Percent of births outside marriage in Europe.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/3197004

Source: https://landgeist.com/2023/08/12/births-outside-of-marriage-in-europe/.

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garfaagel @sh.itjust.works

1y ago

Percent of births outside marriage in Europe.

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68 comments

There has to be some (dis)incentive to have children without marriage in some contries and not others.
I Germany I guess people think you might as well marry when having children because you get extra money, less taxes whatever and maybe that's not the case in other countries.
- The short answer is religion.
  
  Marriage is a civil institution in Germany. A church marrying you has exactly as much legal power as a random citizen doing it: None. You get married at the civil registry office, by a bureaucrat (but yes they're amenable to some mild ceremony)
  
  and Taxes
- Another very important factor is that in Germany it's extremely difficult to become the official father of a child when you're not married to the mother. This obviously comes with a lot of problems. For example when the mother suffers complications during birth. It's just way easier to marry instead of doing all of that paperwork.
- I don't think it really matters in Finland
- Yeah, in Germany you get tax benefits under certain circumstances when married. In many other countries (e.g. Austria), marriage makes no difference. That's already a strong motivator.

In Germany there are massive tax advantages to getting married. That is why a lot of people get married in late December of each year.
- Shouldn’t that sort of discrimination be illegal?
  
  I don't think you can call it discrimination if no one is excluded from marrying.

Can we get another map about inceptions out of mariage? Many marry only after learning they will be parents.
- We'll do deceptions out of marriage after!

Iceland, nice.
- Rounding error when they truncated the last two significant figures. Actual value is 0.020% higher.

In Germany the difference between former East and West Germany is very interesting. While in the East it is roughly 55% in the west it is much lower, also with clear differences from north to south: https://www.iwd.de/artikel/unehelich-na-und-291746/
- This is not what I would have expected given the general tendency seems to be "eastern block = less". Curious about why this is reversed in Germany (and Bulgaria apparently).
  
  To be honest I dont get your comment. Can you maybe explain more? For me the distribution looks exactly like what I would have expected considering our history.
- Honestly, that still sounds very high. I'm in the prime birthing age and hardly anyone in my peer group is married, yet many have kids.
  That's anecdotal, sure, but it also implies that there's a huge population of married child bearers. Where are those?
  
  Bavaria has entered the chat.

Türkiye what u doin
- Marrying apparently
- Mis-reporting or not reporting births, probably. That's far too low to be realistic.
  
  If you get pregnant you get married.
- Be loyal to their spouse.🦃🫡
  
  How does marriage relate in any way to not cheating on a partner?
- Turkish here! The reasons are the fact that we are poor as fuck to finace a newborn baby and the financial incentives of marrying. When you marry usually the tradition is like the bride side funds the ceremony and groom's side funds the house goods like dish washer, bed etc. You also get lotsa assets from your other relatives, colleagues, and friends. Moreover, both grandparents, being rich boomers, subsidise the cost of grandchild and take care of them. They wouldn't do so if it was outside marriage because of old school mindset (herritage laws play a big role here too).
- They're Islamic and have traditional morals. it's better for the kid if they're married anyways.

That sounds wrong for Portugal. Couples who got married, had a kid and then divorced are fairly common, but born outside of marriage makes me struggle to even think of someone.
- Your experience is not representative of the whole. I know a few single moms and many unmarried couples with children.
  
  Indeed, it isn’t. My job has me dealing with a ton of children of the area I live in (“Concelho”, as we call it), and most of them are still not born out of marriage, that’s why I am surprised. 60% seems very high.
- Couples who live together like they are married, with kids and all, but haven't really put the pen to the paper, are more common than you think.
  The ones who stick together eventually make it official as a formality. But their kids technically are born out of wedlock.
  It even has a legal precedent as união de facto.

I would like to know the conception rate out of wedlock

Well yeah. Weddings are expensive (relatively) and can be delayed. Having kids can only be delayed so much. People don't have as much disposable in recent times so are choosing rather than both.

France is looking likeable. I wonder if this is another result of their system of Laïcité.

That's so many kids growing up without married parents, and not even counting the ones that will divorce during their lifetime.
I'm not religious or anything, but I worry about the stability of these households and what kind of life these kids will have.
- Exactly, it's way better to have parents stay together in stable, forced marital bondage and hate each other more and more every day like god intended.
  Sure, dad cheats on mom, sometimes even beats her, and mom is secretly a depressive alcoholic, but separation would be superduper bad for the child!
  
  Why are so many people marrying people they hate? Isn't that the real problem?
- You know people can live happily together without being married right? Marriage is not a indicator of a stable household. Also many couples are in a civil union after the kid is born.
  Also guess which country UNICEF says where the children are the happiest and is the best place to raise kids? It ain’t Turkey or Belarus. It’s the Netherlands. All those Dutch bastards live very happy lives.
  
  Not sure if they meant strictly marriage or civil partnership. Also you can’t claim causal relationship here (not being married implies happier kids), many other confounding factors are at play, like Econ development. Plus don’t forget that some of the happiest countries also have some of the highest suicide rates.
- You don’t have to be married to have a strong relationship or a stable household to raise a family.
- In France (at least), there are different couple statuses recognized, one of them is Marriage, but another that is common nowadays is "PACS" (some kind of non-religious recognized union between two persons), that PACS accounts (since 2019) for around half of all unions of French couple (whatever the sex of both by the way)
  The data may not count for these others kind of recognized unions, and only account for that Catholic union
  Actually, I don't know well, but I'm not even sure that Marriage is for all religions, there may be people "married" according to their religion, but not technically Married according to catholic/state rules
  
  The data may not count for these others kind of recognized unions, and only account for that Catholic union
  Well the legend of the map says "% of live births outside marriage or civil partnership".
- Marriage is not an indicator of a good childhood. Its better not to grow up in the presence of constant parental arguments and drama. Not to mentiom the emotional drain and loss of sleep or worse, timely happy moments missed because of a baf dad or mom is not worth saving marriages.
- Because, as we all know, marriage magically ensures a happy, well functioning household.
- This is just births. There's no commentary on whether or not these parents get married after a child is born, but I'm willing to bet a fair percentage of them do. Also, just being unmarried isn't an indicator of having two separate households. There are people in stable, monogamous relationships who never get married.
- Marriage is just a social structure. Just because a couple isn't married doesn't mean they don't have a stable household.
  
  It usually does.
- A society of broken homes, it’s a Brave New World, my friend.
  
  Way more broken homes in Belarus than in Iceland.

68 comments