Announcing the results of his long-term “evolution” on the subject last week, President Obama revived the debate over gay marriage. In the widespread discussion, however, there is one question that’s rarely asked: How interested are gay couples in getting married?

Heretofore at least, the answer seems to be “not really.” Since 1997, when Hawaii became the first state in the union to allow reciprocal-beneficiary registration for same-sex couples, 19 states and the District of Columbia have granted some form of legal recognition to the relationships of same-sex couples. These variants include marriage, civil unions, domestic partnerships, and reciprocal-beneficiary relationships; and the most recent U.S. Census data reveal that, in the last 15 years, only 150,000 same-sex couples have elected to take advantage of them — equivalent to around one in five of the self-identified same-sex couples in the United States. This number does not appear to be low because of the fact that only a few states have allowed full “marriage”; indeed, in the first four years when gay marriage was an option in trailblazing Massachusetts, there were an average of only about 3,000 per year, and that number included many who came from out of state.

This dearth of early adopters is not peculiar to America. Research conducted in 2004 by Gunnar Anderson, a professor of demography at Sweden’s Stockholm University, seems to confirm the trend. ...

Enthusiasm for marriage is somewhat lopsided by gender. Divorces, too.

Labels: culture, domestic partnership, Europe, gay couples, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, gender differences, lesbians, Massachusetts, men, Norway, Sweden, women

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...No country can afford to ignore a decline in its birthrate. In the long term, a nation's pension payments, power and very survival are at stake. To curb the drop in recent decades, some European governments have re-evaluated their family policies. Germany's example is especially instructive: Although the state's family policies are now among the most generous in Europe -- a parent who stays home with a child receives 67% of his or her current net income for up to 12 months -- they have failed to boost the birthrate or reverse the figures for childless women.

Germany's policies provide considerable financial help, but they essentially encourage mothers (recent figures show that only 15% of fathers take advantage of the leave) to quit the work force. Only an astonishing 14% of German mothers with one child in fact resume full-time work. Thus the family policies end up promoting the role of the father-provider, while mothers in effect feel the need to choose between family and work from the moment the first child is born, an especially risky proposition when one in three marriages ends in divorce.

In this situation, where a high number of mothers are able to stay at home but the birthrate remains exceptionally low, the message is clear: Women do not want policies that serve only to support mothers in their family life. For women to want children, they require policies that support the full range of their needs and roles and ambitions -- maternal, financial, professional.

The varying European experiences show that the highest birthrates exist in the countries with the highest rates of working women. It is, therefore, in society's interest to support working motherhood, which requires considerable public investment. Generous leave is not, by itself, an incentive. To raise more than one child, a mother must have access to high-quality, full-day child care, but that is still not enough. Income equality, flexible work hours and partners sharing family-related tasks -- these are the essential components that will allow women to be mothers without forgoing their other aspirations.

Labels: culture, demographics, Europe, Fathers, feminism, Germany, motherhood, natalism, work/family policy

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As the 2012 presidential election grows closer, voter demographics will grab ever more airtime. In a finely balanced electorate, switching parties is less common, making internal growth of party bases more important. Getting the vote out is one aspect of this; population change another. ...

All of which explains why pundits' interest in demography has been steadily rising. Ruy Teixeira, for instance, claims that the growth of the college-educated, secular and Hispanic proportion of the population will soon provide the Democrats with an inbuilt electoral majority. Chris Bowers of the Nation styles this the “End of Bubba Dominance.” On the other side of the ledger, American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks highlights the role of fertility: “Liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result.” “In Seattle,” adds Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation, “there are nearly 45 percent more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19 percent more kids than dogs.”

In order to adjudicate between these competing predictions, I teamed up with Vegard Skirbekk and Anne Goujon, two leading Austrian-based experts in the art of projecting the size of subgroups in populations. The results, published in the journal Population Studies, show that Democrats are only marginally younger than Republicans and Republican women bear the same number of children as their Democratic sisters. Immigration, however, is an important factor. If ethnic party identification remains as it is, Latino population growth will benefit the Democrats, shifting the balance between the two parties by two and a half points in the Democrats’ favor over the next 30 years. ...

