How Recognizing Gay Marriage Can Increase Abortions

As the amicus brief explains in detail, redefining marriage in genderless terms—which is legally necessary to permit marriage by same-sex couples—undermines the existing social norms of marriage in ways that are likely over time to reduce opposite-sex marriage rates. For example, an “any-two-adults” model of marriage implicitly tells men (and women) that a child doesn’t need a father (or mother), thereby weakening the norm of gender-diverse parenting.  Other norms, such as the value of biological bonding, partner exclusivity, and reproductive postponement until marriage, will likewise crumble.

 

It is thus not surprising that, even in the short time that same-sex marriage has been officially recognized in some states at home and abroad, man-woman marriage rates have declined—even as marriage rates in other jurisdictions have remained relatively stable.

 

In the Netherlands, for example, among young women, and after controlling for other factors, there was a net 5 percent reduction in the nationwide opposite-sex marriage rate, and a 31.8 percent plunge in urban, less religious areas. As shown in the graph below, moreover, in just a few years after it redefined marriage Spain saw man-woman marriage rates plummet 36 percent.

 

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