Matrimonial Wreckage

Pretty divorcee, 27, 5 ft. 4 in., slim technician, with child and three-room apartment, seeks man with varied interests. Can anyone love me?

The woman who thus advertised for a mate last week in the Czechoslovakian newspaper Vecerni Praha was asking a question that echoes mournfully throughout Eastern Europe these days. Everywhere in the Communist bloc the institution of marriage is in trouble, and the proof of the malaise can be read in soaring divorce rates and declining birth rates. In Hungary, which has the lowest birth rate in the world, 13.6 per 1,000 people, more abortions are performed than there are babies born each year. One out of every four Rumanian couples got a divorce last year, as did one out of every three Czechoslovakian couples in Prague. The divorce rate has even shot up in strongly Roman Catholic Poland.

Easy Liaisons. Marriage has never enjoyed much status in Communist dogma. Marxist theory stigmatized the institution as a bourgeois relic whose sinister purpose was the orderly transfer of property from a father to his son. The Soviets scythed the religious significance out of marriage entirely, and in the post-Revolution years they advocated easy liaisons. Many couples married themselves by "solemn agreements," while others, who had tired of their mates, merely called the district party chief and announced that they considered themselves divorced. Tiring came quickly in societies where privacy is almost impossible, diversions drab, and the outlook for the future grey and bleak. Nor did such prospects encourage bringing new lives into the world.

After ignoring the pile of matrimonial wreckage for more than a decade, the Communists are now awakening to its dark demographic consequences. Most Eastern European governments have passed laws making it harder to get a divorce, and most now prohibit abortion except in unusual circumstances. In Rumania, where Party Boss Nicolae Ceausescu has declared war on "levity toward the family," both doctor and patient in an abortion case get stiff prison terms. The government makes it so hard to buy contraceptives that birth control pills have become an appreciated currency for tipping--even for those who get hold of only a few weeks' supply but take them anyway, in the mistaken belief than an ounce of prevention is better than none.

The Communist governments are also trying at long last to emphasize the positive. Hungary this year introduced laws allowing women who give birth 2 1/2 years' leave from their jobs with $40 a month in benefits, while Bulgaria announced gifts to every new mother of $23 for her first child, $234 for her second and $585 for her third. Every Eastern European government is closely following Czechoslovakia's experiments with a lonely-hearts bureau that brings single, divorced and widowed people together for informal teas and fancy balls, and an agency that arranges wedding parties and honeymoon trips. Just getting started in Prague is a new agency called the Stala manzelska poradna (Marriage Guidance Council), that offers advice to couples on the brink of a breakup. While the council's staff stands ready to aid their clients with sex problems, they are powerless to counsel away the financial insecurities and crowded housing and the dreariness of day-to-day life that strain the marriages of even the most devoted couples in the Communist world.

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