I recently posted “It’s the economy”, a rather lengthy article showing the association between Dutch unemployment and the rising non-marital birthrate in the Netherlands. I also showed the non-marital birthrates in numerous European countries rose as quickly and even more quickly than those in the Netherlands. This indicates the rate of change in the Netherlands does not stand out from changes in Europe as a whole.
In a response, Dr. Stanley Kurtz fixated on my discussion of Bulgaria. Previously, he claimed Bulgaria doesn’t count because Bulgarians have the lowest access to birth control in the Europe. I showed they have the highest rate of birth control use in the world. Kurtz now claims the fact Bulgarians use birth control at the highest rate in the world is irrelevant. Why? Because, poor teen Gypsy girls (those of the Roma minority) do not have access to contraception. Their behavior has caused a nationwide explosion in the Bulgarian nonmarital birth rate. In contrast, he says, the rise in the Netherlands is due to women choosing cohabitation over marriage (as a result of legalized same sex marriage.)
Can’t you just hear Cher singing “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” in the background?
I do not wish to give the impression that my argument hinges on Bulgaria; it does not. Even without considering Bulgaria, there are plenty of European countries whose non-marital birth rate rose as rapidly, or much more rapidly, than in the Netherlands. The rise in all those countries can be explained by factors other than legalized same sex marriage. In fact, Dr. Kurtz suggested economic distress contributed to the rise in many of these other countries, including Bulgaria. Yet, he ignores economic distress in the Netherlands. Logically, economic distress would be expected to have similar effects in any two countries. If it explains rising nonmarital births in European countries, including Bulgaria, then the greater severity of distress in Bulgaria explains why the Bulgarian out of wedlock birth rate rose more quickly than in other European countries, including the Netherlands. My argument is thus entirely consistent.
Still, it’s kind of fun to address the notions, and evidence, in Dr. Kurtz’s response.
Dr. Kurtz provided two hyperlink references to support his teen Gypsy girl theory. One is an anectdote posted on a geocities web page describing the wretched conditions of poor married and unmarried mothers in Bulgaria. The article provides absolutely no statistics explaining why the nonmarital birthrate has exploded.
Dr. Kurtz also refers to a report by Jaklina Tzvetkova Anguelova written in 2000. That report mentions that some of its contents are based on preliminary analysis of available data; some information is based on contents of earlier reports. The specific items Dr. Kurtz picks out are not based on Anguelova’s analysis or data, but are speculations cited from reports written well before Anguelova performed her analysis.
More recently, Anguelova wrote a report containing conclusions based on the final analysis of data collected by the Bulgarian government. It is available here: Anguelova 2001.
On page 11 you will find that Anguelova, after examining the data and reviewing the literature, attributes the growing non-marital birthrate to “consensus marriage”, i.e. cohabitation. In a 2004 study, The South Eastern European Legal Initiative (SEELINE) also attributes the rise in non-marital births to rising Bulgarian cohabitation. How much cohabitation do we find in Bulgaria relative to the Netherlands? Batalova and Cohen reported that a larger number of adults cohabit in Bulgaria than in the Netherlands. Of adults surveyed in 1994, 18.1% of Bulgarians reported they had cohabited; in contrast, 15.1% of Dutch respondents reported they had cohabited. Yet, despite the greater prevalence of cohabitation in Bulgaria, Dr. Kurtz attributes the rising Dutch non marital birth rates to cohabitation, yet insists it has a negligible effect in Bulgaria!
Reading further in Anguelova, you will find she laments that no special statistics are available to describe the demographics of unmarried mothers. So the characteristics of unmarried mothers cannot be described. The fact that Anguelova specifically states she cannot describe the characteristics of unmarried mothers because no data are available suggest the older speculations taken from dated reports by others were not based on reliable data. (Many others have reported strong prejudice against the tiny Roma population, noting that Bulgarians often unfairly blamed the tiny Roma population for nationwide problems. Published speculations have sometimes been based on nothing more than prejudice.)
In any case, members of the Roma minority account for 2.6% of the Bulgarian population. Can anyone really believe the nationwide explosion in the nonmarital birth rate is dominated by their behavior? Could the 18.1% of adults who had cohabited all be members of the tiny Roma minority? Could nonmarital birthrates possibly rise to 42.9% because of the behavior of 2.6% of the population?
As in “Dutch Debate,” Dr. Kurtz suggests that women in Bulgaria cannot avoid giving birth. He does this by substituting the term “contraception” for “birth control” and then providing some statistics on contraception to explain lack of birth control. As I showed in “It’s the economy”, he used this same verbal trick in “Dutch Debate”. The communist government did indeed limit contraception. In Bulgaria, abortion has always been, and unfortunately still is, a widely used method of birth control. (The abortion rate is falling as contraception becomes available.) Abortion is available to all Bulgarian women, married, unmarried, young, old and even members of the tiny Roma population. (Interestingly, the anecdote Dr. Kurtz cited describes conditions in a major hospital that acts as a combined maternity ware and abortion facility; this highlights abortion’s widespread availability in Bulgaria.)
