Traditional Family is Falling Apart. Is Registered Partnership to Blame?
Next week, Slovaks will decide whether “marriage is to be preserved as an exclusive union between a man and a woman.” The initiators of the referendum state that traditional family values are endangered and that one of the causes of their decline are same-sex unions. With the nationwide referendum Slovak conservatives are trying to prevent possible legalisation of these unions. We have studied sociodemographic data from all of Europe to find out what effect state-recognised unions between same-sex persons really have on traditionally understood family.<br>Have a look at what we have found out.
Another gap between East and West?
The countries of the old continent have a whole range of approaches to “unconventional” families: from Denmark where registered partnership was legalised in 1989 to Poland which in autumn 1997 adopted a constitution defining marriage as an exclusive union of a man and a woman.
The map shows a clear tendency: most Western European countries enable same-sex marriage, Eastern European countries constitutionally forbid it. In between these two approaches lie – geographically as well as ideologically – Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Czech Republic. Here marriage can only take place between a man and a woman, but the law stipulates other forms of cohabitation. Registered partnership, life partnership, civil union – the term differs from country to country, but the principle is similar: state-recognised partnership of two persons with slightly limited rights in comparison with marriage, especially as regards child adoption.
Hungary and Croatia are interesting examples: the Constitution reserves marriage only to heterosexual couples, but they offer an institute of life (Croatia) or registered (Hungary) partnership. Moreover, the Croatian law on life partnership is one of the most liberal in Europe as it permits child adoption by the other partner, which is a topic that has recently raised a wave of opposition in the Czech Republic.
(mapa)
European approaches thus vary significantly and in many places they have been in effect for a long time. At the same time we have confirmed and comprehensive data on birth rate, marriage rate or divorce rate, on the number of abortions or the share of children born outside marriage, in short data on the position of family as a social institution and on the strength of values related to its traditional reception.
We have put all the data in the following graph. To make it more clear we have attached a colour to each country’s line depending on whether in the given period it had a legal same-sex marriage or another form of state-recognised cohabitation of lesbian and gay couples. The graph shows that there are laws that have a much greater effect on traditional families than those concerning registered partnership.
(graf)
Marriage and legislation
Soon after the implementation of registered partnership, some countries demonstrate a small oscillation in marriage rates, but it is not an unequivocal tendency. In the Netherlands, marriage rate slightly fell after the legalisation of same-sex unions, in Sweden, on the contrary, it went rapidly up. Mostly, though, the law has brought no visible changes – the popularity of marriage since its implementation has been slowly, but surely falling.
The effect of the introduction of registered partnership, if there is any at all, is shadowed by waves often caused by changes in other legislation. For example, when the marriage grant was abolished in Austria in 1986, statistics recorded a hike in marriage rates a year later. Couples were trying not to miss the last opportunity to get a financial boost.
Even greater was the effect of a change in legislation in Sweden when widow pensions were modified in 1988. Women married after 1990 were entitled to a much lower pension after their husband’s death. This led to a three-fold increase in number of new marriages in 1989.
The Czech Republic has also witnessed two large deviations in marriage rates. In 1990 the pre-revolution system of marriage loans was closed which led to the highest number of newly weds in Czech history. (The same effect can be observed for Slovakia, which was still part of the federation at the time). The subsequent declining tendency in marriage rates was interrupted by years 2004 to 2008 when married couples were allowed to use a more advantageous joint taxation.
(graf)
One line in the marriage trends graph catches the eye: Greece. Getting married there in a leap year is considered unlucky. This belief results in a regular marriage minimum surrounded by peaks as couples either try to get married before the leap year, or they wait for it to end. On the other hand, it is clear from the graph that the effect of this superstition is gradually diminishing.
(graf)
The Eurostat data thus proves that the state can affect people’s willingness to enter marriage. However, citizens react much more to impulses from finance ministries than to the abolition or introduction of homosexual unions.
Birth rates are falling, divorce rates are stable, the number of children outside marriage is growing… Everywhere
Other demographic data also fail to react to the implementation of same-sex union laws to any great extent. The list of European countries by fertility shows France, Ireland, Great Britain and Sweden at the top – apart from Ireland all these countries have legalised same-sex marriage. In Ireland there is “only” registered partnership; the referendum on same-sex marriage couples will be held in May. At the other end of the list are Portugal, Poland, Spain, Greece, Hungary and Slovakia – half of them allow homosexual unions, the other half do not.
Birth rate can be influenced by lawmakers even less than marriage rates. The inertia of demographic development is great and if it is related to outside factors at all, they are rather economic than social. This can be seen in the following graph where birth rate for each country is shown in the first column. The former Soviet satellites, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland have an almost identical course of birth rate: a fall in the first half of the 1990s when women started to postpone maternity in favour of a professional career, education or free travel, the bottom lies at the turn of the millennium and there is a gradual increase in the second half of the first decade of the new millennium when the strong population years born in the 1970s joined the “belated” mothers.
A completely different pattern can be observed in the two North European countries – Denmark and Norway where there was a slow, but steady increase, but a turn around 2010. It can be explained by the growing economic insecurity related to how the effects of the global financial crisis arrived in Europe.
At the bottom of the chart you can select and compare other countries and try to find other similar groups – you can try the countries much affected by the crisis – Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain.
(hodně grafů)
The Church as the protector of traditional family?
Some opponents of state-recognised homosexual marriage try to justify their opinion by their belief in God. Last week a group of Slovak Catholics met Pope Francis in the Vatican. “When the Holy Father came to the altar, he greeted the Slovaks with approximately these words: I welcome Father Ľubomír and his Slovak community. Slovakia is bravely struggling for the protection of the family these days. Three words have stuck in my mind: courage, struggle and family,” said Matúš Imrich, priest of the Košice archdiocese and one of the participants of the meeting.
Can the relationship between faith and viability of traditional families be found in statistics? Europe is an ideal sandbox for this kind of research: you have atheist Czechs, Swedes and Estonians, where less than a fifth of the population follows a faith, living next to catholic Poles, Spaniards or even the Maltese, with 94 % share of believers.
If the church had such a great impact on the life of inhabitants, there should be a clear tendency: the more inhabitants identify with some form of religion, the higher the marriage and birth rate and the lower the divorce rate and number of abortions.
Reality is less unequivocal, though: the only monitored value that shows correlation with the percentage of religious persons in population is the number of children born outside marriage. Other numbers such as divorce rates, number of abortions or number of incomplete families (families with children growing up without two parents) show a very low coefficient of determination and are thus primarily influenced by other factors than the declared faith of the population.
(spousta teček)
Traditional family and rights of homosexuals are two independent things
The statistics confirm our expectation that “traditional family” as it was understood by our grandparents is on the decline. However, this happens across all of Europe regardless of country boundaries and their legislation.
Birth and marriage rates correlate much more with the economic situation of the given region than with LGBT rights. A country that wants to support families with children will reach its goal more by tax concessions, loans or social benefits than by rejecting legal same-sex unions. Four years of joint taxation for married couples in the Czech Republic led to “extra” 20 thousand marriages in comparison to the long-term trend. The only effect of eight years of registered partnership was two thousand officially registered couples.
