Now that Barack Obama has ensured gay marriage is back in the news cycle around the world, I am once again hearing from the religious right the repeated insistence that we must continue to resist marriage equality, because every child needs a mother and a father. (Yesterday I heard one Evangelical spokesman declare this to be a “right” of every child).
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What’s the connection? Even with Obama’s support, in most parts of the world, gay marriage is still not an option, but there are still countless children who do NOT have a mother and father, often because they have been let down by the biological parents who created them. A related claim is that we need ”traditional” marriage for procreation, a claim that is so deceptively familiar and plausible that it is seldom challenged – but is in fact no more than a flight of fancy, born of the 1950′s obsession with the nuclear family, the house in the suburbs, white picket fence, two and a half kids and a dog.
Let’s consider the reality, instead.
Marriage is not required for conception
Even in 1994 the British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles clearly demonstrated the vast gulf between myth and reality. Summarizing the findings, the theologian Jon Davies notes that 60% of all conceptions occur outside of marriage.
“The age of first intercourse is getting lower; more women are having “underage sex” (18.7%)…..Marriage has lost both its sexual and its procreational monopoly…..The majority of people cohabit before marriage, and marry late. The average age at which a woman has her first child is 29, and 33% of all births, and 60% of all conceptions, take place outside marriage”
- Davies, Sex These Days
(In a comment to the original version of this post, Chris Morley supplied the updated statistic:
The latest statistics for children born outside marriage in the UK have risen from the 33% in 1994 quoted by Jon Davies above, to 46% of the children born in 2009.
I have been unable to connect to his link, but found an even later figure at the Office of National Statistics:
In 2010 nearly half of all babies were born outside marriage/civil partnership (46.8 per cent) compared with 46.2 per cent in 2009 and 39.5 per cent in 2000. This continues the long-term rise in the percentage of births outside marriage/civil partnership which is consistent with increases in the number of couples cohabiting rather than entering into marriage or civil partnership.
I find it intriguing, and relevant for this discussion, that the ONS groups together births within marriage, and those within civil partnerships).
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The sharp contrast between 60% of conceptions, and 33% of births, outside of marriage, reveals something really important: almost half of all conceptions either do not result in births at all, or end in birth to married parents. This implies that a substantial proportion of parents who happily cohabit for years before conception, decide to marry once they know that they have offspring on the way. Marriage is decidedly not required for conception – but (at least in 1994), two thirds of couples clearly believed it was necessary for the rearing of children – a different matter entirely.
It is also important to note that the quoted figure of 60% is for all conceptions. For those parents who marry between conception and birth (and stay married), any subsequent conceptions and births will be inside marriage. So second and later children in a family will have a substantially lower rate of conception outside of marriage – and first births a correspondingly higher rate.
Marriage does not guarantee a mother and a father.
Even if we accept that the rearing of children is best done by their biological parents, in marriage, the simple fact of marriage does not in any way guarantee that this will guarantee this. Some marriages simply break down in divorce, separation or death, so that many children are raised by single parents, or by a complex network of biological parents and step-parents, and sometimes in a succession of different family structures. For still other children, the simple incapacity of their biological parents to provide suitable loving care leaves them in need of fostering or adoption.
Inevitably, some of the alternative parenting couples who end up raising children after the breakdown of the biological parents’ marriage, or after the children have been placed in care, will be same-sex couples. If it is true that married parents benefit the children and provide a stronger environment for their rearing – that also applies to the children who are being raised by same – sex parents.
Gay marriage: good for the children.
Davies, Jon & Loughlin, Gerard: Sex These Days: Essays on Theology, Sexuality and Society