Even when trying to side step the issue of birth control by substituting contraception statistics, Dr. Kurtz makes unsupported claims. He now claims that unmarried women have more limited access to contraception than married women. Yet, Klijzing, who Kurtz cited in “Dutch Debate”, indicated that married women in Bulgaria have much greater “unmet contraceptive needs” than unmarried women! (Klijzing noted that all Bulgarian women have access to birth control — in the form of abortion. Citing Klijzing to suggest Bulgarian women have limited access to birth control is another example of Dr. Kurtz substituting the term “contraception” for “birth control” in attempt to create the illusion that his thesis is supported by data. )
I think I have disproven Dr. Kurtz’s claims that Bulgaria is fundamentally different from the Netherlands because a) Bulgaria is filled with teen Gypsy girls and b) Bulgarians do not cohabit. Having done so, I need to emphasize that Bulgaria is not central to my argument. To draw away attention from other points, Dr. Kurtz tries to make it seem my argument hinges on Bulgaria. Next, Dr. Kurtz tries to say Bulgaria doesn’t count, because eliminating Bulgaria is necessary to support his thesis. In his attempt to find a reason to eliminate Bulgaria, Dr. Kurtz must repeatedly mislead readers by substituting statistics for contraception to describe access to birth control, which includes access to abortion. He further “buttresses” his argument by claiming the explosive rise in the Bulgarian nonmarital birth rate– to 42.9% –is due to the behavior of the tiny Roman minority, which makes up 2.6% of the Bulgarian population. To blame the problem on the Roma population he must ignore revised information in more recent reports by the very expert he cited.
Dr. Kurtz’s verbal, logical and statistical sleight of hand, accomplished by substituting terminology and omitting numbers may trick some. That he must rely on these sorts of tricks testifies to the weakness of his argument..
Once again very nice, Lucia. But there must have been some talk about gay marriage even in Bulgaria. As Kurtz has said, it is not gay marriage which leads to an increase in cohabitation, but advocacy of gay marriage that leads to it. Do we know if there are any gay rights groups in Bulgaria that could explain the sudden rapid rise in cohabitation there?
Well, of course, there has also been talk of same sex marriage in Spain, where the out of wedlock birthrate has not exploded!
I await hearing certain opponents of same sex marriage suggest that there is a correlation between gay rights flag flying at Catholic parishes and non-marital birthrate in those same Catholic parishes in Spain.
I believe it is traditional to claim this “flag flying”- “out of wedlock births” association when explaining away non-explosive growth of out of wedlock births in countries with gay rights campaigns. (Those who don’t get t his, visit Gabriel’s site, and read comment s under “Scandinavian scare”.
Aha. I’ve discovered there is a group advocating for gay rights in Bulgaria, GEMENI. I bet they were founded sometime near when cohabitation rates started to rise.
I’ll bet you that GEMENI was founded by and is funded by teenage Roma (Gypsy) girls.
Yes, sure enough GEMINI was founded in 1992. The following year, 1993, saw a jump in the percent of non-marital births from 18.5 to 22.1 (3.6 percentage points) [I’m using the chart on page 11 of Anguelova]. GEMINI then suspended activity upon the death of one of the founders until it was revived in 1998. And the following year also saw a huge jump in the percent of non-mariatal births from 31.5 to 35.1 (again 3.6 points). These are the two largest jumps on the chart. I think we have prety strong evidence here that it was the gay rights movement that caused an increase in cohabitation in Bulgaria despite what Kurtz once said about economic factors.
(I notice he seems to have completely avoided responding to your data on the Dutch economy.)
I must point out that Katz believes that unsuccessful campaigns must be included with “non-campaigns”. That is one of the reasons he does not believe my “proof” that the campaign for same sex marriage, based on conservative arguments, lead to the sudden decline in the out-of-wed lock birthrate in the US. In fact, same sex marraige in one state and registrations in another is not enough.
I believe, since this vigorous GEMINI movement has not yet reached the all powerful status capable of enacting same sex marriage, we must still consider Bulgaria to fall in the “no same sex marriage” camp. (Or so I am told.)
I am sure we all await further developments with baited breath.
>>I notice he seems to have completely avoided responding to your data on the Dutch economy.
That was one of the reasons I mentioned the title of my article in my response…..
Well, let’s be honest: for him, the numbers are window dressing. SSM is immoral and wrong, out-of-wedlock birth is immoral and wrong. When you start letting one immoral and wrong thing in, the others are sure to follow in a cascade sweeping us all straight to Hell. Therefore, the numbers MUST back up the SSM/out-of-wedlock birth link–how could they not?
True Mythago. And don’t you have to suspect that editorial writers don’t really expect someone who likes number crunching to suddenly appear?
Nope. And it’s baffling, you know, as though you offered a mathematical proof that gravity makes things fall up.
Hmmm…. I have been known to show a mathematical proof that the surface of a non-accelerating body of water is horizontal in still air. But, that *assumes* gravity points down….
We’ve got a couple of years of data from Vermont. Has anyone crunched the numbers there yet?
