Marriage and its Alternatives:
Opportunity versus Risk     9/25/2003
By Janice Shaw Crouse

Common sense should tell us that the safest environment for a child is with its biological parents.

For nearly 30 years, the actual consequences of the alternatives to marriage – single-parent families or transient live-in boy friends – have been the elephants in the room for public policy decision-makers and ideologues. For a generation, research documenting the effects of these alternative life-styles was for the most part banished from the public square and still is highly controversial. For years ideologues in the universities, think tanks, and government bureaus have worked actively to suppress the publication of data that would inform the public of the incidence of harm resulting from abortion, cohabitation, divorce, out-of-wedlock childbearing, etc. [more ...]

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