Forbidding divorce

The International Herald Tribune/Boston Globe reported yesterday that with the introduction of divorce in Chile, only Malta and the Phillipines continue to forbid it:

For supporters of the law - the right to divorce, especially for mistreated spouses - was long overdue in a society in which by some estimates almost 10 percent of adults are married in name but living apart, unable to legally divorce or make financial transactions without their estranged partner's permission. In updating its marriage code of 1884, Chile became the last country in the Americas to legalize divorce. Malta and the Philippines are the only nations that forbid it.

Critics of legalizing divorce, including the Roman Catholic Church, have warned that the new law will fuel a host of societal ills, from broken homes to delinquent children. They cheered the recent news that only 1,035 divorce petitions were filed from mid-November through the end of December. The Justice Ministry had predicted that tens of thousands of people would file. Legal analysts say that many people may be waiting to see how much bureaucracy is involved in the early petitions before filing their own.

Yet even before the divorce law, marriage was becoming an endangered species in this predominantly Catholic and traditional society, with the annual number of new legal unions plummeting to fewer than 58,000 in 2003 from about 105,000 in 1990, according to civil registry figures. More striking in a country in which most prominent Catholic schools do not admit "illegitimate" children, and in which until 1997 there was no law granting child support or inheritance rights for children born outside wedlock, more than half of children in Chile now are born to unmarried parents, one of the highest rates in the world, according to national statistics.

Trish Wilson's blog