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Illegitimacy'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'. HistoryIn 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" 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 Mari?, 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 http://travel.state.gov/law/info/info_609.html 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. The proportion of children born 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% http://europa.eu.int/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=STAT/06/59&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en 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:
Parental responsibilityIn 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 http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts2002/20020038.htm , 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 stigmatization, especially in the case of "Celebrity Bastard Parents." In some countries, including Britain, the child may inherit the surname of both parents rather than just the father's surname. such as, if the mother's name is Allaway, and the father's name is north, then that would make the child's legal surname Allaway-North, this is known as a double barrel name, the names being separated with a hyphen. Any children of the illegitimate child shall adopt the Double-barrelled name. usualy the mother's name shall come first. if the child dose regain their legitimacy they can usualy keep their double barrel name if they choose 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 muleteers stopped for the night and unpacked their mules, they used the packsaddles as beds, and sometimes a liaison with a local girl or woman would ensue and a child be conceived. The French suffix "-ard" and Italian suffix "-ardo", seen in words such as "coward", was formed in post-Roman times by extracting it from invading Germanic tribesmen's names that ended in -hard or -ward.List of notable persons born "illegitimate"
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