UN Commission on Women Ignored Benefits of Marriage

By | March 24, 2023

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 24 (C-Fam) At UN negotiations, including the recently-concluded Commission on the Status of Women, efforts to include pro-marriage and pro-family language in resolutions face increased opposition. Activists claiming to be feminists argue that the family is a structure that perpetuates harm to women and girls.  Yet a new study is adding to the wealth of evidence that marriage is in fact beneficial to women’s health and wellbeing.

Researchers followed almost 12,000 female American nurses, all originally unmarried, for nearly 25 years.  The analysis, published in Global Epidemiology, found that married women had lower risk of cardiovascular disease, which is the leading cause of death for women in the U.S.  The married women were also happier, more optimistic, and less likely to suffer from depression and loneliness than those who did not marry.

While divorce was associated with worse outcomes than remaining married, the women who got married—including those who subsequently divorced—had a 35% lower risk of death during the time frame of the study than those who never married at all.

The authors of the study, who published an essay in the Wall Street Journal summarizing their findings, noted that while their analysis focused exclusively on women, there is a substantial body of evidence indicating that marriage has even more robust benefits for men’s health, as well as being associated with longer lifespans.

Around the world, marriage is declining and unmarried cohabitation and extramarital childbearing have become more common.  While regional and country-level differences exist, the overall trend is toward fewer, and later, marriages.

Critics of marriage and family as institutions, at the UN and elsewhere, are right to point out that abuse and harm can take place within the family, and has devastating effects on its victims.  However, their proposed solutions, which include redefining “the family” to entail virtually any household structure or collection of persons or the dismantling of all traditional structures deemed to be “patriarchal,” ignore a growing body of social science data.

Core UN documents including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights refer to the family as the “natural and fundamental group unit of society”—language that has now become highly controversial in negotiated resolutions, where progressive governments insist that the family exists in various, diverse, forms.

Family structures do matter, especially for the children who are raised in them, as professor Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas has shown in his groundbreaking large-sample-size studies.  Children fare best when they are raised by their biological, married, parents.

The new study on marriage, authored by Harvard scientist Ying Chen and colleagues, shows that the benefits of marriage do not come at the expense of women, but are shared by them as well.

The authors acknowledge that their study population of nurses is relatively financially stable and well educated, which imposes some limitations on its interpretation.  Nevertheless, it is noteworthy to see that women living in a wealthy country who are enjoying many of the benefits of “empowerment” as framed by UN targets, such as education and employment, can see their health and wellbeing improved further by getting—and staying—married.

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