I think you can see Gypiese in Roem are the ladies on Drugs and alcohism they uselly have a hood on their head which is Brown a cotton and also have a cotton Jaket.
decision is the spark that ignites action,untill a decision is made nothing happens
In the thread on Lucia’s previous post, I noted the following:
http://amptoons.poliblog.com/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=974
As for the women-girls of the Gypsy variety, I think you may want to do some homework on Bulgaria and Eastern Europe. Particularly the share of population, age composition, and birth rates, and family formation customs.
A minority group can make a very significant contribution to non-marital births. Look at how the census bureaus in the Netherlands and in our own country examine stats on non-marital births. [I personally don’t buy the concept of race itself, but I recognize the legitimate reasons to monitor demographics of ethnic minorities.] It is not about “blame”, as you put it. Gypsie representatives acknowledge the same facts that Kurtz very briefly mentioned.
Your innuendos implied bigotry where there was none. You were mistaken, again.
—
In that other thread Lucia has repeated the allegation that the source cited in the Anguelova paper was prejudiced.
Supposedly, by Lucia’s speculative word alone, the source is tainted and dismissable.
And it looks like poisoning the well.
Lucia, on what factual basis do you allege that the source cited by Anguelova was prejudiced?
I did not allege any source is prejudiced. Sources themselves cannot be prejudiced– they are documents. I have also not suggested any authors are bigoted.
I believe I stated, in comments, that societal prejudice can cause speculative explanations to be introduced into sources, particularly derivative sources. This is particularly true when the derivative source (Anguelova ) is paraphrasing an explanation for current observations from an older document (Belcheva). (Belcheva is in Bulgarian, and I have not read it.)
Because of the source Kurtz cited, Anguelova, is derivative, and neither Kurtz nor Anguelova provide data to the reader which might be used to evaluate the validity of Kurtz’s argument, I believe a reader should be sceptical of using Anguelova’s paraphrase of Belchava’s earlier work to explain what happened during the decade ending in the 2002. It is for this lack of data, and not my observation that Gypsies are disparaged in Bulgaria, that one might doubt the Kurtz’s speculation.
I believe I have said this, but if I was unclear, I hope this clarifies.
That said, I believe it is an unfortunate fact that people do often end up attributing problems to disparaged minority groups. This can happen, despite even when individual authors harbor no ill-will toward any disparaged minority group. Each author simply quotes or paraphrases and explanation of something they find in a previously published document by someone who the author believes (often correctly) harbors no ill will toward the disparaged group. Yet, if we examine the underlying documents, we find no data to support the paraphrase explanation or quote. When a belief is widely repeated in this way, the belief becomes trusted as reliable and data based by many.
In context of the current discussion, Gypsies are a disparaged group in Bulgaria. No data are provided — at least by Kurtz. In my opinion, this factor does need to be considered when assessing the plausibility of a third hand claim made without providing data. I do not believe pointing this out impugns anyone’s motives or work. Others may, of course, have a different opinion.
As to Chairm’s comment that I am repeatedly explaining my view on possible bias, it is true that I am providing this response repeatedly. This is because I have responding each time the Chairm expressed his concerns.
Lucia’s repetitions are evident in posts and earliest comments as well as recent comments. It seems to me that she has now mischaracterized even her own words.
This evasion of responsibility for what was actually written can be put aside for the now.
—
No one here has denied the hardships experienced by Gypsies. Those of us who have felt the backhand of racial prejudice in our society have a small taste of the dish served to generations of Gypsie people for 800 years or more. For example:
GENOCIDE OF EUROPEAN ROMA (GYPSIES), 1939-1945
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/index.php?ModuleId=10006054&Type=normal+article
—
The Anguelova papers included Gypsie-related material that has been confirmed in surveys, studies, and analyses from credible and reputable sources.
The first paper was not a rough draft. The second paper did not correct the first paper. Lucia mischaracterized the relationship between the two background papers.
1. Each paper is a review of Bulgarian material for separate Regional Reports on the various transitional countries. Each paper feeds a Regional Report and reflects the new theme.
See the complete set
http://www.unicef-icdc.org/cgi-bin/unicef/Lunga.sql?ProductID=315
2. Contrary to Lucia’s speculations, the Belcheva analysis was not repudiated. Rather than “remove” text, the 2001 paper borrowed some but not all text from the 2000 paper for the sake of continuity. The source of the text that Lucia dismissed as suspect actually reappeared both in the text and reference section of the 2001 paper.
It is unreasonable to presume that the 2000 paper had to be entirely republished in 2001; the 2001 paper had a different focus, it was twice the length of the 2000 paper anyway as it included an additional six sources of data and analysis. Repetition was not required.
3. Both background papers continue to stand with the Innocenti series which is widely considered to be the most authoritative on the subject matter.
4. The substance of the text that Lucia suspects was racially prejudiced has been confirmed by Romani representatives as well as a variety of credible and reputable surveys, studies, and analysists. (More to follow).
Lucia has not substantiated her speculation that text had been removed from the 2001 paper due to anti-Gypsie prejudice in the analysis. She got it wrong.
By the same standards that Lucia has just outlined, readers might question the inclination to attempt to discredit material she has not read (language is not a barrier given the other sources), material on a subject of which she has slight knowledge (plenty of background info available), and material that does not fit her predetermined conlcusions. It is not credible to scoff that Kurtz had summarized info that readers probably would rather not wade through on their own. On matters of fact, Kurtz has been right about Bulgaria and Lucia has been mistaken.
