cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/3197004
Source: https://landgeist.com/2023/08/12/births-outside-of-marriage-in-europe/.
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
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.
It is a discrimination since not everyone will find somebody to marry. And even if everybody could marry, it still is a discrimination towards not married people.
Marring for the purpose to get tax benefit and oder advantages is a sign of discrimination, because they are marring to get advantages in society.
Society is full of discriminations that people have normalised and so they don’t see it as such.
That only makes sense if you assume that marriage is a purely financial thing. It has lots of other aspects that have nothing to do with money that a lot of people dislike.
Can we get another map about inceptions out of mariage? Many marry only after learning they will be parents.
Iceland, nice.
Rounding error when they truncated the last two significant figures. Actual value is 0.020% higher.
Türkiye what u doin
Marrying apparently
Mis-reporting or not reporting births, probably. That’s far too low to be realistic.
They’re Islamic and have traditional morals. it’s better for the kid if they’re married anyways.
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).
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.
I mean looking at the other numbers on the map, the eastern countries generally seem to have much lower outside-marriage birth rates yet east Germany has higher rates than the west. I’d have expected closer numbers to e.g. Poland in east Germany and closer to France/Belgium/Netherlands in the west.
Yeah but Poland for example is very catholic traditionally. Also South and West Germany, while East Germany was more protestant. The socialist system in the GDR didn’t care much for religion or actively opposed it leaving todays east Germany then largely atheist. I think this plays a huge role. You’ll see the same divide looking at women working or children in kindergarten because east Germany favored a more progressive way of family and gender roles.
They didnt just ‘didnt Care much’, the goverment discriminated you If You believed in god. Examples i have Heard of is that If you wanted to Go to university or wanted a promotion they advised you to Stop practicing your religion.
I don’t remember the exact Numbers, but about 80% were catholic after the war and about 15% were after Germany united again.
Jep exactly, that is what happened to my grand parents.
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.
Bayern is higher than BaWü: https://www.iwd.de/artikel/unehelich-na-und-291746/
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?
They don’t marry people they hate, they just grow apart and since marriage forces them to stay together, they’re essentially trapped with a person they don’t want to be in a relationship with anymore.
A normal couple would simply break up, but divorce is much harder.
Which is the real problem.
A lot of the time because they get pregnant and it’s not socially acceptable where they live to have a kid by someone you’re not married to.
You don’t have to be married to have a strong relationship or a stable household to raise a family.
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.
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.
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.
I would like to know the conception rate out of wedlock
France is looking likeable. I wonder if this is another result of their system of Laïcité.
