Cohabitation Growing Worldwide
Cohabitation has become a mainstream and acceptable way of life in the United States and even more so in some other developed countries, according to a National Marriage Project study on cohabitation, marriage and divorce using data that examined living habits in 13 countries.
Study data from Western European and Scandinavian nations, Australia, Canada and New Zealand found that 15 to 30 percent of couples live together in those areas; in the United State the number is about 10 percent.
Since 1970, the number of Americans living together has increased from about 500,000 to over 5 million. The U.S. marriage rate declined from 1995 to 2005 by almost 20 percent.
“Americans have down played qualities that are vital for a healthy marriage culture—commitment and faithfulness,” said Jenny Tyree, associate marriage analyst at Focus on the Family Action. “The de-emphasis on these qualities has profoundly and negatively influenced this and successive generations.
“If Americans want to strengthen marriage in this country, they need to support it in the home, the church and at the ballot box as the union of one man and one woman who together raise their children.”
Earlier studies by the same group show that children of cohabiting couples are more likely to experience emotional problems, alcoholism and drug abuse.
See the Source: “Cohabitation Becomes Mainstream Around the World,” Focus on the Family, CitizenLink.com, 12 June 2008, http://www.citizenlink.org/content/A000007620.cfm.
Birth Control Costs and the War-Funding Bill
Pro-war politicians should perhaps rethink their latest anti-life antic: the inclusion of language to help reduce recent birth control cost increases in a war-funding bill. Or perhaps it is their way of trying to stop war, believing that they are preventing the births of future soldiers in which case with no soldiers there will be no war and no need for a war-funding bill 20 years from now.
Inclusion of language to reverse the rising costs of birth control drugs and devices at health centers serving low-income women, including college students, was promoted by over 100 House members in the recent war-funding bill.
The Senate passed supplemental spending bill now includes language that says college clinics and other health centers are eligible for discounted birth control measures.
In 2006, a budget law removed university clinics and private birth control providers from a list of eligible suppliers for “nominal” pricing under the Public Health Service Act. This made it less profitable for drug manufacturers to offer reduced-cost birth control drugs and devices to some health centers, causing the monthly cost of birth control on campuses to increase according to a number of college newspapers. The 2006 law was intended to crack down on abuses of the “nominal pricing exception.” But the lawmakers’ support of the Senate provision contend Congress did not intend to apply tougher standards to birth control providers. For whatever reason, the language has no reason to be included in a war-funding bill.
See the Source: “House Members Want Birth Control Provision in War Funding Bill,” CQ Politics, 10 June 2008, http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=cqmiddqy-000002893723
The Power of TV
We have come to a point in our couch-potato existence when we must ask: Which comes first, life or the television soap opera; does media reflect life or does life mirror media? This is the question asked by researchers in “Soap Operas and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil.”
The average Brazilian woman had 6.3 children in 1960; by 2000, the fertility rate was 2.3. The explanation for the drop, suggests the study, is not government force, increased education or economic development, but that people wished to mirror what they saw on TV soap operas (novelas ) produced by Rede Globo, which are very popular in Brazil.
According to the study conducted by Eliana La Ferrara (Bocconi University in Italy), Alberto Chong and Suzanne Duryea (both of the Inter-American Development Bank), a great number of Brazilian families of all social classes began tuning into the novelas between 1965 and 1999. These programs presented smaller families than the Brazilian norm. Seventy-two percent of the leading female characters under the age of 50 had no children and 21 percent had one child. The study authors theorized the soap operas could be acting as a kind of birth control.
Census data between 1970 and 1991 found that women living in areas where the novelas were available had significantly lower fertility rates. Curiously, people living in these same areas were more likely to name their children after the program’s characters. These facts suggest the novelas did have an influence on childbearing.
See the Source: “Are soap operas a form of birth control?,” Foreign Policy Passport (A Blog by the Editors of Foreign Policy), 10 June 2008, http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/9013; Eliana La Ferrara, Alberto Chong, and Suzanne Duryea, “Soap Operas and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil,” March 2008, http://www.cid.harvard.edu/bread/papers/working/172.pdf (20 June 2008)
