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Study Reveals a "Striking Exodus from Marriage"

In 2000, at the end of his 40-year political career, Senator Patrick Moynihan said, "The biggest change [that I've seen] is that the family structure has come apart all over the North Atlantic world." The change has occurred in "an historical instant," Moynihan said. "Something that was not imaginable 40 years ago."

A new State of Our Unions report (December 2012) concludes that things have gotten even worse. The report notes the following statistics:

  • More than 40 percent of children are born out of wedlock.
  • Between 1970 and 2012, the annual number of marriages per 1,000 unmarried adults decreased by more than 50 percent.
  • The divorce rate today is about twice that of 1960 (although it has declined since peaking in the early 1980s).
  • More than 25 percent of all children live in single-parent homes, compared to only nine percent in 1960.
  • The number of unmarried couples has increased seventeen-fold in the last 50 years.

The study concluded that we are "witnessing a striking exodus from marriage." The distinguished historian Lawrence Stone noted, "The scale of marital breakdown in the West since 1960 has no historical precedent …. At no time in history, with the possibility of Imperial Rome, has the institution of marriage been more problematic than today."

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