Those who doubt whether demography can shape politics should consider world Jewry. The combination of religious polarization and demographic upheaval is especially stark among Jews. They began to secularize in large numbers in the 19th century, and Orthodoxy emerged to combat this trend. The temperature of Jewish fundamentalism increased sharply after the horrors of World War II, and an ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, community emerged, segregating itself from other Jews. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and the largely secular Zionist leadership assumed that the black-hatted, sidelocked Haredim were a relic of history. They gave the ultra-Orthodox an exemption from the draft, subsidies to study at yeshiva, and other religious privileges to make sure their anti-Zionism didn't dissuade the Great Powers from establishing a home for the Jews in Palestine. In 1948, there were only 400 Israeli Jews with military exemptions, many of which were not used. By 2007, that number had soared to 55,000. Meanwhile, the fringe of ultra-Orthodox pupils in Israel's Jewish primary schools in 1960 has ballooned: they now comprise a third of the Jewish first grade class. They are gaining power: in Jerusalem, Haredim rioted in late December, demanding the right to segregate women on buses, and have already elected the city's first Haredi mayor. Outside Israel, work by Joshua Comenetz and Yaakov Wise reveals that the ultra-Orthodox may form a majority of observant American and British Jews by 2050.

The Jewish example shows that population change can reverse secularism and shift the center of gravity of an entire society in a conservative religious direction. Notice that change has come about because values have polarized people and increasingly determine family size.

In a more modest way, the same is true elsewhere.

Labels: Christianity, culture, demographics, Europe, immigration, Islam, Israel, Judaism, Orthodox Judaism, religion

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...But that’s where the dearth of workers comes into play. Everyone agrees that rapid growth would be much nicer than higher taxes and slashed pension payments. The hitch is that over the past five years, growth in the Italian economy hasn’t averaged even 1 percent a year. Soaring growth will be tough to achieve, because more and more Italians are getting too old to work—and fewer and fewer Italians have been having the babies needed to replace them.

Italy’s fertility rate has actually been inching up from its 1995 low of 1.19 children for every woman, but it is still only about 1.4—well below the number needed to replenish its population (2.1). As a result, even with some immigration, Italy’s population growth has been very slow. It will soon stall, and eventually go into reverse. And then, one by one, the rest of Europe’s nations will follow. Not one country on the Continent has a fertility rate high enough to replace its current population. Heavy debt and a shrinking population are a very bad combination.

Since the invention of birth control and antibiotics, country after country has gone through a fairly standard shift. First, the mortality rate drops, especially among the young and the aging, and that quickly translates into a bigger workforce. Then, birthrates drop, as families realize that they no longer need to birth a basketball team to ensure that a couple members will survive to adulthood. A falling birthrate means that parents can invest more in each child; with fewer mouths to feed, more and better food can nourish each of them, and children can spend more years in school, causing worker productivity to rise from one generation to the next. As the burden of bearing and rearing children lightens, mothers can do more work outside the home, boosting both household resources and the national economy.

In 1984, when Ronald Reagan spoke of “morning in America,” he was at least demographically accurate. The youngest members of America’s vast Baby Boom were in college; the oldest were on the brink of their peak earning power. America was about to reap what the economists David Bloom and David Canning have dubbed the “demographic dividend” of rising labor supply and productivity. Bloom and Canning’s analysis of East Asia and Ireland attributes a substantial fraction of the recent economic booms in those places to this dividend.

But the dividend does not last forever. Eventually, the baby bulge reaches retirement age, the labor force stops growing, and older workers start spending their savings, depleting the nation’s supply of capital. The virtuous cycle turns vicious. This is what is happening right now in much of southern Europe.

Is strong growth still possible once the demographic dividend has been paid out? Of course it is, at least in theory. Even if the workforce isn’t expanding, strong-enough gains in worker productivity can substantially lift the economy. Longer hours and longer careers can theoretically have the same effect. But it is far from clear that in practice, these solutions will work, given the advanced age of Europe’s workers.

To see why, picture two neighboring towns, sharing all the same infrastructure and economic opportunities, with one key difference: their median age. In the first town, which I’ll call Morningburg, the average resident is 28. In the second, which I’ll call Twilight City, the average householder is 58.

Labels: aging, demographics, economics, Europe, Italy

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The ruling follows the launch of a consultation over gay marriage in the UK, in which the Equalities Minister promised a change in the law.

The European Court of Human Rights reached the decision in the case of a lesbian couple in a civil partnership in France, who complained they would not be allowed to adopt a child as a couple, according to the Daily Mail.

