Study: Disaster Triggers Births, Marriages, Divorce

April 10 -- The voice on the telephone was shaky as a dear friend told of yet another possible casualty of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

Life can be snuffed out so easily, she said, and like many others, she has spent much of her time since Sept. 11 re-examining her own life.

What had seemed fine before the attack, she said, turned out to be seriously flawed when she confronted human mortality and began to examine matters more closely. Her marriage, she said, was not what she had expected. Some things that had been annoying a few months ago had become major problems.

That marriage now hangs by a very thin thread, and my friend is in danger of becoming another statistic in the grim aftermath of the tragic events of last September. Disasters, whether natural or intentional, can have a profound impact on how we get along with each other.

Life, Re-examined

Counselors and psychologists have known for years that a life-threatening event can do great harm to a marriage, but it turns out that there's far more to the story than that. It can also cause more people to get married, and even engage in that most life affirming process of all, bringing another baby into this troubled world.

According to a study published in the March issue of the Journal of Family Psychology, one of the worst natural disasters to ever hit the United States — Hurricane Hugo — caused a significant increase in divorces, marriages and births among the residents of South Carolina who were the hardest hit by the brutal storm.

"The fact that all three went up, marriages, births and divorces, leads us to speculate that these life threatening events lead people to take stock of their lives, reevaluate their futures, reevaluate their current situations, and it might motivate them to make some changes," says Catherine L. Cohan, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor of human development at Penn State, principal investigator of the study.

She's the first to admit she doesn't know for sure what drove some people to divorce and others to having a baby, because "the data tells us what people did, not why they did it."