Legitimate Illegitimacy

I went to a talk yesterday by Dr. Robert D. Retherford, the coordinator for the Population and Health Studies program and a senior fellow at Hawaii's East-West Center. He had some interesting stats about out-of-wedlock births. In France, 43 percent of births take place outside of marriage. In the UK, the figure is in the upper ...

I went to a talk yesterday by Dr. Robert D. Retherford, the coordinator for the Population and Health Studies program and a senior fellow at Hawaii's East-West Center. He had some interesting stats about out-of-wedlock births. In France, 43 percent of births take place outside of marriage. In the UK, the figure is in the upper 30s. In the United States, a quarter of births are out-of-wedlock. In Japan, however, only 2-3 percent of births are to unmarried mothers. It's not that Japanese youth aren't engaging in premarital sex. In fact, it's become very socially acceptable in recent decades. It just means that the Japanese use birth control, even though there's never been any kind of family planning or birth control campaigns by the government. And even though the pill was legalized a few years ago, some 80 percent of Japanese couples, wed and unwed, use condoms for birth control.  

I went to a talk yesterday by Dr. Robert D. Retherford, the coordinator for the Population and Health Studies program and a senior fellow at Hawaii's East-West Center. He had some interesting stats about out-of-wedlock births. In France, 43 percent of births take place outside of marriage. In the UK, the figure is in the upper 30s. In the United States, a quarter of births are out-of-wedlock. In Japan, however, only 2-3 percent of births are to unmarried mothers. It's not that Japanese youth aren't engaging in premarital sex. In fact, it's become very socially acceptable in recent decades. It just means that the Japanese use birth control, even though there's never been any kind of family planning or birth control campaigns by the government. And even though the pill was legalized a few years ago, some 80 percent of Japanese couples, wed and unwed, use condoms for birth control.  

Christine Y. Chen is a senior editor at Foreign Policy.

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