Skepticism is healthy, of course. But it is not a one-way street. The Bulgarian example is useful in that it illuminates the broader discussion — both in substance and in form.
For instance, Lucia has mischaracterized Kurtz, again, on the Gypsies. Kurtz has not “blamed” the Gypsies, as Lucia has claimed. The related analysis is not Kurtz’s “theory”, as Lucia has claimed. And Kurtz has not suggested that 100% of the nonmarital birth trend in Bulgaria is attributable to Gypsie teenagers.
More to follow.
Chairm: You are rebutting things I did not say.
Re Anguelova, Lucia did say the following and was mistaken:
>>>Lucia: “Dr. Kurtz provided two hyperlink references to support his teen Gypsy girl theory.”
It was not his theory.
>>>Lucia: “One is an anectdote posted on a geocities web page describing the wretched conditions of poor married and unmarried mothers in Bulgaria. The article provides absolutely no statistics explaining why the nonmarital birthrate has exploded.”
That was a news article. It included statistics that provide background.
>>>Lucia: “That report mentions that some of its contents are based on preliminary analysis of available data; some information is based on contents of earlier reports. The specific items Dr. Kurtz picks out are not based on Anguelova’s analysis or data, but are speculations cited from reports written well before Anguelova performed her analysis.”
It is contradictory for Lucia to claim that on one hand the data was preliminary and on the other hand that the analsyis of that data was somehow out-of-date.
There was preliminary data from recent surveys and these were confirmed even in the second Anguelova paper. Both papers were a reviews of available material so of course Anguelova cited the work of others. The one under contention by Lucia was published just four years prior to Anguelova’s background paper, hardly out-dated as Lucia implied. The cited data, and the cited analysis, were not speculations.
Which Lucia would have learned had she dug just a little past Nationmaster. (That is an impressive website but not always reliable and certainly not a primary source.)
>>>Lucia: “More recently, Anguelova wrote a report containing conclusions based on the final analysis of data collected by the Bulgarian government.”
“Final analysis” would imply that Belcheva’s analysis was incomplete. Lucia has not shown this to be the case. She cannot. The fact is that Belcheva used data that still stands. And her analysis has been confirmed.
Of course, in the background paper for a new Regional Report, Anguelova incuded new data and analyses newly available. Who could have expected that doing so might cause anyone to believe that text that appeared in a different background paper of the previous year was now discredited as prejudiced?
This is not like reading tea leaves or chicken entrails.
It is quite absurd for Lucia to suggest that Anguelova needed to republish the entire text of her 2000 paper — within the new 2001 paper. There was some overlap but there was no need for a full redo.
>>>Lucia: “(Many others have reported strong prejudice against the tiny Roma population, noting that Bulgarians often unfairly blamed the tiny Roma population for nationwide problems. Published speculations have sometimes been based on nothing more than prejudice.)”
This served no purpose other than to attempt to discredit a source that Lucia knew next to nothing about.
If the point that Lucia now makes it that she was ignorant of the background material, then, that’s no crime, but it was also no cause to wrecklessly cast aspersions.
>>>Lucia: “Kurtz suggests that women in Bulgaria cannot avoid giving birth. He does this by substituting the term “contraception” for “birth control” and then providing some statistics on contraception to explain lack of birth control.”
Here Lucia did the word swapping.
And since Kurtz clearly described cost and availablility he was not referring to traditional methods of contraception such as withdrawal and rhythm; and he did not refer to avoidance of giving birth, as Lucia wrongly says, but the emergence of a trend in which births occured, not abortions. The extramarital increase was in absolute numbers, birth rates, as well as share.
>>>Lucia: ” Abortion is available to all Bulgarian women…”
Yes, but not in equal measure.
Women under the age of 35 must pay a fee that is often beyond the resources of the poor and unemployed. Also, many women in rural areas (45% of Gypsie women live in villages and small towns as do the vast majority of Turkish women) have additional costs associated with travelling to clinics. Even urban women in ghettoes have limited access to what Lucia mistakenly presumed to be easy access to abortion and other contraceptives. For example, the high infant mortality rate is associated with home births; maternal mortality is associated with botched abortions outside of the confines of medical clinics. Also, Gypsie women have good reason to fear abortionists who have been known to sterilize Gypsie women without their consent. Among Gypsies there is a general suspicion of medical services, not all of it irrational. Most doctors no doubt do their best to serve their patients regardless of ethnicity, but there have been official communist programs that encouraged sterilization both under duress and with lump sum payments. And documented cases of such incidents in recent years.
Lucia’s words described some sort of abortion utopia where no such thing actually exists in Bulgaria. Besides, these are births — marital or nonmarital — not abortions of children.
>>>Lucia: “Even when trying to side step the issue of birth control by substituting contraception statistics…”
Kurtz refered to contraceptives. Lucia side-stepped births to unmarried women by emphasizing “the birth control rate” (i.e. abortions) of married women.
