The reality now: Regulations require insurance plans offered by employers to cover contraception.  However, they exempt churches and other clearly religious institutions from this requirement.

What is happening: The Conference of Catholic Bishops and other groups have been lobbying for a much broader definition of the exemption.  The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) originally crafted the exemption and defined “a religious employer as applying to nonprofit organizations that have ” instilling religious values as their purpose and whose employees and clients share their religious tenets.”

Lobbyists are trying to expand this definition to include “religiously affiliated” colleges, universities, medical schools, hospitals, social service organizations, and schools such that it will prevent them from offering birth control coverage for their employees as well. As Ms. Richards makes clear, they are trying to push for this, “despite the fact that these institutions in large part neither employ nor serve individuals who share their religious beliefs. In fact, they are open to and serve the public.”

The truth is even 98% of sexually-active Catholic women have used methods of birth control prohibited by the Vatican.  And the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has declared that “the exclusion of insurance coverage for prescription contraceptive drugs and devices in an employer health plan that covers prescription drugs” spells sex discrimination.

Why would  forces still want to find new ways to restrict access to birth control?  Some say it’s a Vatican “power grab.”  I think somehow, someway, that this attempt to expand the exemption is a part in a legal master plan to ultimately roll back Roe v Wade.  Both are about taking away the fundamental right to control one’s reproductive life.

Efforts like this send me through the roof. Join me and stand with these groups who are sending the White House the message to stop the “1%” on this one–the current exemption is more than enough when it comes to religious liberty, and that expanding refusal clauses is not what 99% of Americans want as a part of healthcare reform.

Catholics for Choice

National Women’s Law Center

Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health

Planned Parenthood Federation of America

NARAL Pro-Choice America

Find great books for women and reproductive issues at:

…domestic chore balance is important to a happy relationship.  Numbers from a 2007 poll indicate that,  “62% of married adults said ‘sharing household chores’ was the third most important ingredient (after faithfulness and sex) in successful marriage.”

If we just look at couples without children, the stats from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tell us that in 2010, if both partners worked full time, the “combined daily totals of paid and unpaid work,” meaning “work at the office and all the drudgery you have to do at home” were almost the same: 8 hours and 11 minutes for men, and 8 and hours and 3 minutes for women.

Now, looking at how couples without children do the domestics can include those that just don’t have children yet and couples who never plan to have children. In my interviews with childfree couples for Families of Two, I learned that domestic chore balance was very often in place for many couples.  There certainly was a trend for couples to share the domestics, and not fall into the stereotype that women do most of this work.  It was especially true when both partners worked outside the home.

Childfree couples also did not fall into gender role stereotypes in other areas.  For example, unlike the common stereotype that he handles the finances, it was not uncommon for this to be her arena to handle in the relationship.  She might also be the major breadwinner, and there was no issue with this.  However their relationship looked or how they split the responsibilities, I observed  a real trend of egalitarianism in the childfree marriage. The odds of “chore wars?” Low to nil.

What do you see out there on how childfree couples “do” their relationship, in terms of domestics, and other responsibilities that come along with a committed, co-habitating or married relationship?

To childfree couples, how do you “do” your relationship?

Journalist and novelist Po Bronson’s divorce factoid sheet,  which is often quoted. One startling “fact” based on divorce research that is often quoted is, ”the <divorce> rate for “childless” couples was almost double the rate for families with children.”  The problem–the research is from 1950.

The often quoted sources out there also do not point to causation–the research is not saying that having kids ”causes” divorce. Bronson’s  factoid sheet does source reasons people cite, however, but again it’s dated, and comes from studies in the early 80s.  They are still worth a look, as many capture the themes of more recent findings:

Top reasons why American women said they’d gotten divorced:

communication problems (69.7%)

unhappiness (59.9%)

incompatible with spouse (56.4%)

emotional abuse (55%)

financial problems (32.9%)

sexual problems (32.1%)

spouse’s alcohol abuse (30%)

spousal infidelity (25.2%)

physical abuse (21.7%)

Top reasons why American men said they’d gotten divorced

communication problems (59%)

incompatible with spouse (44.7%)

unhappiness (46.9%)

emotional abuse (24.7%)

financial problems (28.7%)

sexual problems (30.2%)

Do you see anything like “We don’t have kids” on these lists? You don’t see it in the list of top reasons on more recent lists either. What is? Try history of parental divorce, communication issues, lack of conflict management skills, and sex & intimacy issues.

We also see a lot from Anneli Rufus, an author and journalist, who has a longer list of 20 factors purportedly based on recent divorce data. Two of the 20 have to do with a “childless” marriage.  One is if the couple does not agree on having kids. Another is, “The absence of children leads to loneliness, and at least 66% of divorced couples in the U.S. are childless.”

Like other sources, this factor (which I have yet to find the research source for–let us know if you do), hugely lacks delineation between childfree and child “less,” and all that the latter can mean. Is the couple “lonely” because they want children and have not been able to have them? Is not being able to have them the big issue in the relationship? Or were they planning to have children but are technically child “less” because they had not had kids yet before they split? Or has one person changed his/her mind about kids? Or had they waited to bring the topic up seriously until they were married and found out they were in fact not on the same page? All of these factors could explain their unhappy child “less” marital state.

The childfree are not in this group, but the stats just lump us all together anyway.  Now, it can be true that if the couple wants the marriage to end, it can be even more complicated when there are children in the equation.  That does not mean it is always easier for those without children; divorce is never easy, kids or not.

My take-the likelihood of split up doesn’t boil down to whether you have kids or not–it’s all too often about how couples with or without children did not deal with their own relationship issues—they let them go too long to where they became unrecoverable. All marriages, with or without kids, are work and need tending, including dealing wth challenging issues.

Even many parents admit that the children can serve as a big distraction from dealing with problems in their marital relationship. With no kids, if you veer from dealing with the tough stuff, you can always find other kinds of distractions to go to e.g., work, serious hobbies, attending to other or aging family.

We see lots of couples with kids who may stay married longer but are not happy–they stay together for the kids, and when they become empty nesters, face that it’s too late to resolve issues that have not been dealt with for too long. With or without kids, it comes down to how long you go knowing there are issues and choose not to deal with them. And every couple, with or without kids, has their point of no return.

What do married childfree tell me? Many say they don’t let stuff fester. Relationship is #1. Others might let distractions allow them to avoid really dealing with things for awhile, but it reaches a point where things just have to be dealt with. For parents it can be harder, because the raising of children can be such a powerful distraction away from their relationship.

But there’s nothing like really good research. I say let’s stop drawing conclusions from old data, and data that is far from looking at the whole picture when it comes to couples who split and have no kids.  Until we see research comparing reasons for divorce with parents, couples who wanted children but ended up without them, couples who disagreed about having children, and those who were aligned about not wanting them, the answer to who is more likely to divorce is - “it’s unclear; more study required.”

What do you think?

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