The Case for Abstinence and Marriage

First Healthy Respect Speaker Praises Abstinence Programs

An overwhelming wealth of social science data indicate that children do much better emotionally, materially, financially and even physically if their biological parents get married and stay married, said Maggie Gallagher at the first Healthy Respect Speaker Series event. Yet, due to what she called "experiments in marriage over the past 50 years," there are few social or legal structures today to help build good marriages and keep them intact over time.

Abstinence programs are one of the few community-based efforts to promote marriage and healthy relationships, said Gallagher, who is president of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy.

"I appreciate and admire what Healthy Respect is doing, providing scientifically sound and medically accurate abstinence programs in New York schools," she said. "It's amazing that this is a supposedly controversial thing to do."

She continued, "Abstinence education efforts are among the few community programs that actually make the case for marriage. When you ask your students to wait to engage in sexual activity, the question is 'wait for what?' When you say they are asked to wait for marriage, then marriage is presented as an ideal, a special relationship that is worth waiting for. You don't hear that message too often in our society today."

Ms. Gallagher spoke November 28th at the Union League Club in New York City at a breakfast fundraiser to inaugurate the Healthy Respect Speaker Series, which is dedicated to bringing experts in various fields to comment on issues related to abstinence education.

"We were privileged to have someone of Maggie Gallagher's reputation and expertise to be our first speaker," said John Margand, Chief Executive Officer of Healthy Respect. "She has a wide and comprehensive knowledge of her subject and presents it in a very concise and understandable way. We were especially encouraged by the praise she has for abstinence education programs and the positive connection she made between the teaching of abstinence and the value of marriage. She showed how abstinence is not simply a way to say no here and now, bur rather how abstinence is a skill set that has long-range implications for a young person going into adulthood that will help him or her make positive choices throughout life. This, in turn, has great benefits for our society at large."

Drawing upon the data from thousands of social science studies, Ms. Gallagher said the high rates of divorce "touches most of us across all social strata," who have experienced divorce in our immediate or extended families. In 1960, 95 percent of children in the United States were born to married parents; today the number is only 35 percent. "This is an extraordinary shift in an extraordinarily short period of time," she observed.

Children whose parents do not marry or get divorced, she stated, are 4 to 5 times more likely to live in poverty, are more likely to die young or be hospitalized, have higher rates of substance abuse, become pregnant out of wedlock, have conduct problems in school and require special education. In addition, boys without their biological fathers at home are 2-3 times more likely to be incarcerated in their lifetimes.

"The waste in human life is the major cost of divorce or having children outside of marriage," Ms. Gallagher said. The social costs are also immense, and all of us pay for them."

Marriage is a strong social structure to keep biological fathers close to the mothers of their children, and to keep fathers close to their children, Ms. Gallagher added. "The importance of fathers in the lives of their children is often a neglected aspect in our society today. Any institution that helps to keep fathers in their children's lives should be supported by the whole society, because the social costs are too high otherwise."

These statistics hold true not only when an intact marriage is "good" or "exceptional," she pointed out, but also when a "marriage is decent or good enough." A marriage that is not high-conflict need not be ideal to provide immense benefits for the children and the spouses.

She concluded, "It's a lot more difficult in life if your parents don't give you the gift" of an intact marriage.

Marriage is an almost universal institution throughout human history and cultures, she concluded. "There is something stubborn in the human heart for marriage," she said. "But how long can that ideal last if we do not actively support and promote marriage?"

Abstinence for marriage education programs play a key role in keeping the ideal alive. "There is a crisis surrounding the family, so there is no more important task for society today than that of bringing men and women together in stable marriages for the task of childbearing and committed love."