>>>Lucia: “I did not allege any source is prejudiced. Sources themselves cannot be prejudiced– they are documents. I have also not suggested any authors are bigoted.”
And documents write themselves.
Lucia emphasized prejudice when she attempted to dismiss a credible source cited by Anguelova. She did not refer to documents but explictly said “Bulgarians often unfairly blamed the tiny Roma population”; and since then she has repeatedly said that Kurtz blamed the Gypsies.
What does “blame” mean in this context? Blame the document?
>>>Lucia: “It is for this lack of data, and not my observation that Gypsies are disparaged in Bulgaria, that one might doubt the Kurtz’s speculation.”
That may be a good enough reason to learn more rather than to allege prejudice.
Kurtz did not speculate; he referred to the confirmed findings of others in surveys, case studies, and so forth. These have included Roma professionals and independant represenatives. There are gaps in the data, but no lack of data to support what Kurtz has said about the Bulgarian example.
>>>Lucia: “despite the greater prevalence of cohabitation in Bulgaria, Dr. Kurtz attributes the rising Dutch non marital birth rates to cohabitation, yet insists it has a negligible effect in Bulgaria!”
That’s a misrepresentation of both the cited source and of Kurtz. Cohabitation is not more prevalent in Bulgaria — not in the sense of cohabitation as it is known in the Nordic countries or in the USA.
>>>Lucia: “…Anguelova … laments that no special statistics are available to describe the demographics of unmarried mothers. So the characteristics of unmarried mothers cannot be described. The fact that Anguelova specifically states she cannot describe the characteristics of unmarried mothers because no data are available suggest the older speculations taken from dated reports by others were not based on reliable data.”
Laments, Lucia? Such a dramatic misrepresentation.
The “older speculations” were not speculations, but credible analyses. And these were published just a few years prior to Anguelova’s review of available material. Lucia would have readers believe that the cited source was out-of-date and had been contradicted — even repudiated — by more current information. Not so.
In addition, contrary to Lucia’s claim, Anguelova said it was difficult, not impossible, to describe the circumstances of unwed mothers. Then she went on to describe their health, difficulties with establishing paternity, unemployment, poverty, and so forth. She also referred to single mothers in terms of the relinquishment of children to state care. Considerable data was, and is, available, the analysis was, and is, possible, but there are gaps as there are in most post-communist societies. Lucia grossly overstated the point made by Anguelova.
And contrary to Lucia’s misrepresentation of Anguelova’s remarks about cohabitation, Anguelova did not attribute all, or even most, of the nonmarital births to cohabitating couples. For example, she referred to lone mothers and paternity issues. She described mothers in hardship passing their children to state care. And so forth. (Not all such mothers were single, and many were married by custom rather than state sanction and thus not officially married.)
>>>Lucia: “In any case, members of the Roma minority account for 2.6% of the Bulgarian population. Can anyone really believe the nationwide explosion in the nonmarital birth rate is dominated by their behavior? Could the 18.1% of adults who had cohabited all be members of the tiny Roma minority? Could nonmarital birthrates possibly rise to 42.9% because of the behavior of 2.6% of the population?”
Ironically, here Lucia has (unknowingly) used an old statistics from the 1992 census.
The official count of Roma (not all Gypsies are Roma or identify as Roma) increased by 50 thousand by 2001 — 4.7% of the Bulgarian population while the general population declined by 600 thousand.
Leading sociologists have independantly examined the proportion and number of Gypsies in Bulgarian society (and in other countries in the region and throughout Europe) and have reached a consensus that this minority comprises about 10% of the national population — about 750,000. In the last ten years similar results have been achieved in other countries with Gypsie populations.
Earlier I linked to the Holocaust Museum. There are Gypsie grandparents alive today in Bulgaria who remember the census takers whose inquiries were prelude to the death camps. Gypsies have often identified as a members of another minority or with the majority — because of the stigma attached to being Gypsies. This is a heterogenous minority — many subgroups, dialects, and religious differences. But social surveys reveal that up to half of Gypsies do not make it into official enumerations. Of course, some of the minority are more integrated into the broader society and sincerely identify there rather than with Gypsie communities.
The difference between official and actual numbers is even more striking in Hungary and Slovakia. This aspect of the Bulgarian example extends across Europe. It applies to other minorities and demonstrates the need to monitor extramarital trends with a careful eye to ethnicity.
>>>Lucia: “Kurtz makes unsupported claims. He now claims that unmarried women have more limited access to contraception than married women. Yet, Klijzing, who Kurtz cited in “Dutch Debate”, indicated that married women in Bulgaria have much greater “unmet contraceptive needs” than unmarried women!”
Each of Kurtz’s remarks are supported by the facts.
Lucia misrepresented Klijzing who explained that unmarried women in these surveys are generally presumed to be less sexually active and, thus, reported less of a felt need for contraceptives. In societies like Bulgaria, for example, most unmarried females are younger than the legal age of marriage. In the past decade or so this has begun to change, and surveys now measure contraceptive use among married, and unmarried, women.
There are two sides to unmet need — the part in which there is a perceived need and the part in which there is access (high, low or sometimes next to nonexistent) to contraceptives. And Klijzing expressly distinguished between contraceptives, traditional contraception methods, and abortion. He did not conflate them as did Lucia. Kurtz was correct on this.
