried mothers include Iceland, Sweden, Norway, France, Denmark and the United Kingdom; countries with a lower percentage than the USA include Ireland, Germany, Canada, Spain, Italy and Japan.

In 2007, the Netherlands had the same percentage as the USA, but it has increased ten-fold there from 4% in 1980.

Demographer Patrick Heuveline of the University of California-Los Angeles compared non-marital fertility in many of the same countries about a decade ago. He found that U.S. mothers are more likely to be single parents because the non-married couple relationship doesn't tend to last very long, something he says continues to be true, he says.

"There might be little bit more cohabitation now, but it's probably true that the United States remains unique and ahead of other countries for births to single mothers not in a cohabiting partnership," he says.

Labels: cohabitation, demographics, Europe, out-of-wedlock births

posted by Eve at 9:21 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...The mothers are part of a far-reaching social trend unfolding across the United States: The number of children being born out of wedlock has risen sharply in recent years, driven primarily by women in their 20s and 30s opting to have children without getting married. Nearly four out of every 10 births are now to unmarried women.

"It's been a huge increase -- a dramatic increase," said Stephanie J. Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics, which documented the shift in detail yesterday for the first time, based on an analysis of birth certificates nationwide. "It's quite striking."

Although the report did not examine the reasons for the increase, Ventura and other experts cite a confluence of factors, including a lessening of the social stigma associated with unmarried motherhood, an increase in couples delaying or forgoing marriage, and growing numbers of financially independent women and older and single women deciding to have children on their own after delaying childbearing.

"I think this is the tipping point," said Rosanna Hertz, a professor of sociology and women's studies at Wellesley College. "This is becoming increasingly the norm. The old adage that 'first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage' just no longer holds true."

Labels: culture, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births

posted by Eve at 9:20 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...The second story was the report that in 2007 the United States experienced a baby boom of post-World War II proportions. More babies — 4,317,119 to be exact — were born than in any other year of our nation's history. That's good news because, unlike many of our European friends, the U.S. population is replacing itself at a healthy pace.

However, the not-so-good news is that we had a record number of births to unwed mothers. Forty percent of all births were out-of-wedlock, and more than three-quarters of these moms are 20 or older. ...

As with the subprime mortgage craze, there will be many unintended consequences of our nation's growing acceptance and, too often, celebration, of creating single-mother families. We are moving toward an era of the "subprime" family, with fathers as optional as an adequate down payment.

But with families, like mortgages, structure matters. Indeed, in each of the mortgage-backed investments that are now deemed toxic, the underlying assets had value but the structure made them more risky.

Labels: demographics, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births

posted by Imapp Staff at 10:35 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Though most Americans agreed that out-of-wedlock births are a problem for society, the survey found that "blacks are much less likely than whites to marry and much more likely to have children outside of marriage. However, an equal percentage of both whites and blacks (46 percent and 44 percent, respectively) consider it morally wrong to have a child out of wedlock."

The survey also found that "Hispanics ... place greater importance than either whites or blacks do on children as a key to a successful marriage -- even though they have a higher nonmarital birth rate than do whites."

How does being morally opposed to out-of-wedlock births play out realistically in communities of color, which are experiencing the highest levels of such births?

Is the moral opposition to these births harming any attempts to address the possible contributing factors to out-of-wedlock birth rates? Or, should there be alarm at the survey's findings that most people ages 18 to 49, regardless of racial or ethnic background, say that births out of wedlock are wrong only sometimes or not at all?

Labels: culture, out-of-wedlock births

posted by Eve at 4:05 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

More babies were born in the United States in 2007 than any year in the nation's history, topping the peak during the baby boom 50 years earlier, federal researchers reported Wednesday.

There is both good and bad news from the more than 4.3 million births:

_The U.S. population is more than replacing itself, a healthy trend.

_However, the teen birth rate was up for the second year in a row.

The birth rate rose slightly for women of all ages, and births to unwed mothers reached an all-time high of about 40 percent, continuing a trend begun years ago. More than three-quarters of these women were 20 or older. ...

But it's not clear the boomlet will last long. Some experts think birth rates are already declining because of the economic recession that began in late 2007.

"I expect they'll go back down. The lowest birth rates recorded in the United States occurred during the Great Depression—and that was before modern contraception," said Dr. Carol Hogue, an Emory University professor of maternal and child health.

The 2007 statistical snapshot reflected a relatively good economy coupled with cultural trends that promoted childbirth, she and others noted.

Meanwhile, U.S. abortions have been dropping to their lowest levels in decades, according to other reports. Some have attributed the abortion decline to better use of contraceptives, but other experts have wondered if the rise in births might indicate a failure in proper use of contraceptives. Some earlier studies have shown declining availability of abortions. ...

CDC officials noted that despite the record number of births, this is nothing like what occurred in the 1950s, when a much smaller population of women were having nearly four children each, on average. That baby boom quickly transformed society, affecting everything from school construction to consumer culture.

Labels: abortion, demographics, out-of-wedlock births

posted by Eve at 2:58 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...On this view, not only does gay marriage contribute to heterosexual irresponsibility, but even advocating gay marriage sets it off. This is a lot to lay on a few gay couples in Massachusetts and a stack of unread law review articles. Jon Rauch responds that there's not even a correlation here. There are multiple other problems, starting with the arbitrariness and manipulability of the starting point (why choose five years ago?). And note this: this resurgence in illegitimacy happened during the five years in which gay marriage bans have become (not thanks to me or my choice) the most prominent marriage issue in America, and the one marriage idea emphasized by "pro-family" conservatives to Americans, helping tar it as an invidiously discriminatory institution.

But leave all that to one side. Here's my deal for Maggie: I'll admit that "gay marriage," or I should say more precisely its "prominence" among the trend-setting pointy-heads, contributed to more heterosexual irresponsibility, circa 2003-08. In exchange, when illegitimacy stabilizes or goes down, or when unmarried cohabitation falls off, or when deadbeat dads start paying their child support, or when the rate of second and third and fourth and umpteenth heterosexual marriages declines, or when the traffic at websites promoting adultery eases, she will insinuate that gay marriage contributed to these trends too. Deal?

Labels: culture, gay marriage, out-of-wedlock births

posted by Imapp Staff at 2:39 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT