Illegitimacy

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Illegitimacy was a term in common use for the condition of being born of parents who were not validly married to one another; the legal term was bastardy. That status could be changed in either direction by civil law or canon law; a specific case of the former occurred with the Princes in the Tower. In some jurisdictions, marriage of an illegitimate child's parents after its birth resulted in the child's legitimation, changing the legal status to special bastardy.

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History

In many societies, present and historical, the law has not given illegitimate persons the same rights of inheritance as legitimate ones, and in some, not even the same rights. In the United Kingdom and the United States, as late as the 1960s, illegitimacy carried a strong social stigma among both middle- and working-class people. Unwed mothers were strongly encouraged, at times actually forced, to give their children up for adoption. Often, an illegitimate child would be raised by grandparents or married relatives as the "sister" or "nephew" of the unwed mother. In such cultures, the fathers of bastard children did not incur the same censure nor, generally, much legal responsibility, due both to social attitudes about sex and to the difficulty of accurately determining a child's paternity.

Thus illegitimacy has affected not only the "illegitimate" individual himself. 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 codify the responsibility of both parents to provide support and care for a child, regardless of the parents' marital status, and giving illegitimate and 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." One does not speak of a child being "illegitimate"; all children are equally legitimate.

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 [1] and its constitutionality was upheld by the Supreme Court in Nguyen v. INS, 533 U.S. 53 (2001). [2]

Stating 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 today in the Western world be seen as highly controversial by even the most conservative people. Many religions view premarital or extramarital sexual intercourse as a sin, but they generally feel that any resultant child is not in any state of sin. Nevertheless, some religious fraternities, notably Opus Dei, still prohibit individuals born out of wedlock from becoming members.

History shows some 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.

Today the word "bastard" remains:

  • a pejorative epithet (the masculine equivalent to "bitch"). The word is, however, also often used without pejorative sense; in Australian English, it is sometimes called the "great Australian endearment" (e.g., "He's a lucky bastard"). Bastard Nation, an advocacy group for the rights of adopted children and adult adoptees, has attempted to "reclaim" the word "bastard" as a neutral or self-respecting term;
  • an acceptable adjective for describing odd-sized objects or parts, such as bolts with non-standard threads. There is a particular type of engineer's coarse file known in the trade as having a bastard cut, and referred to as a bastard.

Due to the common use of the word as a mildly profane generic insult to any man, regardless of birth circumstances, many students are surprised to find that the use of the word, in reference to a child of unmarried parents (for example, to Shakespeare's John the Bastard) is seen by their teachers as entirely appropriate.

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Parental responsibility

In the United Kingdom the notion of bastardy was effectively abolished by The Children Act 1989, which took 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 [3], 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 is the parents who are ultimately responsible for the actions that caused an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Cultural commentator and radio talk-show host Michael Medved advocates this stagmatization, especially in the case of "Celebrity Bastard Parents."

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Etymology of "bastard"

The word "bastard" is said to come from Old French for "child of a packsaddle," being formed from bast (modern bât) = "packsaddle": when mule drivers stopped for the night and unpacked their mules, they would use the packsaddles as beds, and sometimes a liaison with a local girl or woman would ensue and a child be conceived. The French and Italian suffix "-ard," seen in words such as "coward," was formed in post-Roman times from names of invading Germanic tribesmen that ended in -hard or -ward.

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List of notable persons born illegitimate

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References

  • Shirley Foster Hartley, Illegitimacy, University of California Press, 1975.
  • Jenny Teichman, Illegitimacy, Cornell University Press, 1982.
  • Alysa Levene, Samantha Williams and Thomas Nutt, eds., Illegitimacy in Britain, 1700-1920, Palgrave and Macmillan, 2005.
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See also

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