Anyone planning to have kids should marry their partner
What if you already are pregnant and it was unplanned and your partner refuses to marry you? Or tells you that he will marry you next year when you have more money and you can have a nice wedding? Only next year never comes around because you needed the money for something else, a house maybe. And he tells you that it's OK because surely having a roof over your heads is more important than just a piece of paper? And you think okay and anyway, society tells you that the man should be the one who proposes and you will wait for that to happen. By this stage you have had another child because he told you it would be a good idea and you hoped that maybe he would propose after that and anyway, you always wanted more than one child. It makes no sense for you to go back to your job- you would be paying all the money to the nursery. So you give up your job and become a SAHM. You mention marriage again and he says 'why fix something that isn't broken'. You get an inkling that he probably isn't going to marry you but you have been out of the workplace for 6 years now. Meanwhile, he has been promoted three times and earns a great salary. You can't complain because he is generous with his money and says he will always look after you. When the kids are a bit older, you go back to work but it's a part time job to fit around school and it does not pay well or offer good prospects. 10 years later, he tells you that the relationship is over- he has met somebody else. The house and everything else is in his name. You cannot show that you made any financial contributions. The kids who are teenagers now say that they want to live with their dad. You are told that you have no entitlement to anything from him. You are evicted from the house and are forced to live in cheap shared accommodation where your children cannot come to stay. You would like to start again, to retrain, but you are in your late 40s by now and have to be realistic.
You might think that I am being melodramatic, but the reported and unreported cases are full of stories like this. One of the leading cases involved a woman who had raised the couple's two children and the relationship broke down after 20 years. She was forced to live in her car on the roadside.
The point is that it isn't a black and white choice of 'marry your partner'. The vast vast majority of married couples cohabit before marriage. If a pregnancy happened and the male partner refused to get married, what can the female partner do? And as I explained in my invented example, it is often a case of putting it off rather than flat out refusing.
The current law permits financially stronger people to reduce their obligations. It makes it easier for them to walk away from partners and families with few or no consequences. They have helped to create a family of dependent children who require someone to care for them, but they are able to shift that responsibility to another person who places herself at huge financial disadvantage as a result.
I struggle to see how anyone can think that is fair and in the other common law jurisdictions, they have clearly decided that it is not. The same is true in Scandinavia and on the continent.
Also, interestingly, before the early 1970s, there was very limited financial provision legislation for divorce too. So women who wanted to divorce would face potential poverty and financial hardship. That was changed because we decided that it was plainly unfair. Now, because society has moved on yet again, we need to extend legal protection to cohabitants.