Fr Peter Serracino Inglott states that divorce is necessary in a society where there are more cohabiting couples than married ones.

This argument presupposes that divorce will encourage couples to go for marriage and reduce the number of cohabiting partners. Research suggests the exact contrary.

Divorce brings about increased serial cohabitation (Cohen and Manning, 2008) and countries introducing liberal divorce laws saw marriage rates decline significantly and permanently (Rasul, 2003). At the same time Fr Peter also stressed that we have to recover the concept of the family as a productive unit in order to safeguard marriage. This is the only suggestion he puts forward and it is, humanly speaking, degrading.

Treating marriage just as an economic activity to be helped out with favourable tax schemes is a wrong approach to the problem. Society should rather go about recovering the authentic concept of the family, which is that of a community of persons where unique lifetime communion is based on love and commitment (not economic necessity).

It makes sense to keep the religious context out of the secular divorce argument, but I definitely reject the idea of removing the human context as well. If we take that road, we would be asking for a society in which our children would suffer greatly.