cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/3197004
Source: https://landgeist.com/2023/08/12/births-outside-of-marriage-in-europe/.
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.
I would like to know the conception rate out of wedlock
Türkiye what u doin
Marrying apparently
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)
What about the whole Christian no-sex-before-marriage? Has to contribute at least something
At least for Germany I really doubt it.
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.
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?
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?
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.