The pair, Valerie Gas and Nathalie Dubois, had tried to establish marriage rights under anti-discrimination laws but the judges said there had been no discrimination.

The court heard how the women had wanted Miss Gas to be allowed to adopt Miss Dubois's 11 year-old daughter.

But the judges in Strasbourg said: "The European Convention on Human Rights does not require member states’ governments to grant same-sex couples access to marriage."

"With regard to married couples, the court considers that in view of the social, personal, and legal consequences of marriage, the applicants’ legal situation could not be said to be comparable to that of married couples," the judges added.

On the issue of gay unions, the judges said: "Where national legislation recognises registered partnerships between same sex, member states should aim to ensure that their legal status and their rights and obligations are equivalent to those of heterosexual couples in a similar situation."

Labels: adoption, civil unions, discrimination law, Europe, gay marriage, law, United Kingdom

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The Parliament of Finland on Wednesday began debating a bill which would legalize gay marriage in the Nordic country, EFE reported.

Since 2002, Finland has recognized gay and lesbian couples with registered partnerships.

The legislation would allow gay couples to enter a civil marriage, take the surname of the other spouse and adopt a partner's children without biological links. ...

If approved, Finland would become the 11th country to approve such unions, behind Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Spain, Holland, Iceland, Norway, Portugal, South Africa and Sweden.

Labels: Europe, Finland, gay marriage

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So these two sociologists go into a bar and the man says to the woman, “What have you been up to?”

“I’ve been studying what I call ‘accordion families,’ ” she says. “Right now something like three and a half million American parents are sharing a house with adult kids who’ve either come back home or never left.”

“You want to talk about trends?” the man counters. “Did you know that aside from childless couples the most common household type in America is an adult living alone? That’s one out of seven adults, over 30 million people.”

Wishing to avoid an argument, the sociologists appeal to the bartender. Which trend seems more significant to him? “Beats me,” he says, “but I liked this place a lot better when the customers were political economists.”

It’s not funny, I know, but it’s not the punch line, either. That comes when the two sociologists I have in mind — ­Katherine S. Newman of Johns Hopkins University, the author of “The Accordion Family,” and Eric Klinenberg of New York University, the author of “Going Solo” — conclude their fascinating studies with a nod each to the bartender. Except by then they’re no longer in a bar; they’re in Sweden. We’ll get to that.

First let’s look at those so-called accordion families, which Newman evaluates both as a transnational phenomenon and in the nuanced particulars of individual households. Like Klinenberg, she devotes a good portion of her book to personal interviews, but where Klinenberg goes deep in his emphasis on the United States, Newman goes wide. At the extreme end of her analysis is a country like Italy, where 37 percent of 30-year-old men live with their parents, and have never lived anywhere else. Less striking but certainly notable is a parallel trend in the United States, where a higher proportion of adult children now live with parents than at any time since the 1950s.

Newman states her thesis plainly: “Global competition is the most profound structural force affecting the residential location of young adults in the developed world (or the under­developed world, for that matter)” — but one is impressed by her refusal to turn thesis into dogma. She acknowledges that different cultures define adulthood in different ways, with Americans tending to see it as “a process of self-discovery” and Europeans as “a station defined by the way one relates to others.” She also appreciates the mutual benefits of multi­generational households, as suggested by a survey showing that 76 percent of American parents of 21-year-olds say they feel close to their child, as opposed to a mere quarter of their own parents saying the same.

Still, Newman does not shy away from the larger effects of a child’s “failure to launch,” independently, into the world. Not the least of these is a generation’s failure to generate. At present there are four workers in Europe for every pensioner; by 2050 there will be only two workers for every retiree. Birthrates in the United States would also be falling if not for Mexican immigrants — yet another job they’ve taken on, along with those of lawn- and elder-care and favored scapegoat. But in Japan, the fastest-aging country in the world, where only 1 percent of the population is foreign-born, the future looks more bleak.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", aging, class, culture, demographics, economics, Europe, extended family, family structure, motherhood, work/family policy

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We believe in sexual freedom. We take it for granted that consenting men and women have the right to do what they like with their bodies. Sex is everywhere in our culture. We love to think and talk about it; we devour news about celebrities' affairs; we produce and consume pornography on an unprecedented scale. We think it wrong that in other cultures its discussion is censured, people suffer for their sexual orientation, women are treated as second-class citizens, or adulterers are put to death.

