Tag Archives: Divorce

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MUST-HEAR: Jennifer Roback Morse on contraceptives, divorce, cohabitation, SSM and ART

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Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

I often tease women for being too focused on happiness and feelings, but Dr. J isn’t like that at all. She is all about economics, incentives, and moral boundaries. She thinks about the big issues. She once chastised me in an e-mail for being too emotional. I think she has had it with the feelings-based arguments from the socially-liberal left.

This lecture does not repeat much from her previous lectures.

Anyway – DO NOT MISS THIS LECTURE!

The MP3 file is here. (93 minutes, 43.5 Mb)

Keep in mind that this speech was given to Wisconsin Catholic seminarians, so there is a lot of rah-rah Catholic stuff. I’m an evangelical Protestant, so I just smile when she talks about that. At least there was no Mary in it. Yay!

SUMMARY

Contraception:
– contraception does not reduce the abortion rate
– contraception is bad because it makes sex a recreational activity
– contraception fails, which leads to the need for abortion
– 80% of abortions are done on unmarried women
– teenagers do not think that contraceptives will FAIL for them
– they don’t understand that the probabilities is PER ACTION – more actions increases probability
– the more you rely on something that has a small chance of failure, the more chance you will get a failure
– more sex, means more chances for a person to get a failure
– older women are naturally less fertile, so they skew contraceptive effectiveness figures higher
– contraceptives are most likely to fail for the young, the poor and the unmarried
– contraception means that women cannot ask men to promise to marry them before sex
– the pressure for a man to marry if the woman gets pregnant is gone
– the presumption is that the woman will have an abortion
– women who want to get married are at a disadvantage to get male attention now
– because men will prefer women who are willing to have an abortion if they get pregnant
– when people argue for these social changes, they don’t accurately assess consequences
– they think that they can have the happiness-making freedom without damaging anything else
– they think that no incentives will be created so that others start to act differently
– example: no-fault divorce – there were terrible consequences that were minimized by the social engineers

Divorce:
– people who wanted this believed myths in order to get the happiness-making freedom for the adults
– they said that divorce would be less harmful for children than if the parents stayed together
– they argued for no-fault divorce because they wanted happiness and didn’t care about children
– in a low conflict marriage, it is better for children if the parents stay together
– in a high-conflict marriage, it is better for children to divorce
– but for high-conflict divorce, you could have gotten a divorce for cause
– what people pushing no-fault divorce really wanted was to divorce to pursue happiness elsewhere
– there is also a financial incentive to divorce for no reason – alimony, child support, property
– but divorce really disrupts the lives of the children
– the VAST MAJORITY of divorces are in low-conflict situations
– the social norm was that low-level conflict meant that you stayed married for the sake of the kids
– a pregnancy after a re-marriage is devastating to children of the first marriage
– not being able to have a normal relationship with both biological parents is devastating to children
– what often drives people into co-habitation is the fear of screwing up their own marriages
– pro-divorce people want women to re-marry afterwards to provide kids with a “father-figure”
– the presence of a stepfather increases bad behavior in the kids, as well as risk of abuse
– but actually, stepfathers spend little time with kids, and draws mother away from the kids
– biological fathers spend the most time with the children
– disciplining the children is more complex with a non-bio dad
– normally, dads wants the kids to behave, and moms want the children to be happy
– often, the woman will forbid the father from disciplining the children
– the father will just drop out of parenting completely when his authority is not respected

Co-habitation:
– social engineers understate the risks of co-habitation and overstate the risks of marriage
– but research shows that co-habitation makes no positive contribution to marriage
– feminists love to say that marriage is very risky, but without comparing it to alternatives
(feminists don’t like marriage because of the “unequal gender roles”)
– when compared with the alternatives, like co-habitation, marriage is better on every measure
– feminists say that married women do not report abuse in marriage, that’s why marriage LOOKS better
– but murders HAVE TO BE reported, and co-habitation results in NINE TIMES more murders than marriage
– children are killed FIFTY TIMES more with co-habitation with an unrelated adult than with 2 bio-parents
– the live-in boyfriend is the culprit in 85% of these cases

Same-sex marriage:
– alternatives to marriage change rules and incentives, it is NOT the same thing as marriage
– necessarily, one of the parents will not have a close relationship with one bio-parents
– social engineers say that mothers and fathers are interchangeable – but they are different
– SSM undermines the presumption of paternity, and substitutes state-ordered parenting
– the public purpose of marriage is to attach mothers to fathers, and parents to children
– SSM elevates private purposes for marriage over and above the public purpose of marriage
– SSM will lead to fathers being marginalized from the family
– the state will have to force people to equate SSM and natural marriage

Artificial reproductive technology:
– it is the next substitute for marriage
– highly educated career women do not have to prepare for a husband to get a baby
– her behavior through her life changes because she doesn’t have to care about marriage

News

New study finds that Christians who regularly attend church divorce less

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From Citizen Link. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

It’s a number that is trumpeted from the rooftops — and the pulpit: Half of marriages among Christians and non-Christians alike end in divorce.

But the reality is that Christians who attend church regularly get divorced at a much lower rate.

Professor Bradley Wright, a sociologist at the University of Connecticut, found that among people who identify as Christians but rarely attend church, 60 percent have been divorced. Of those who attend church regularly, 38 percent have been divorced.

W. Bradford Wilcox, a leading sociologist at the University of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project, found a nearly identical spread between “active conservative Protestants” who regularly attend church and people with no religious affiliation.

