MANILA, Philippines -- I’m encouraged by Archbishop Oscar Cruz’s interest in increasing the minimum age of marriage, to 24, from the current 18. Cruz has been a member of the local Catholic Church’s National Appellate Matrimonial Tribunal, which handles annulments, since 1971, and heads it at present. He blames the country’s failed marriages on many couples being “psychologically unprepared and emotionally unstable.”

I do not actually favor the proposed increase, but am heartened by the way the bishop has opened up discussions on the role of marriage. For too long now, Filipinos have tended to look at marriage as a cure-all. Many Filipinos have actually quoted St. Paul to me, referring to 1 Corinthians 7:8-9: “Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.”

“Get them married and they’ll learn responsibility,” I’ve actually heard parents say about their jobless children. Or, talking about a gay son, they’ll comment: “We just need to find him a girl and once he marries he’ll change.”

By far the most common function of marriage seems to be to control the young’s libido -- especially when a pregnancy has occurred.

Child-brides

I wanted to focus on that last point. We keep hearing complaints these days about “immorality” among the youth, prompted mainly by the belief that more young people are having sex before marriage. But we forget that until 1988, the minimum age of marriage for girls (literally, girls) was 14 and for boys, 16. If you think that was awful, there was a time, dating back to the Spanish period, when the minimum age of marriage was 12. We shake our heads reading about child brides in other countries but we had them too until fairly recently.

No one will say a 14-year-old married girl is immoral. But over time, countries have banned child marriages, largely because of public health reasons. A 14-year-old mother faces many risks during pregnancy and childbirth because her body is not yet fully developed. Many are also malnourished and anemic so childbirth can even threaten their life.

After we adopted the new Family Code in 1988 and raised the minimum age of marriage to 18 for both sexes, parents complained because the young lovers, including a very pregnant daughter, couldn’t get married. The disgruntled parents were able to convince Sen. Renato Cayetano to propose a law to once again lower the age of marriage. He was well-intentioned, hoping to cut down the number of illegitimate births, but probably didn’t realize that a 14-year-old married mother was still a kid having a kid.

The bill was endorsed by the secretary of social welfare, but it did not prosper. I shudder to think what it would have been like if the bill had been proposed a few years later, because that social welfare secretary had since become our president.

A few years back I advised Sr. Teresa Dagdag, a Maryknoll Sister on her doctoral dissertation in anthropology. The research was about young marriages. Sister Teresa found that many of these young couples, the girls especially, were miserable as a result of their early marriage. Some of the young wives had second and third pregnancies before they had turned 20. Poverty worsened as well, with more mouths to feed even as the young couples, often drop-outs from high school, found it more difficult finding work.

Some Catholic priests, notably the Redemptorists, as well as nuns like Sister Teresa, now counsel young unmarried pregnant girls to postpone marriage until after they’ve delivered the child. This doesn’t sit well with the parents of pregnant girls, who can easily find other Catholic priests or, another religious denomination, to perform the ceremony. Even more shocking, Sister Teresa found that “barangay” [village] officials, as well as some religious, would fake the age of the teenage couple so they could get married. The tradition of child-brides and grooms lives on.

Parental guidance

It is important to have a minimum age of marriage, mainly to prevent child betrothals. Most countries in the world prescribe a range between 16 and 18. If we raise our minimum age of marriage to 24, we’d actually end up with the dubious distinction of having the highest legal age for marriage in the world. Currently, the highest minimum age is in the People’s Republic of China: 22 for males and 20 for females.

We’re not that far off, actually. Even under the present Family Code, parental consent is required for those aged 18 to 21. Not only that: For those aged 21 to 24, the law requires parental advice.

What should we do then? It would help if the Catholic Church would be more supportive of family education in schools, to include sex and sexuality. The age of puberty for Filipino children is dropping as a result of changes in diet, urbanization and, probably, stress factors. We can’t continue to pretend our teenagers are still little boys and little girls.

Even before puberty, children will already have crushes. When the onset of physical changes, puppy love turns into adolescent love with the risks of pregnancy. It’s a difficult time as the teenager faces impending adulthood, asked to choose a college course, asked to think about working overseas and yes, thinking about the family they want to have later.

It’d help, too, if Catholic schools reduced the stigma around a premarital pregnancy. Family education should acknowledge such pregnancies occur, but one mistake shouldn’t be compounded through a forced marriage. Many of these schools still expel unmarried girls for getting pregnant. It’s this stigma that pressures families to force their children into early marriages.

There have been many studies showing that the age of marriage increases with the level of education. The Philippines is a striking exception. We have relatively high levels of educational attainment but people are still marrying early. I suspect it’s spurred in part by a lack of options. In an uncertain and difficult world, with little to look forward to in life, our young find solace in their relationships. Prodded by mass media’s rosy depictions of romantic love, marriage becomes a cocoon and a refuge, as well as a way of escaping their existing family life, unaware of course that married life can be even harsher.

So much pushes early marriage. Even the prospects of working overseas, the last hope for many Filipinos, may actually hasten a marriage, with the idea that you profess true love before leaving.

I agree, let’s push for later marriages. But this can’t be done through legislation. We need to work harder in the homes and in schools to get the young to understand what marriage entails. Meantime, we work on building prospects for a better life, here in the Philippines. When a person knows he or she can have a better life, and wants that assured for the next generation, the decision to marry will be more deliberate, more committed.

Previous columns:
PowerPoint – 1/24/08
Three American presidents of UP – 1/22/08
Plastic or paper – 1/17/08
Nanos – 01/16/08
God and science – 01/10/08
American UP – 01/08/08
Catching up – 01/03/08