Everything about Illegitimacy totally explained
Illegitimacy is a label once commonly assigned to individuals whose
parents were not
married. In most European nation-states (
Scotland being the most notable exception), the child of unmarried parents wasn't a legitimate heir in law to its father's estate – hence, the child was "[an] illegitimate [heir]."
In social and sometimes legal terms, the individual child so born was termed a . In most national jurisdictions, the status of a child as a legitimate or illegitimate heir could be changed - in either direction - under the
civil law (as with the
Princes in the Tower); and likewise, under
Canon law in most religious jurisdictions. In some jurisdictions, a child's birth could be retroactively "
legitimated" if the parents married afterward - usually within a specified period of time, such as one year. This is still true but it's increasingly unnecessary, as jurisdictions increasingly abolish the concept of illegitimacy.
History
Law in many societies has denied "illegitimate" persons the same rights of
inheritance as "legitimate" ones, and in some, even the same
civil rights. In the
United Kingdom and the
United States, illegitimacy carried a strong
social stigma as late as the 1960s. Unwed mothers were often encouraged, at times forced, to give their children up for
adoption. Often, an illegitimate child was reared by
grandparents or married
relatives as the "sister", "brother" or "cousin" of the unwed mother.
In such cultures, fathers of illegitimate children often didn't incur comparable
censure or legal responsibility, due to
social attitudes about
sex, the nature of sexual reproduction, and the difficulty of determining
paternity with
certainty. In the ancient
Latin phrase, "
Mater semper certa est" ("The mother is always certain").
Thus illegitimacy has affected not only the "illegitimate" individuals themselves. The stress that such circumstances of birth once regularly visited upon families, is illustrated in the case of
Albert Einstein and his wife-to-be,
Mileva Marić, who — when she became pregnant with the first of their three children,
Lieserl — felt compelled to maintain separate residences in different cities.
By the final third of the 20th century, in the
United States, all the states had adopted uniform laws that codified the responsibility of both parents to provide support and care for a child, regardless of the
parents'
marital status, and gave "illegitimate" as well as
adopted persons the same rights to inherit their parents' property as anyone else. Generally speaking, in the United States, "illegitimacy" has been supplanted by the concept, "born out of wedlock."
A contribution to the decline of "illegitimacy" had been made by increased ease of obtaining
divorce. Prior to this, the mother and father of many a child had been unable to marry each other because one or the other was already legally bound, by
civil or
canon law, in a non-viable earlier
marriage that didn't admit of
divorce. Their only recourse, often, had been to wait for the death of the earlier spouse(s).
Today, in the
Western world, the assertion that a child is less entitled to civil rights, or abides in a state of
sin, due to the
marital status of its
parents, would be viewed as dubious. Many
religions regard
premarital or
extramarital sex as a
sin, but generally don't hold that a resultant child itself dwells in a state of sin.
The exception to the less entitled view is that children born via donor sperm are generally not considered legally entitled to a father unless their mother is married to a man who consents to their conception. Children born from donor sperm are considered to be not related at all to their genetic father, and courts generally regard donor conceived children to have no legal rights of support from parents except for the support that parents agree to supply.
Sperm-donor-conceived people are automatically considered illegitimate in most legal systems.
Nevertheless, the late-20th century demise, in Western culture, of the concept of "illegitimacy" came too late to relieve the contemporaneous
stigma once suffered by such
creative individuals, born before the 20th century, as
Leone Battista Alberti,
Leonardo da Vinci,
Erasmus of Rotterdam,
d'Alembert,
Alexander Hamilton,
James Smithson,
Vasily Zhukovsky,
Sarah Bernhardt,
T.E. Lawrence or
Stefan Banach.
Despite the decreasing legal relevance of illegitimacy, an important exception may be found in the
nationality laws of many countries, which discriminate against illegitimate children in the application of
jus sanguinis, particularly in cases where the child's connection to the country lies only through the father. This is true of the United States
(External Link
) and its constitutionality was upheld by the
Supreme Court in
Nguyen v. INS, 533 U.S. 53 (2001).
(External Link)
The proportion of children born extramaritally (outside marriage) varies widely between countries. In Europe, figures range from 3% in
Cyprus to 55% in
Estonia. In Britain the rate is 42% (2004). The rate in Ireland is 31.4%, close to the European average of 31.6%
(External Link).
History shows striking examples of prominent persons of "illegitimate" birth. Often they seem to have been driven to
excel in their fields of endeavor in part by a desire to overcome the
social disadvantage that, in their time, attached to illegitimacy.
Examples include
Henry Morton Stanley, the explorer of Africa.
Parental responsibility
In the United Kingdom the notion of bastardy was effectively abolished by
The Children Act 1989, which came into force in 1991. It introduced the concept of
parental responsibility, which ensures that a child may have a
legal father even if the parents were not married. It was, however, not until December 2003, with the implementation of parts of
The Adoption and Children Act 2002 (External Link), that parental responsibility was automatically granted to fathers of out-of-wedlock children, and even then only if the father's name appears on the
birth certificate.
Recently, some people in the United States have taken to stigmatizing the parents, rather than the child, by labeling the parents as "Bastard Parents," because it's the parents who are ultimately responsible for the actions that caused an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Conservative cultural commentator and radio talk-show host
Michael Medved advocates this stigmatization, especially in the case of "Celebrity Bastard Parents."
Further Information
Get more info on 'Illegitimacy'.
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