Lucia: “I think I have disproven Dr. Kurtz’s claims that Bulgaria is fundamentally different from the Netherlands because a) Bulgaria is filled with teen Gypsy girls and b) Bulgarians do not cohabit.”
Far from it.
Bulgaria is fundamentally different from The Netherlands on a variety of levels. For one thing, teen mothers (marital or not) are uncommon in Holland where the birth rate for women aged 15-19 is just 5.5 births per thousand women of that age group. In Bulgaria even young girls aged 14 have a birth rate of 5.5; by 15 the rate is 15; by 16 it is 28; and by 17 the birth rate is 40 births per thousand women of that age. The Gypsie birth rates are higher again.
To any objective observer this constitutes a fundamental difference that strongly points to other significant differences.
As for “Bulglarians do not cohabitat”, Kurtz did not say that. Lucia again misrepresented his remarks.
He said that there is a Scandinavian-style of cohabitation that does not explain the nonmarital trends in the Bulgarian example. Much is up in the air in Bulgaria because so of the degree and direction of change — social, political, econoic, and much more — that has unsettled family patterns. But there are indications that Bulgarians have not abandoned marriage and marital childbearing to the extent that has already occured in the Nordic countries and The Netherlands.
If Lucia has “proven” what she says she has proven, then she has proven herself mistaken. Again.
The Gypsie minority is distinctly younger in age-structure than the wider society. While their children (under 15) make-up about 40% of the Gypsie population, children comprise about 12% of the general population. This translates into a Gypsie share of the child population that is about 20-25%. Other indicators reveal a birth rate that distinguishes this minority from the ethnic Bulgarian majority.
In addition, multiple surveys have shown that most Gypsies in Bulgaria marry before the legal age of 18 years. About 40% by age 16 and 32% more between 17 and 18 years; another 22% marry between 19 and 22. Early marriage — especially underaged marriage — is almost universal. Most marriages are unofficial and unregistered with the civic authorities. Most births of such unions are extramarital officially.
Some describe these couplings as “consensual unions” but the young age of the participants might place that in doubt. Some use the term “informal marriages” but that doesn’t necessarily match the communal recognition and the traditions attached to these unions. Neither do these arrangements match the Scandinavian-style cohabitation of middle-class couples who chose to bear children outside of marriage in their late twenties and early thirties. The Gypsie Law marriages, also known as custom marriages, are not sanctioned by the state but neither are they mere oral agreements between consenting adults. The typical newlywedded couple moves into the home of the groom’s parents.
What’s more, Gypsie families are typically large. Early marriage by tradition strongly discourages, even prohibits, the use of contraceptives. Young brides quickly become young mothers and have multiple children in short intervals. Most have had as many children as they want before they reach the age of 25 years. That is very unlike cohabitating Scandinavian women. The mean age of Gypsie mothers at first birth is under 18; the mean age for Bulgarian women in general is about 23.4 years. Multiple social surveys show that most Gypsie couples have two or more children (15% have three or more) while 60% of ethnic Bulgarians are childless and about 25% have one child.
The high birth rate of the Gypsie minority is tragically offset by very high rates of infant and maternal mortality. As in many poor parts of the world, many parents chose to have more children in the belief that some will survive by sheer volume. There are other factors, of course, and the situation is not one-size-fits-all, but the nonmarital trends among this segment of the Bulgarian society is markedly different from that in the general population.
If all the unregistered Gypsie unions were counted as marriages, and all the resulting births counted as marital rather than nonmarital, then, the nonmarital trends in births and “cohabitation” would both be greatly diminished.
This Bulgarian example has application in other parts of Europe — most significantly in post-communist countries where the collapse of the totalitarian regimes removed state-imposed cajoling and incentives for the Gypsie population to register marriages with the civic authorities. Among some Muslim communities in the region, such as in neighbouring Macedonia, there is an old custom of postponement of registration until the arrival of the first birth — or after a few years of satisfactory union. This may also contribute to the two nonmarital trends and have only a superficial resemblance to the Scandianvian style of cohabitation in which increasingly second order births do not prompt the couples to marry.
Certainly there is a Bulgarian trend toward cohabitation, as pre-marriage not as a substitution, among a small segment of society. And with the costs involved in divorce, there are couples who are ineligible for marriage due to prior marriages undissolved. And as Bulgarians travel in the West and return home, they bring with them new ideas; the new sense of freedom may well encourage alternative family formations. But Buglaria is rather conservative on social issues and liberal attitudes have not translated directly into widespread practice.
Among several social surveys, there are indications that about 8-10% of young couples live together outside of marriage. But they generally marry upon the arrival of a child or in planning for children. Or they don’t last that long. Most young adults reside in their parental homes until they marry or if they take up residence at university campuses. Economics is a major factor as affordable housing is scarce. Unemployment and poverty hits the young segment of the population the hardest.
And on that point is worth emphasizing that a good part of the decline in the general birth rate is attributable to the postponement of marriages. Unmarried individuals are not rushing to cohabitate instead of marriage. Many chose not to bear children; and that means delaying marriage, or union, for the most part. Slowly increasing access to contraceptives and the old reliance on abortion and such certainly do play a part, but so do long-established customs and sexual mores.
