French parents giving vows a pass
PARIS – France may still be the land of love. But the country’s traditional tableau of marriage and the baby carriage has changed dramatically in three decades, according to a parliamentary report released Friday.
Nearly half of children are now born out of wedlock, and the marriage rate is down 27 percent compared to 1970 – prompting calls for reform of France’s widely used civil unions.
And yet, there’s a baby boom. With 1.94 children born to the average woman, France has the highest birthrate in the European Union after Ireland’s 1.99, according to 2005 demographic figures released last week. The European average is 1.5 babies per woman.
The glossy French magazine Paris Match devoted its cover this week to the high birthrate, with a photo of French actress Judith Godreche (“The Spanish Apartment”) holding her diaper-clad baby under the headline “France, champion of births.”
The parliamentary study, drafted by a bipartisan parliamentary committee, was commissioned more than a year ago. Legislators were expected to use the report as a basis to modify existing legislation on marriage and the rights of children.
Among other findings: The average age at marriage has increased by nearly six years for both men and women since 1970, to 28.8 for women and 30.9 for men. And today, 42 percent of marriages end in divorce – compared with 12 percent three decades ago, the report said.
Sometimes, romantic partners decide not to marry because they have already experienced complicated divorces or breakups, the report said. And the stigma of living together outside wedlock is simply disappearing, it said.
The evolution of French families contradicts certain stereotypes handed down over the years, said Claude Martin, a sociologist with France’s National Center for Scientific Research. The first is that countries with many practicing Roman Catholics – such as Italy, Spain or Poland – have higher birthrates than more secular countries such as France. The second is that working prevents women from having children.
“Countries where women have access to professional life are also those where the birthrate is higher,” Martin told Le Monde newspaper.
The parliamentary report also studied the outcome of a 1999 French law that gave unmarried couples, including homosexual couples, extensive legal rights if they register their unions with the state.
Some 170,000 such unions have been signed in France, the report said. It urged the government to strengthen such alternative unions by reforming the law to make it more like marriage. Proposed revisions include property rights, laws of succession and taxation.
The report did not recommend legalizing marriage for gay couples.