New Bush marriage promotion proposal may fall short of goals, expert says

COLUMBUS – President Bush’s $1.5 billion proposal to promote marriage, especially among low-income couples, is likely to have mixed results at best, according to a researcher who has studied the issue.

Bush administration officials said the President may discuss the new marriage promotion proposal in his State of the Union address on Jan. 20. The proposal would provide at least $1.5 billion for training to help couples develop skills that sustain marriages.

In a study published last year, Daniel Lichter, a professor of sociology at Ohio State University, and his colleagues found that preventing unwed childbearing may be more important than promoting marriage in helping women economically.

“Marriage is no panacea for women who had children before they got married,” Lichter said. “Marriage cannot offset the economic disadvantages associated with out-of-wedlock childbearing.”

But, according to Lichter, the first priority should be reducing unwed childbearing.
Findings of his study showed that about 30 percent of women who had babies before marriage are poor, compared to only 8 percent of women who had a birth after marriage and 5 percent of married women who were childless.

Women who had children before marriage are less likely to get married in the first place, and when they do, they are less likely to stay married and they are less likely to marry a man with good economic prospects, Lichter said.

And marriage can actually be a disadvantage for unwed mothers if they later divorce, the researchers found. These women had higher rates of poverty than did women who were unmarried.

Lichter said his study suggests “if marriage is a public policy goal, then government and other groups must first attend to the business of reducing unwed childbearing.”

Lichter conducted the study with J. Brian Brown, a graduate student at Ohio State, and Deborah Roempke Graefe of Pennsylvania State University. The study appeared in the journal Social Problems.