New Spanish Language Marriage Website launched

A Spanish-language version of a marriage support website has been launched by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). The site aims to help couples discover the “great richness” of Christian marriage and to strengthen spousal love within the community of faith.

The site, PorTuMatrimonio.org, is a version of the English-language marriage site ForYourMarriage.org, but not a direct translation.

Alejandro Aguilera-Titus, director for Hispanic Affairs of the Secretariat of Cultural Diversity in the Church and coordinator of the project, explained that the site responds to the bishops’ current priorities on marriage and cultural diversity with special emphasis on Hispanics.

“PorTuMatrimonio.org is a space to inspire, help and urge Spanish-speaking couples to live more fully their marriage relationship,” Aguilera-Titus commented. “The idea is to help them be happy couples, committed to their vocation.” Read more...

Marriage Among Unwed Mothers: and Hispanics Compared

Recent debates on welfare reform have increasingly centered on whether states should actively encourage marriage among poor, welfare-dependent women with children.1 Female-headed families are considerably more likely than families headed by married couples to be poor and to receive public assistance.2 Although encouraging marriage is an explicit goal of the 1996 welfare reform law (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act), most states have focused instead on promoting work among welfare mothers, most of whom are unmarried, through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). With reauthorization of welfare legislation looming, promoting marriage is viewed as one strategy to reduce poverty and welfare caseloads.

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THE HISPANIC EXPERIENCE IN MARRIAGE PREPARATION

In addressing the Hispanic experience in marriage preparation, it is important to highlight that currently Hispanics constitute the largest minority group in the U.S.--38.8 million or 13% of the population. This includes 13.3 % in the Northeast., 7.7% in the Midwest, 34.8% in the South, and 44.2% in the West. The population is soaring because of immigration and higher birth rates. It is also important to acknowledge the cultural and educational diversity: 66.9% are of Mexican descent, 14.3 % Central and South American, 8.6 % Puerto Rican, 3.7 % Cuban, and 6.5% other. Sixty percent of Hispanics currently in this country are U.S. born. In reference to the educational diversity, it becomes incumbent on us as pastoral agents to consider the current U.S. Hispanic reality when using printed marriage preparation materials and pre-marital inventories: 27% have less than a 9th grade education, 16% 9-12 grade education, 45.9% high school and some college, and 11.1% a bachelor’s degree or more.

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The Increasing Protection of Marriage on Infant Low Birth Weight Across Two Generations of African American Women

This study used data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) on two generations of African American women who gave birth from 1967 to 2005 to describe changing relationships between marital status and low birth weight (LBW) across the generations. An increasing protection of marriage on infant LBW across the two generations was found after adjusting for socioeconomic and demographic confounding factors via (a) logistic regression using generalized estimating equations, (b) propensity score analyses taking into account the differential distribution of confounders across the generations, and (c) sensitivity analyses that adjusted for childhood health of the mother prior to marriage. Intergenerational findings also suggest that marriage across generations was most protective against infant LBW; the lowest risk for LBW was found among women who were both married when they gave birth to their infants and had mothers who were married at the time they themselves were born.