>>>Lucia: “[Kurtz] further “buttresses” his argument by claiming the explosive rise in the Bulgarian nonmarital birth rate– to 42.9% –is due to the behavior of the tiny Roman minority, which makes up 2.6% of the Bulgarian population. To blame the problem on the Roma population he must ignore revised information in more recent reports by the very expert he cited.”
Again, more misrepresentation. In the haste to dismiss the Bulgarian example, Lucia misused an out-of-date statistic and missed the widely-acknowledged undercount of the Gypsie minority.
Kurtz did not “blame” this minority. He did not ignore recent reports. Lucia misrepresented the very reports that Kurtz had cited, and which support precisely what Kurtz had said about Bulgaria.
Low use of contraceptives among impoverished, under-educated, and young women is not peculair to the Gypsies nor to Bulgaria for that matter. It is, as Kurtz said, especially relevant to Gypsie teenagers.
>>>Lucia: “And don’t you have to suspect that editorial writers don’t really expect someone who likes number crunching to suddenly appear?”
Crunching numbers is an important, but not the most important, aspect of demographic and sociological analysis. In Lucia’s crunching she has also misrepresented what Kurtz had to say about the pace of change in The Netherlands.
>>>Lucia: “I did not allege any source is prejudiced. Sources themselves cannot be prejudiced– they are documents. I have also not suggested any authors are bigoted.”
And documents write themselves.
Lucia emphasized prejudice when she attempted to dismiss a credible source cited by Anguelova. She did not refer to documents but explictly said “Bulgarians often unfairly blamed the tiny Roma population”; and subsequently she has said that Kurtz blamed the Gypsies.
What does “blame” mean in this context? Blame the document?
>>>Lucia: “It is for this lack of data, and not my observation that Gypsies are disparaged in Bulgaria, that one might doubt the Kurtz’s speculation.”
Kurtz did not speculate; he referred to the confirmed findings of others in surveys, case studies, and so forth. These have included Roma professionals and independant represenatives. There are gaps in the available data, but no lack of data and credible analysis to support what Kurtz has said about the Bulgarian example.
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Well, that’s more than I expected to write in my comments this morning. I’ll bring some more citations — some as background and some as sources of relevant statistics.
I do believe that taking the Bulgarian example to some depth will benefit further discussion of the Nordic countries which is where we began, of course.
Early Marriage
“Cultural Identities of Roma, Gypsies, Travellers.” Roma Centre for Public Policies. Ms. Delia-Madalina Grigore (2004).
>>”[E]arly marriage actually tries to shield the young from the difficulties and frequent trauma of seeking and changing partners and to free them from the enormous worry of looking for the proper match in life. … In the traditional society, the sexual fact is protected and controlled, blessed by the family in a complicated customary system of rituals, meant to purify and support the couple.”
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“When her feet touch the ground.” Transitional Law & Policy. Timmerman (2004).
>>”Roma marriage is neither socially integrated nor culturally demoralized. The process of juvenile arranged marriage is culturally self-contained and affects only Roma youth. … [W]hile it is undeniably true that Roma youth are being denied the right to choose whom and when to marry in some instances, the Roma community itself openly embraces juvenile arranged marriage as a protectionist strategy and means of cultural, economic, and societal preservation and autonomy.”
>>”The abaiv — or wedding — has little legal or religious significance to the Roma community aside from sheer symbolic value. Participation in a formal civil ceremony is often nothing more than a method of conforming to and appeasing local host country laws and customs…. Traditionally, the civil or religious ceremony, or bijav, would not take place until the couple had been together for a few years or had produced a child. … [R]omani are less likely to officially register marriages in civil records.”
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“Roma in an Expanding Europe.” World Bank Group (2003).
>>”[Chief among the] reasons for the higher-than-average birth-rate of the Romani population of Macedonia … is the tendency of Roms to marry young, with many Romani girls entering marriage months after the onset of menstruation. Moreover, by Romani tradition a woman who fails to give birth within a year after her wedding is returned to her parents. As a result, reproduction tends to begin earlier among Roms than among non-Roms in Macedonia. … [The] total number of sons receives greater emphasis than does the total number of children.
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I also recall reading an exchange on the web this past summer — several Romani activists held a very informed discussion on the human rights issues, as well as cultural issues, at play among East European Gypsie communities. If I can find it again, I’ll post it to provide some balance both pro-early marriage and contra-early marriage.
Cohabitation and childbearing.
“Children in Bulgaria.” Innocenti Research Centre. Gantcheva (2001).
>>”[A] predominant share of children born out of marriage belong to the lowest income groups. And contrary to many established economies, where cohabiting is widespread, in Bulgaria out-of-marriage birth generally means living in an incomplete family with a higher risk of the child being placed in a public institution.”
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“Women in Transition.” Innocenti Research Institute (1999).
>>”[In] all transition countries, only a small share of women were bearing children during cohabitation. This suggests that, as in Western Europe, cohabitation often serves as a sort of “trial marriage”.
