Q
The fact that the market takes advantage of February 14 to celebrate the day of love and friendship does not invalidate the origin of this celebration in honor of love and Saint Valentine, who they say was sentenced to death on that day, but from the 3rd century, for celebrating in secret marriages for lovers, in direct opposition to the order of the emperor of Rome in terms of prohibiting marriages of young people, considering that single men without families made better soldiers.
The needs of the State are behind many of the sexual and conjugal norms. However, the exercise of sexuality, marriage and reproduction occurs in the midst of regulations, which few people are willing to obey. Coital practices have always occurred outside of marriage, between heterosexual couples and people of the same sex, children are born inside and outside of marriage, free or informal unions and dissolutions have always been present in every society.
Although many patterns of sexuality are perpetuated in the culture, with history the regulations and the incidence of each of the practices mentioned above change. Since the middle of the last century, access to contraceptive methods paved the way for the separation between the exercise of heterosexual sexuality and biological reproduction, with which union and marriage ceased to be the only framework to regulate sexual and reproductive life. Important changes include fewer children and smaller family sizes, the institutionalization of marriage between people of the same sex, raising the age at marriage and the prolongation of single life, the latter related to schooling each year. of young people, the lack of stable employment and the possibility of having sexual relationships without the pressure of pregnancy or marriage. Access to legal and safe abortion has also contributed. The stability of couples also changes, although the majority of adults continue to live as a couple and have children, today they last less time together, they are less stable than in the past and second and third marriages occur. All these transformations also express what Jeffrey Weeks calls the sexual secularization
the progressive distance between religious regulations and sexual practices, which occurs even among believers.
In Mexico, consensual union and marriage (consensual or forced) at an early age constitute a traditional way of forming a family (20 percent of Mexican women do so before the age of 18), which is associated with conditions of poverty, lack of educational opportunities (nine-grade educational horizon) and in some communities for reasons of ethnic survival. However, this practice coexists today with an increase in free unions and a decrease in marriage among young people from the middle and upper strata, similar to cohabitation in developed countries (where marriage occurs around the age of 30, on average). , in which the spouses have high educational levels, it is also observed that, after a period of cohabitation, some people who lived in a free union decide to get married.
A recent study finds that unions entered into when the woman is a minor have a higher risk of dissolution than those entered into when she is older. Although dissolution or separation could free many women from early unions from situations of abuse or violence, marital dissolution tends to leave women and their children in situations of greater vulnerability, the economic consequences are more severe for women than for men, because they are the ones who regularly lose access to the couple’s assets. Hence the importance of postponing the age of union and motherhood, of completing education, at least upper secondary, and of entering paid work, in order to build human capital and achieve economic autonomy before forming a family (Julieta Perez Amador, The conjugal union in minors and the risk of dissolution
in demographic situation no. 18, El Colegio de México/Inmujeres/Somede/ Onumujeres, July 2020, pp. 53-59).
Within the inter-institutional framework of the Strategy for the Prevention of Pregnancy in Adolescents (Enapea), of which, in addition to Conapo, the National Institute for Women, the Ministry of Public Education, the National Center for Gender Equity and Health Reproductive, the Mexican Youth Institute, the National System for the Comprehensive Protection of the Rights of Girls, Boys and Adolescents (Sipinna), the DIF, the United Nations Population Fund, the state Population Councils and civil society organizations among others, we are going to celebrate February 14 by holding meetings with adolescents and young people in the various entities of the country, with the motto: I decide to live love freely
.
* General Secretary of Conapo
Twitter: @Gabrielarodr108
