The demographic transition of the passport does not ask

According to experts from the Higher School of Economics, in the Russian Federation, the proportion of conceptions that occur before the entry of Russians into official marriage is growing. Since 1960, it has increased from 11% to 30%. At the same time, they note, for the majority of Russians, marriage is still preferable for having children, rather than cohabitation, which distinguishes the Russian Federation from many developed countries and may be due to insufficient protection of the rights of citizens when living together.

Most Russians still strive to have children in marriage, but increasingly, the reason for marriage is not its value as such, but necessity. Such a conclusion can be drawn from the article by the experts of the Higher School of Economics “First births in the context of partnership: the preservation of the importance of marriage” in the academic journal European Journal of Population. The study is based on data on the marriage behavior of Russians in several generations from the 1994 microcensus and information on births from registry offices for 2000, 2011 and 2016. Before the so-called second demographic transition that began in the 1960s, premarital pregnancy and marriage resulting from it were considered undesirable in most communities, the authors explain. However, as cohabitation becomes an increasingly acceptable alternative to marriage in developed countries, the number of children born without formalization of the relationship by their parents is also growing. Even the legislative restrictions on the rights of single mothers and children born out of wedlock, which existed in the USSR until the end of the 1970s, could not interfere with this process.

As follows from the calculations of the authors, in the Russian Federation in recent years, the proportion of conceptions outside of marriage has been growing. So, if in the cohort of women who first married in 1960, the proportion of pregnant women (with an average period of 3.3 months) was 11%, then by 1988-1991 it had grown to 29%, and by 2016 – up to 30%, The average gestational age at marriage also increased to 4.9 months.

This, according to the authors of the work, suggests two changes in the reproductive behavior of Russians. First, pregnancy during cohabitation outside of marriage is gradually ceasing to be undesirable, as evidenced by both the increase in the number of pregnant women who marry and the increase in the duration of pregnancy when the relationship is registered. With a forced marriage, the latter indicator should not have increased, especially given the earlier diagnosis. This, in turn, allows us to talk about the similarity of demographic trends in the Russian Federation and developed countries. At the same time, the fact that the majority of births still occur within marriage testifies to its importance for Russians.

As the authors of the study note, it is hardly possible to speak unambiguously about the influence of family values ​​on this – the fact is that in the Russian Federation, unlike in other countries, cohabitants do not have the opportunity to somehow formalize their relationship outside of marriage. At the same time, in a number of countries, as in Sweden, there are intermediate forms of legalizing cohabitation, which allow cohabitants, for example, to pay taxes as a single household.

However, even with some differences, the main trends in the marital behavior of Russians correspond to the parameters of the second demographic transition. There is no reliable evidence that these trends can be significantly influenced by state policy measures – as Kommersant wrote earlier, even the maternity capital program contributed not so much to an increase in the number of children for each woman, but to a shift in the moment of their birth to an earlier date ( see “Kommersant” dated February 22, 2020 for details). At the same time, one of the consequences of this may be a drop in the birth rate in the last couple of years.

Anastasia Manuylova