marriages, babies and census

I was reading news from Yahoo! Philippines and I came across an article fed by wires agency Agence France Presse. The report, "Marriage going out of fashion in Philippines", used the recently released 2008 census from the National Statistics Office to point out that getting married is no longer as big of a deal as it was years ago.

According to the census, 1,784,316 live births were registered in the country in 2008, of which 37.5 percent were born out of wedlock. Meanwhile, a total of 486,514 marriages were registered the same year (press release here). Of the cases, 41 percent were celebrated through civil rites and 36.3 percent were commenced in Catholic churches (press release here).

A growing number of Filipinos now treat marriage as an option, rather than a requirement, for starting families, said Nene Baligad, a member of a unit of the National Statistics Office that licenses people who officiate weddings.

"Nowadays, some couples just live in and only get married after having four or five children," she told AFP.

"You can't really say it's for practical reasons, since you can be married on the cheap. It's more like, we Filipinos tend to follow what is in fashion."

What the article failed to argue however, is that a decrease in registered marriages does not necessarily mean couples more often opted to living together instead of actually getting married.

NSO's release on live births also included statistics on teenage mothers. A total of 186,527 babies were born to teenage mothers, a 7.64 percent increase from 2007. This figure side by side the number of illegitimate babies born in 2008 may also show the lack of knowledge and the problem with education.

If NSO has provided the trend by age, we may be able to provide more analysis.

Allow me to say, I am proud that we may be the only country who does not allow divorce. Of course, there are biblical perspectives as to why divorce should not be an option but I am more concerned with the mindset divorce policies encourage. But I am for the inclusion of sex education in classroom discussion. And the way the article has made the connection between marriage statistics and the divorce bill was not clearly woven out.