Yet a few centuries ago, our own society was like this too. In the 1600s people were still being executed for adultery in England, Scotland and north America, and across Europe. Everywhere in the west, sex outside marriage was illegal, and the church, the state and ordinary people devoted huge efforts to hunting it down and punishing it. This was a central feature of Christian society, one that had grown steadily in importance since late antiquity. So how and when did our culture change so strikingly? Where does our current outlook come from? The answers lie in one of the great untold stories about the creation of our modern condition. ...

Indeed, the first sexual revolution was characterised by an extraordinary reversal in assumptions about female sexuality. Ever since the dawn of western civilisation it had been presumed that women were the more lustful sex. As they were mentally, morally and physically weaker than males, it followed that they were less able to control their passions and thus (like Eve) more likely to tempt others into sin. Yet, by 1800, exactly the opposite idea had become entrenched. Now it was believed that men were much more naturally libidinous and liable to seduce women. Women had come to be seen as comparatively delicate and sexually defensive, needing to be constantly on their guard against male rapacity. The notion of women's relative sexual passivity became fundamental to sexual dynamics across the western world. Its effects were ubiquitous – they still are.

A crucial reason was the rise of women as public writers, which introduced into the cultural mainstream powerful new female perspectives on courtship and lust.

Labels: adultery, class, culture, Europe, gender, homosexuality, men, premarital sex, race, religion, sex, women

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...In his work on European family life, UCLA demographer Patrick Heuveline finds that

in most [European] countries children born to cohabiting families are two to four times more likely to see their parents separate than are children in married households.

Even in Sweden, children are worse off when mom and dad cohabit. Demographers Sheela Kennedy and Elizabeth Thomson find in their recent study that children born to cohabiting parents are 75% more likely to see mom and dad break up, compared to children born to married parents.

So, in part because cohabitation does not offer the same rituals (a big ceremony), norms (commitment), and practices (fidelity) to partners, their family and friends, and their communities as does marriage, my bet is that cohabitation is not soon likely to deliver stability to kids in the way that marriage does–even in fair Sweden.

Labels: children, cohabitation, culture, Europe, Marriage, Sweden, unmarried parents, W. Bradford Wilcox

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Does India need a new independence struggle?

The fight this time would not be against British colonialism, but rather against the United Kingdom's approach to regulating reproductive medicine. At a time when India is considering a sort of match-making service for Western couples seeking to hire Indian surrogate mothers, the UK government has announced the abolition of two leading medical regulatory agencies.

Meanwhile, as these countries move farther down the road to free markets in reproductive medicine, France is debating all of its bioethics laws - and continuing to stand up for a different model - focused on social justice and protection of vulnerable women. There is an alternative simply to letting the market decide, the French Assembly insists. ...

Proponents of the Assisted Reproductive Technologies Regulation Bill 2010, now before the Indian Parliament, employ a similar rhetorical twist. They say that the bill actually protects surrogate mothers - for example, by limiting the number of pregnancies they can undergo. But the law would make surrogacy contracts legally binding, requiring the mother to give up the baby even if she changes her mind.

Opponents say that the agencies making the arrangements will be the biggest winners - that the huge profits they reap will dwarf the fees paid by foreign couples to the women bearing their children. As NB Sarojini and Aastha Sharma wrote in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, "The Bill actively promotes medical tourism in India for reproductive purposes."

Labels: donor conception, economics, Europe, France, India, poverty, surrogate motherhood, United Kingdom

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ONE in three babies is now born out of wedlock in this country.

The percentage of babies born outside of marriage rose to 33.8pc nationwide in the third quarter of last year -- an increase of 2.3pc over the same period in 2005, new Central Statistics Office (CSO) figures reveal.

The figures also reveal striking variations between the number of babies born to unmarried parents in urban and rural locations.

City dwellers are far more likely to have a child outside of wedlock than their rural counterparts.

Labels: children, Europe, Ireland, out-of-wedlock births

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Germans have serious doubts about marriage, monogamy and life-long partnerships, according to a survey released on Thursday.

Some 53 percent believe most couples won’t stay faithful during their marriage or partnerships. And an overwhelming 80 percent think divorce is no big deal, according to GfK market research firm's survey of 2,028 men and women from throughout the country. ...