>>”However, it appears that births to cohabiting mothers are relatively uncommon and so do not account for the rising ratios of non-marital births across the region (Figure 3.7). In Slovenia [for example], where cohabitation rates grew rapidly, 13 percent of all births in 1996 were to unmarried couples living together. This compares with the 32 percent share accounted for by all out-of-wedlock births in that year, suggesting that cohabitation explains barely more than one-third of all non-marital births. However, in most cases of extra-marital birth in Slovenia, fathers do register themselves as a parent of the child even if they do not live with the mother of the child.”
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“On the Margins: Roma and Public Services in Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia.” Soros Foundation. Zoon (2001).
>>”Many Roma prefer traditional marriages [i.e. unregistered and unofficial] to civil ones because they think that their traditional weddings are as valid if not more valid than civil ones. Civil marriages involve money and papers they often cannot obtain, and many of them marry before 16 [in Romania and 18 in Bulgaria] which is the legal civil marriage age.
>>”The civil marriage requirement has a disparate impact on the Roma because many Romani couples live in traditional unions, rather than civil unions, and a higher percentage of Roma, at a younger age, have this type of relationship than do Macedonians.”
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“Roma in the Transition.” The World Bank (2000).
>>”A survey of Roma communities conducted in Bulgaria in 1994 found that 40 percent of Roma marry before age 16 and 80 percent before age 18. These findings were confirmed in more recent fieldwork (Tomova, 1998; Tomova, 2000). Similar results were found in the Romania case studies where informal, nonregistered, marriages were found to be prevalent, since many couples marry below the legal marrige age.”
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“Women in Transition.” Innocenti Research Institute (1999).
>>”In countries where data are available, there are signs that more and more children are not living in dual-parent households, but in single-parent households or extended family households.”
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There are more sources. These quotes are from hardcopies so please excuse any typos. There are also social surveys that have begun to quantify the lone-parent trend as more dominant than cohabitation among the majority ethnic Bulgarians. Some surveys are of lesser quality due to the sampling methods but none that I’ve seen point to a Scandinavian-style extramarital trend in Eastern Europe.
Teenage motherhood.
“Women in Transition.” Innocenti Research Institute (1999).
>>”In Bulgaria and Romania, teenage fertility is still very high. The narrower economic opportunities and the influence of traditional values among the Roma ethnicity in these countries may play a part in this outcome. Early childbearing, large families and a pronounced gender division in household labour are frequently reported especially among Roma families in Central and Southeastern Europe.”
>>”[M]ore than half the Roma women who responded said they hoped to have three or more children, more than double the number desired by ethnic Turkish women, another minority in Bulgaria, or by ethnic Bulgarian women. Roma women tend to start having children in their early teens and have many children, often with a relatively short interval between births. These young women face daunting economic disadvantages, and, as a 1995 survey noted, behaviors such as early sexual activity (at younger than age 15), low educational attainment and extra-marital lbirth are frequently transferred from one generation to the next.”
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“Roma in the Transition.” The World Bank (2000).
>>Roma women marry at a younger age and begin having children earlier than other groups. … Because of higher birth rates, the Roma community is significantly younger than other population groups. Data from two representative surveys of Roma conducted in Hungary illustrate this phenomenon (Purporka and Zadori, 1999). In 1993, 39 percent of the Roma population was under 14 years old, while only 19 percent of the total population fell into this age group. … [Studies in Bulgaria found that birth rates were increasing among the poorer subgroups of Roma (Tomova 2000). … Roma families remain larger than those of other ethnic groups.”
Low contraceptive use (in case there’s still any doubt).
“Fertility Regulation in a Declining State Socialist Economy: Bulgaria.” International Family Planning Perspectives (1998).
>>”In 1995, the proportion of married women aged 25 and older who were using a modern contraceptive method (43%) was similar to that of unmarried women (39%). At the youngest ages, however, unmarried women were far less likely to practice contraception than were married women. (Many of the youngest unmarried women were not practising contraception because they were not sexually active.)”
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“Roma in an Expanding Europe.” World Bank Group (2003).
>>”Rom’s relatively high birth-rate, however, seems to have less to do with access to contraception than with the age at which childbearing begins and with a widespread preference for male children. The main causes of infant mortality are home births….”
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“Abortion Policies: A Global Review.” United Nations Population Division. (2002).
>>”As of 1991, abortions were free of charge only if performed for medical reasons or performed on women under the ge of 16 or over the age of 35. … Family planning services are provided in Bulgaria in health centres and hosptials, although contraceptives are often in irregular supply.”
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There are other sources on the rates of infant and maternal mortility in Bulgarian — and post-communist Europe — that connect poverty, under-education, early childbearing, and correlate with ethnicity. That would mean that the hardships are experienced more by young women in ethnic minorities, not that ethnic minorities cause these things to themselves by the color of their skin or the language they speak, obviously. And, just as clearly, this does not rule out certain practices that are more prevalent among some ethnic communities than in others.
I am closing comments because I would prefer to discuss this at the article level, and would like to encourage Chairm to write one. That will let me work on other blogs, and respond to a full argument. I think this would benefit all interested parties.