A study published in the scientific journal Global Epidemiology followed nearly 12,000 American nurses, all originally unmarried, for nearly 25 years. It found that married women had a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, which is the leading cause of death for women in the United States. Married women were also happier, more optimistic and less likely to suffer from depression and loneliness than those who had not married. While divorce was associated with worse outcomes than staying married, women who married–including those who later divorced–had a 35 percent lower risk of death during the time frame of the study than those who never married.
The authors of the study published a paper in the Wall Street Journal on March 18, in which they summarized their findings, noting that although their analysis focused exclusively on women, there is a great deal of evidence indicating that marriage has even greater health benefits for men, as well as being associated with longer life spans. Worldwide, marriage is declining, and unmarried partnerships and extramarital children have become more common. Although there are regional and national differences, the general trend is for fewer and later marriages.
Critics of marriage and the family as institutions, at the United Nations and elsewhere, are right to point out that abuse and harm can occur within the family and have devastating effects on the victims. However, their proposed solutions, which include redefining “family” to include virtually any domestic structure or set of people or dismantling all traditional structures considered “patriarchal,” ignore a growing body of social science data in favor of the natural family, consisting of one man and one woman and open to life. The core documents of the United Nations, including the UN’s fundamental pillar, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, refer to the family as the “natural and fundamental unit of society,” yet such language has now become highly controversial as progressive governments insist that the family exists in various and diverse forms.
Still, the latest study and research in recent days confirms how important family structures are, especially for children raised in those families, as has already been shown by Professor Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas in his groundbreaking studies: children are better off when they are raised by their biological, married parents. The new study on marriage, conducted by Harvard scientist Ying Chen and colleagues, shows that the benefits of marriage are not at the expense of women, but are shared by them as well. Despite the limitation of the sample of women considered, it is noteworthy that even women who live in a wealthy country and enjoy many of the “empowerment” benefits according to UN goals, such as education and employment, can see their health and well-being improve further by marrying and staying married.
“This study provides evidence that the initiation of first marriage in early adulthood is associated with successively lower risks of mortality and cardiovascular disease and greater psychosocial and mental well-being, whereas dissolution of marriage is correlated with lower psychosocial well-being and greater psychological distress among women, with these associations persisting into mid- and late life. Our study also addresses criticisms from previous research in that it deals with incidental marriage (including the effects of the decision to marry on subsequent divorce) rather than just “prevailing” marriage, and reduces the concern of residual confounding by prior marital history by focusing on first marriage… Although marriage is clearly a powerful social bond, all people need social relationships and community support,” the authors said in the conclusions of the study.
Logically, natural marriage and family is even more beneficial for women living in more modest working conditions and welfare in other nations of the world, and yet, at the UN, they do not think so and, as evidenced by C-Fam, the majority of experts and nations are considering removing the term family from documents in order to ‘not discriminate’ against LGBTI and transgender couples… A censure of social science, as well as common sense and simple factual reality.
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