From a research paper by "The National Partnership for Women & Families", sounds so nice, the paper's position is to normalize abortion. Still a great paper to read and understand the nature of the problem.
Married women accounted for 14.8% of abortions, while 29.2% of abortions were attributed to women who lived with a male partner at the time of the abortion. Further, married women had the lowest abortion rate (6.6 abortions per 1,000 women), while cohabitating women had the highest rate (52 abortions per 1,000 women).
In the course of discussing a woman's freedom, we fail to talk about the consequences of simply either hooking up or in this case 'shacking up' without marriage. Understanding consequences and sound decision making isn't an act of oppression by the patriarchy!
Marriage isn't an extension of cohabitation, it's a whole other creature. It's easy in cohabitation, simply spend the night and never leave. Marriage though is different, it has to be discussed and be consented to prior to being married. There has to be some form of cooperation (not coercion) to get both bride and groom down the aisle. I live in a society in which women can choose their husbands, and yet so many of us throw that choice away. While feminism focuses on our right to be recklessly be with any man willing and ready, and be free of the unwanted consequences of being pregnant with his child either by contraception or abortion. Feminism fails to see what marriage could do for women, please understand I only hope and pray that our sisters can realize what is missing.
When you marry, you make the other person an in-law to your family. Without marriage, they are just "our son/daughter/brother/sister's partner."
ReplyDeleteOf course, many people who think shacking up is fine don't see why having a higher abortion rate is a problem.
On some level, a woman is willing to subject herself to living with the guy, and willing to invite him into her body, but she's not willing to subject a child to him. Or, she's focused on her career and rightly can't rely on her shack-up honey to support her, so she kills her child rather than make it harder for her to keep her career going. There are a bunch of other reasons for the correlation.
Shacking up is a horrible idea. Even for people who just want sex or companionship.
Most women believe in shacking up as a path to marriage. If your already engaged with a date set, I assuming these relationships are otherwise healthy. On the other hand if your living together with no idea of what will be, the whole relationship loses anything that was built while dating, even if they end up marrying.
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