Professor Scott Stanley from the University of Denver, who is working on the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative, said couples with a vibrant religious faith have more and higher levels of the qualities that marriages need to avoid divorce.

“Whether young or old, male or female, low-income or not, those who said that they were more religious reported higher average levels of commitment to their partners, higher levels of marital satisfaction, less thinking and talking about divorce and lower levels of negative interaction,” he said. “These patterns held true when controlling for such important variables as income, education and age at first marriage.”

I think this is another good example of means-end reasoning in marriage. I often criticize women for choosing the wrong men to marry because they don’t define typical marriage scenarios and then select men who have prepared for those scenarios. Going to church is an antidote for the moral relativism that ails us, and it transports us outside of our hedonism to a place where we can think about bigger and better things. Women need to choose men who have a habit of attending church. Basically, young people need to study research to find out what works (chastity, pre-marital counseling, church attendance, etc.) and then demand that prospective mates demonstrate those skills – if they expect the marriage to last.

I say this as someone who struggles enormously with the feminized church, but you can’t argue with the data. I personally think that church attendance is less important than a good knowledge of philosophical theology and apologetics, and the habit of debating about those things. (Especially science apologetics) I’ve been to my friend Andrew’s church, and if I lived near him, I would attend regularly. They have excellent apologetics events, world-reknown apologetics speakers and classes on apologetics. They have shown William Lane Craig debates, taught Greg Koukl and Lee Strobel books, and they even did “The Truth Project”, which features Stephen C. Meyer. They actually believe what they claim to believe, and they have actually studied why they ought to believe it. I would attend a church like that regularly.

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The best short article on the state of marriage

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Map of Canada
Map of Canada

One of the things that bothers me most about many women is that they think that planning for marriage means getting a degree in liberal arts, reading romance novels, looking at their friend’s wedding photos and holding other people’s babies. I am not convinced that many women understand anything about why a man would want to marry, what he’ll need in the marriage, and how children should be raised so that they will be effective, public Christians.

But then I read articles like this one in the National Post and I realize that some people do get it. (H/T Andrea)

Excerpt:

But, paradoxically, for those who do go through with a real marriage, the introduction of no-fault divorce in 1968 means it is easy to end the commitment. No-fault divorce made it simple for one spouse to give up on their vows when the going gets tough (or a better-looking/higher-earning/ less-nagging partner appears on the scene).

The result has been a fivefold spike in the divorce rate. The courts are now filled with family-law cases, helping ex-spouses and lawyers sort through the minutiae of domestic life. Courts pick through the unsavoury business of marital breakdown, deciding who gets what, including the children themselves.

Speaking of children, when it comes to their safety, there isn’t much the government won’t regulate. From secondhand smoke in cars, to the plastics in toys, to the design of playground equipment, no sandbox is left unturned in a quest to protect our kids.

Yet at the same time, high tax rates make it nearly impossible for one parent to stay home and care for their families. But children don’t raise themselves. This has led some to call for national state-run daycare programs — adding a new, more literal meaning to the words “nanny state.”

Since successive federal governments have failed to implement national daycare, the push for institutional care for toddlers has gone provincial. In Ontario, draft plans given to Premier Dalton McGuinty in June 2009 included a recommendation for the Ministry of Education to establish an “Early Years Division” to create programs for kids age “zero through eight.” The vision? A seamless day of state-provided care, including care before and after work. Under the proposal, some three-yearolds would log longer hours in school than many grown-ups do at work, healthy lunch and snacks included. All at taxpayer expense, of course.

[…]Often, when it comes to raising kids, daycare and schooling, we hear talk from qualified experts and smart people with degrees — as if parents aren’t quite up to snuff. Today’s smaller families mean we seldom learn from parents or grandparents who successfully raised large broods, so it’s easy to assume the experts have a better handle on our kids.

But it’s gone too far. The public school curriculum is now devised largely without parental input, yet attempts to usurp some of the most important family responsibilities, including teaching ethics, values and sex education. On that front, studies suggest that parents are still the number-one influence in teen sexual decision making. Good news perhaps, since but for rare cases, teachers aren’t exactly jumping over couches in staff rooms to grab the sex ed curriculum.

I have probably never read so much useful information about what men are thinking about when they think about marriage in such a small space. We are thinking about fiscal conservatism, parental autonomy, stay-at-home mothers, and vouchers for private schools. The irony is that most young unmarried women are opposed to ALL of those things, and they VOTE AGAINST all of those things. And so, naturally, men want nothing to do with marrying them. Men may be interested in sex, but they certainly won’t be interested in marriage.

No one ever asks men what they want – everyone just assumes that men will keep acting chivalrously and keep marrying when all the incentives to marry are taken away! Ridiculous! If marriage doesn’t involve keeping what you earn, respect from the wife, family autonomy and social prestige, then men will not marry. Men like to do hard things ALONE – we don’t want to pay the government to “help” us, especially when the “help” means using our earnings to subsidize single motherhood with welfare and state-run education.

Women: if you want a man to think about marriage, this article shows the way you need to talk about marriage with men. Reading Dr. Laura’s “The Proper Care of Marriage”, Dr. Stephen Baskerville’s “Taken Into Custody”, George Gilder’s “Men and Marriage”, Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse’s “Love and Economics”, and James Dobson’s “Bringing Up Boys” would also be a good start. Probably the best two things to learn to impress a man are economics and Christian apologetics, with an emphasis on science and history.