About a third of the roughly 375,000 German marriages that take place each year end in divorce, according to government statistics. But contrary to popular opinion, many of the failed marriages last quite a long time – on average they end after more 14 years.

Labels: adultery, divorce, Europe, Germany, Marriage, women

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Hungarian lawmakers approved a socially and fiscally conservative new constitution Monday that was blasted by rights groups and the political opposition for measures including a ban on gay marriage and protection of the life of a fetus from conception. ...

Same-sex couples may legally register their partnerships but marriage is restricted to heterosexual relationships.

Labels: abortion, domestic partnership, Europe, gay marriage, Hungary, Marriage

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A revolution is sweeping North Africa and the Middle East. No, not the one you've been hearing about in the media -- all the protests against dictatorship and oppression, in Egypt and Tunisia, and most violently, in Libya. The revolution I'm referring to certainly affects all those countries, profoundly, but its effects promise to outlast any change of regime, or even any new constitutions. Barely noticed by the West, many Muslim societies are experiencing a demographic transformation that is going to make them look far more European: more stable, more open to women's rights and above all, more secular. That change underlies all the current political upsurges. ...

But here's the problem. In just the last thirty years or so, those very Middle Eastern countries that used to teem with children and adolescents have gone through a startling demographic transformation. Since the mid-1970s, Algeria's fertility rate has collapsed from over 7 to 1.75, Tunisia's from 6 to 2.03, Morocco's from 6.5 to 2.21, Libya's from 7.5 to 2.96. Today, Algeria's rate is roughly equivalent to that of Denmark or Norway; Tunisia's is comparable to France. Counter-intuitively, that remark about "the closer to Rome" also holds good on the southern, Muslim, side of the Mediterranean. ...

Such a wrenching change cannot fail to have political implications. In a country with a Third World fertility rate, it is very unlikely that women will seek or be granted education: their designated career path as mothers is starkly clear. Meanwhile, adolescents and young men proliferate, and provide ample cannon fodder for armies or militias, to whom life is cheap. (Yemen's fertility rate is still over 5.0, Somalia's is 6.4). But then imagine a newer, more European society, in which men and women are intensely concerned about their nuclear families, and have invested their love and attention into just one or two offspring. As citizens become more educated, they are not prepared to accept the demagoguery and systematic corruption that has long passed for government in those regions. They see themselves as responsible members of a civil society, with aspirations that demand to be met: they feel they deserve full democratic participation. Of course the recent turmoil began in Tunisia, with its very low fertility rate and its intimate ties to France.

Sudden demographic change also seems to be closely linked to secularization, a point of potentially great significance in the Middle East. Smaller family sizes can result from a decline in religious ideologies, but falling fertility can itself drive such a decline, as has happened in modern Christian Europe.

Labels: demographics, Europe, Islam, Middle East, religion, Tunisia, women

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What is a mistress? Elizabeth Abbott, who has also published A History of Celibacy and held the post of Dean of Women at Trinity College, University of Toronto, offers this definition: “a woman voluntarily or forcibly engaged in a relatively long-term sexual relationship with a man who is usually married to another woman”. Given the persistence of this model across time and cultures, Abbott maintains that “mistressdom”, like celibacy, is therefore an essential means by which to consider sexual relationships outside marriage – “in fact, an institution parallel and complementary to marriage”. Considering the media’s current obsession with love-rat footballers and cheating celebs, “mistressdom” might also be considered a safe bet for a publisher’s list, and Abbott duly provides us with a generally cheerful tumble through adultery down the ages. ...

...Bess’s critics, the author claims, held her up to “a standard of independence she did not possess”. Here is the paradox that stalks the book. Abbott is keen to portray her mistresses as feisty, autonomous characters who chose mistressdom as a means of negotiating with, and often defeating, the oppression of patriarchy, yet their very powerlessness in the face of that culture is invoked as an excuse which belies the premiss. She regrets Lady Caroline Lamb’s collusion in history, remembering her only as Byron’s mistress (as though anyone would bother to read Glenarvon otherwise), implying that all mistresses are at some level victims, yet claiming their problematic historical status as evidence of ingenious agency.

