Then Comes Sambo With a Baby Carriage

Love and marriage... In Sweden, not so horse-and-carriage-like. Shacking up is incredibly common here, so much so that there's even a politically correct (but silly) term for the act. It's a much more fun word than the vague and sanitized "domestic partner": Here, unmarried folks who live together (and often have families together) are called sambos.

I actually learned this new vocabulary word from my Swedish-language lesson book, in which two characters featured throughout the text are Linda and Hassan, a multiracial pair of sambos who are expecting a baby. How progressive! The textbook is typically used to teach the language to immigrant workers arriving from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, so I figure they decided to introduce this concept as early as possible (chapter 2) to get people prepared for the real-live Sweden. ("Yup, we openly live in sin. Hope you're cool with that. If not, there's a ferry to Estonia leaving at 5 pm sharp...") There's no stigma whatsoever about raising a family out of wedlock, and sambos receive all the same legal benefits as married people. This is true in both the larger cities and the rural areas—there's no discernable slide into right-wing thinking the closer you get to corn fields.

The effect is that marriage is on the decline in Sweden. Many people see the institution as antiquated and the wedding ritual as an unnecessary expense. But those who do get married seem to do so in high style. August is the most popular month for weddings, and in the first few weeks I was here, a few of my friends went to weddings and reported that they included course after opulent course of food with alcohols to match, tons of toasts, and drunken reveling well into the night.

So, I decided to quiz my coworkers about whether there's any stigma around pregnancy. If marriage is a non-issue, what about age? For instance, what do they think of the hub-bub over Bristol Palin? Is teen pregancy a problem here? (The legal age of consent in Sweden is 15.)

My informal pollees reported that there are very few teen pregnancies here, and some quick research on the Web suggests they're right. Whereas, in the U.S., 84 out of every 1,000 teens become pregnant, in Sweden, pregnancy affects only 25 out of 1000 teens. There was an interesting interview on Chicago Public Radio last week with Margareta Larsson, associate professor of women's and children's health at Uppsala University. She discussed the differences in attitudes about sexuality in Sweden and the U.S., and explained why she thinks teen pregnancy rates here are so much lower.

Predictably, the answer lies in education. As my colleague Maria says, "sex just isn't such a big deal here." Parents discuss safe sex with their teens, and they expect that their kids will have sex at some point, so they prepare them. Larsson said on the radio that the aim is to help teens have a "responsible, healthy and enjoyable sex life." She goes on: "We never talk about abstinence. We begin discussions about pregnancy at a young age... then we teach about puberty, the impact of media messages about sex, and when they're a little bit older, how to protect themselves against disease and pregnancy." Most revealing was Larsson's statement that there's a "broad political consensus" that this is the right strategy. If you have a few minutes, give the show a listen at the link above. It's refreshing to hear an outside opinion on this issue, especially in the current U.S. political climate.