Educated women choosing to be mothers without marrying their spouses
Childbearing and conjugal relationships in Latin America
2015-03-19
(Press-News.org) This news release is available in French.
In Latin America, consensual (common-law) unions are traditionally associated with poorer or indigenous populations. But recent research is turning this conventional wisdom on its head, finding that that in the past 30 years or so consensual unions have become increasingly popular throughout Latin America, including in higher-income groups. In certain countries, such as Panama, common-law partnerships are now as widespread as in Quebec.
Another widely held belief was that only low-income, uneducated women bore children in consensual unions. But a new study led by Benoît Laplante, professor at INRS Centre Urbanisation Culture Société, shows that this is no longer true. The proportion of university-educated women choosing to have children out of wedlock remains relatively small in Latin America, but it is rising significantly. It is simply no longer the case that only uneducated Latin Americans choose to start a family without getting married. Research demonstrates that in most Latin America countries, regardless of level of education, fertility rates correlate with the fact of living in a conjugal relationship, not with the legal nature of the relationship.
"Consensual partnerships among urban, educated people can no longer be viewed merely as precursors to marriage," notes Professor Laplante. "They should be seen as a step in the life-cycle, one which affords the possibility of procreation, as has traditionally been the case in lower socioeconomic strata of Latin American societies."
The study found that, even for the economically privileged, consensual unions and marriage are two coexisting family models. In this regard Latin America is beginning to resemble western European societies and Quebec. This leaves the English-speaking regions of the Americas as the only parts of the continent where marriage is still considered the normative family arrangement for child-rearing by the well-off.
INFORMATION:
The study was published in the March 2015 issue of the prestigious journal Population and Development Review.
About this publication
The article, "Childbearing within Marriage and Consensual Union in Latin America, 1980-2010," is published in Population and Development Review, vol. 41, no. 1. Research was supervised by Benoît Laplante of INRS, Teresa Castro-Martín and Teresa Martín-García of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid, and Clara Cortina of Barcelona's Universitat Pompeu Fabra, with funding from the EU's FamiliesAndSocieties project (Seventh Framework Programme 2007-2013).
About INRS
Institut national de recherche scientifique (INRS) is a graduate-level research and training university and ranks first in Canada for research intensity (average grant funding per faculty member). INRS brings together some 150 professors as well as 700 students and postdoctoral fellows at its four centres in Montreal, Quebec City, Laval, and Varennes. Its applied and fundamental research is essential to the advancement of science in Quebec and internationally even as it plays a key role in the development of concrete solutions to the problems faced by our society.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2015-03-19
DURHAM, N.C.-- Children who are older when they start kindergarten do well in the short term, academically and socially. But as teenagers, these old-for-grade students are more likely to drop out and commit serious crimes, says new research from Duke University.
The negative outcomes are significantly more likely for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
"This research provides the first compelling evidence of a causal link between dropout and crime. It supports the view that crime outcomes should be considered in evaluating school reforms," said lead author Philip ...
2015-03-19
Amateur botanists in the Western Cape Province of South Africa have discovered two new species of beautiful blue-flowered legumes. The study was published in the open access journal PhytoKeys.
Few people take the chance to tramp the empty rolling ranges of mountains and the fragmented and jagged coastline of the Southern Cape in South Africa. Most avoid it because of how wild and tough-going it can be.
This region is part of a unique and species rich global flora called the Cape Floral Kingdom. Yet there are a band of intrepid walkers and climbers who traverse these ...
2015-03-19
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Across much of the Western world, 25 years of expansion of the medical system has actually led to people feeling less healthy over time, a new study has found.
A researcher at The Ohio State University used several large multinational datasets to examine changes in how people rated their health between 1981 and 2007 and compared that to medical expansion in 28 countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
During that time, the medical industry expanded dramatically in many of those countries, which you might ...
2015-03-19
ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill. (March 3, 2015) - Getting sick when you're pregnant is especially difficult, but women whose children are at risk for developing asthma should avoid antibiotics, according to a new study.
The study, published in the Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, the scientific publication of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI), followed 298 mother-child pairs through the child's third year of life. The study found that 22 percent of the 103 children born to mothers who took antibiotics during pregnancy were diagnosed with ...
2015-03-19
This news release is available in French. Research has shown that the health of immigrants is generally better than that of citizens of their host country, at least on their arrival and for some time afterwards. But a team of researchers in Montreal has found that this is not true of all groups of immigrants; children and older people, for example, may be exceptions. "Our analysis suggests that immigrant health policies should not be 'one size fits all' in type, and that they need to take account of immigrants' ages and the indicators of the health problems they are ...
2015-03-19
Physician practices are engaging in new health care payment models intended to improve quality and reduce costs, but are finding that they need help with successfully managing increasing amounts of data and figuring out how to respond to the diversity of programs and quality metrics from different payers, according to a new joint study by the RAND Corporation and the American Medical Association.
Both the federal government and private payers are changing the way they pay physicians and other health professionals, moving to innovative models intended to improve quality ...
2015-03-19
Electric vehicles are cool, research shows. Literally.
A study in this week's Scientific Reports by researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) and in China add more fuel to the already hot debate about whether electric vehicles are more environmentally friendly than conventional vehicles by uncovering two hidden benefits.
They show that the cool factor is real - in that electric vehicles emit significantly less heat. That difference could mitigate the urban heat island effect, the phenomenon that helps turn big cities like Beijing into pressure cookers in warm ...
2015-03-19
Researchers funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, have found that two common antibiotic treatments work equally well against bacterial skin infections caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) acquired outside of hospital settings. Known as community-associated MRSA, or CA-MRSA, these skin infections have been reported in athletes, daycare-age children, students, military personnel and prison inmates, among others, and can lead to hospitalization, surgical procedures, bacteria ...
2015-03-19
Nanoparticles of various types can be quickly and permanently bonded to a solid substrate, if one of the most effective methods of synthesis, click chemistry, is used for this purpose. The novel method has been presented by a team of researchers from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland.
A small movement of the hand, the characteristic 'click!' - and the snap fastener quickly and securely fastens our clothes. One of the newest methods of synthesis in modern chemistry, click chemistry, works on a similar basis. Here, molecules ...
2015-03-19
Clear and realistic expectations are key to successfully hiring heads of departments, say Professor Pierre-Alain Clavien, University of Zurich, and Joseph Deiss, former President of the Swiss Confederation, in a commentary in Nature magazine.
Selecting a chair for a position in clinical academic medicine is often problematic, with the diverse demands placed on the position proving a constant source of debate. Today's heads of departments are not only expected to be outstanding physicians, researchers, and teachers, but also adroit and cost-conscious managers. Finding ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Educated women choosing to be mothers without marrying their spouses
Childbearing and conjugal relationships in Latin America