This contradiction is at its most uneasy in the chapter entitled “Sexual Unions and the Jewish Question”, where Abbott discusses Nazi men who committed the crime, as defined by the Third Reich, of Rassenschande, or race defilement through sex. Over 4,000 people, Jews and Gentiles, were convicted of Rassenschande in the 1930s, and as the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss recalled, women’s greater role in propagating “racial pollution” led to further measures of horror than even men endured. In the hell of the camps, Abbott observes that Bett-Politik, “bed politics”, might be a woman’s only recourse. ...

Abbott’s concluding chapters struggle awkwardly towards a coherent thesis – the boundary between coercion and volition is never satisfyingly addressed, while those between prostitute, concubine, mistress and wife are blurred to suit. Notwithstanding a section devoted to the transformation of marriage and mistressdom by the sexual revolution of the 1960s, Abbott opts in the end for victimhood over victory.

Labels: adultery, culture, economics, Europe, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, sexual assault, women

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Some are divorced and disenchanted with marriage; others are young couples ideologically opposed to marriage, but eager to lighten their tax burdens. Many are lovers not quite ready for old-fashioned matrimony.

Whatever their reasons, and they vary widely, French couples are increasingly shunning traditional marriages and opting instead for civil unions, to the point that there are now two civil unions for every three marriages.

When France created its system of civil unions in 1999, it was heralded as a revolution in gay rights, a relationship almost like marriage, but not quite. No one, though, anticipated how many couples would make use of the new law. Nor was it predicted that by 2009, the overwhelming majority of civil unions would be between straight couples. ...

...But the attractiveness of civil unions to heterosexual couples was evident from the start. In 2000, just one year after the passage of the law, more than 75 percent of civil unions were signed between heterosexual couples. That trend has only strengthened since then: of the 173,045 civil unions signed in 2009, 95 percent were between heterosexual couples. ...

France is not the only European nation to allow civil unions between straight couples, but in the few countries that do — Luxembourg, Andorra, the Netherlands — they are not as popular. In the Netherlands in 2009, for example, there was just one civil union for every eight marriages.

Labels: Catholic Church, Christianity, civil unions, cohabitation, Europe, France, heterosexual couples, Marriage, religion

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You can't guarantee the longevity of a marriage, but what you can do is play the odds. Researchers have studied marriage success rates from nearly every conceivable angle, and what they've found is that everything from smoking habits to what state you live in can predict how likely it is that your union will survive. Here are 15 ways to gauge whether your marriage is for the long haul—or on the fast track to Splitsville.

1. If you're a married American, your marriage is between 40 and 50 percent likely to end in divorce.

After peaking at 50 percent in the 1980s, the national divorce rate has dropped steadily, but in the public's mind, that outdated "half of all marriages" figure still sticks—and scares. "Inflated divorce statistics create an ambivalence about marriage," says Tara Parker-Pope, author of For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage. "The bottom line is that modern marriages are getting more and more resilient. With each generation, we're getting a little better about picking mates. A different kind of marriage is emerging in this century."

(Source: David Popenoe, "The Future of Marriage in America," University of Virginia/National Marriage Project/The State of Our Unions, 2007)

2. If you live in a red state, you're 27 percent more likely to get divorced than if you live in a blue state.

Maybe that's because red-state couples traditionally marry younger—and the younger the partners, the riskier the marriage. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the states with the lowest median age at marriage are Utah, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Oklahoma.

(Source: National Vital Statistics Report, 2003; cited in The Compassionate Community: Ten Values to Unite America, by Jonathan Miller and Al Gore) ...

14. If you're a female serial cohabiter—a woman who has lived with more than one partner before your first marriage—then you're 40 percent more likely to get divorced than women who have never done so.

Although "playing house" seems like good practice for married life, it can also make living together seem less permanent. "People feel like, 'If it doesn't work out, we can just step out of this,'" says lawyer Emily Doskow. Statistics show that marriages preceded by cohabitation have better chances of success when couples became officially engaged before moving in together.

(Source: Daniel T. Lichter, Zhenchao Qian, "Serial Cohabitation: Implications for Marriage, Divorce, and Public Policy," Brown University Population and Training Center, 2007)

15. If you're in a male same-sex marriage, it's 50 percent more likely to end in divorce than a heterosexual marriage. If you're in a female same-sex marriage, this figure soars to 167 percent.

