Tensions Between Legal, Biological and Social Conceptions of Parentage

Abstract

During the last forty years, family law has undergone profound changes throughout Western industrialized countries. Notwithstanding minor set-backs, the development has been surprisingly even. However, this legal evolution is but a refl ection of, and, at the same time, part of the developments occurring in society in a whole, as is already becoming apparent in offi cial statistics. The most salient feature is the rise in the divorce rate. Since the 1970s, it has more than doubled in nearly all countries. In many countries, the percentage of marriages ending in divorce has now reached 40 to 50 percent. The high number of divorces brings about, in turn, manifold further developments. These are, on the one hand, the rapidly increasing number of children living in stepfamilies and, on the other, the growing number of single-parent families. Developments parallel to the rising divorce rate are the increase in the age of persons marrying for the fi rst time and the general decrease in marriages as a whole. Simultaneously, cohabitation has increased in all countries, in some places dramatically. This is consistent

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 37 citations exist upstream.