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MARRIAGE AND FERTILITY The general tendency for marriage ties to be impermanent, in many countries today, and for couples often to live together without undergoing any ceremony or sacrament, has had a considerable effect on fertility in general, and particularly upon the relative numbers of births within and outside marriage. A new analysis is therefore welcome, particularly from the USA, where because of the nature of national statistics very many studies have been conducted on an ‘any woman’ basis, with regard to marital status. Using extensive survey data, Rindfuss and Parnel have assessed the probabilities of conception within one year according to parity, in combination with marriage situation, for three broad educational levels, for blacks and whites separately. Their most significant figures for whites are as follows, for women aged 23 with no previous births:
What stands out from these figures is the absence of any differential within marriage, whereas outside it – whether before or after – there are sharp disparities. As the authors comment, the higher the level of education the more the options available to a woman, economic or social, and so the greater the cost, in broad terms, of having a child outside marriage. It is also interesting that the probabilities post-marriage are no less than those for the single. However, at this parity the chances of conception are much higher within marriage than outside it. The general message from this type of analysis is much the same for blacks as for whites. For both, however, it must be remembered that marital status can change at short notice, and that the levels of some of the probabilities may have been influenced by marriage prospects; not unaware of this consideration, the authors have given figures excluding women who changed their status within the year, but while the effect of such exclusion is to reduce the non-married probabilities significantly it does not alter the general pattern. The same can be said when higher parities are considered for young white women of low educational standard the results are:
For those who remain unmarried, the chances of more children actually increase with rising parity, and they do not diminish for those whose marriage has ended. This may be because the opportunities for marriage are dimmed by the presence of one or more children. The data for higher educational achievements show the same relativities, but at a lower level for the non-married. Again blacks exhibit the same general features as whites, though it appears that they are less liable to legitimate pre-marital conceptions. It looks from this study as though most interest in fertility differentials or time trends should in future be directed to the experience of unmarried women and of the widowed and divorced. Although such matters could not be investigated in the enquiry under review, attention should also be paid to such interactions between marital state and conception as (1) marriages brought about by the imminence of birth, (2) marriages ended because of disagreements over the number of children, and (3) the continued existence of at least some people who believe that children should not be born outside marriage, or that once married one ought to have children. It would have been interesting to see a comparable classification of fertility within and outside marriage according to religious belief or observance. Given that most creeds attach high importance to marriage and family, it seems possible that once again the principal differences in fertility would be outside rather than within the marital state, according to the strength of people’s commitment to moral behaviour when not in that state. 1. The Varying Connection between Marital Status and Childbearing in the United States. Population and Development Review, 15,3. September, 1989. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||