A research team led by Stockholm University demography professor Gunnar Anderson based their calculations on legal partnerships in Norway and Sweden, where five out of every 1,000 new couples are same-sex.

Labels: cohabitation, culture, divorce, economics, Europe, gay marriage

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Benedict XVI is urging the bishops of Europe to work for the defense of the family and human life, and to fight against intolerance and discrimination of Christians.

The Pope sent a telegram, through his secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, to participants in a plenary assembly of the Council of European Bishops' Conferences.

The assembly began today in Zagreb, and will focus on the theme, "Demographics and the Family in Europe." It will end Sunday.

In the telegram, the Pontiff encouraged the prelates "to continue the important work undertaken and inspire in the Church communities the necessary commitment so that the faithful might be free from intolerance and discrimination and to promote the family and the defense of human life."

Labels: Catholic Church, Europe, Marriage, religion

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The European Union says the number of children born out of wedlock in the 27-nation bloc has doubled over the past two decades and now accounts for over one-third of the region's births.

Eurostat, the EU's statistical agency, said Thursday that 35.1 percent of births in 2008 occurred outside of marriage, up from 17.4 percent in 1990 and 25.1 percent in 1998.

Estonia holds the highest out-of-wedlock birth rate at 59 percent, and every EU nation except Denmark - whose rate remained flat at 46 percent - has experienced an increase.

Eurostat also said EU marriage rates have decreased from 6.3 marriages per 1,000 people in 1990 to 4.9 marriages per 1,000 in 2008. The only EU nations to see an increase in marriages were Denmark, Ireland, Poland, Finland and Sweden.

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

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When you sit on the loo in Ed Houben's tiny bathroom, there's a postcard at eye level that says "Welcome to Maastricht". It's decorated with dozens of smiling tadpole-shaped creatures homing in on the words with cheerful intent. It's a little touch to make his visitors smile; after all, most of them are here for Ed's sperm.

Houben has been donating sperm for more than 10 years now, first at the local sperm bank and then, after reaching the clinic's legal limit, privately via the internet. Most of his donating is done in his neat, modest flat on an estate on the outskirts of the Dutch town. The T-shirt he's wearing, which declares "Anytime, anyplace, anywhere, anyway", is actually a bit misleading. "In the old days I would gladly travel, and my colleagues covered for me if I was late to work," he says. "But my job at Maastricht's tourism office has changed and I have to be around much more. Now I ask people to come to me."

And they do, from all over the world. Houben has biological offspring in Australia, Israel, Canada, Cyprus, Germany and Luxembourg, as well as at home in the Netherlands. His current tally of donor-conceived children stands at an eye-watering 62, with the 63rd on the way. It is by no means a world record – Houben once watched an episode of Oprah about a man who has fathered 200, a number he says he'll never catch. But he has been called Europe's most prolific sperm donor, and he's happy to accept the title until someone has the, well, balls to challenge him. ...

As it's illegal to sell your sperm in Europe, donation is a vocation rather than a career. Houben got the calling in 1999, after witnessing the trials and heartbreak of childless friends undergoing fertility treatment. Donor numbers were declining dramatically in the Netherlands (from 900 in 1990 to 200 in 2002) and those affected by the shortage, particularly lesbian couples, turned to the internet. With his state-sanctioned quota fulfilled, and much more to give, Houben started placing ads on the websites and online forums that were springing up. He scored with his very first attempt; the day we meet, that child is celebrating her seventh birthday. ...

And like many of the online donors, he is also an experienced practitioner in "natural insemination" – in other words, sex. Sperm donor forums bristle with terminology, but the most regularly used are AI and NI, and there is considerable debate in the community as to whether offering NI makes you a hero, an opportunist or a pervert. FSDW instantly bans any donors offering NI; Co-parentmatch says it recommends against donors who insist on NI only. But John says it remains an important option for those who want to hurry the process along "if they feel their fertility might be limited, or they want to keep the costs down".

Houben, who also offers NI, agrees. "From my own experience, statistically NI is faster," he says, and he has records to back up his claim. "I take off my hat to the guys who only do AI, but if people are coming all the way from Italy they don't want to be trying for three years." He only started offering NI when a couple specifically requested it – and he got a further shock when he discovered that the boyfriend expected to be present at the insemination. Fortunately his sense of duty prevailed.

Labels: culture, donor conception, Europe, Fathers, sex, United Kingdom

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