The Non-Marital Child?New Conceptions For the Law of Unlawfulness

I want to say a few words about the child that has been neglected even in family law?because he has no family. He is the child whose "nice" legal designation means "unlawful" and whose traditional legal designation is a swear word for the use of which an action lies in tort. Nationally, one in sixteen children is born illegitimate. In some urban areas, the incidence of illegitimacy rises to nearly 40 percent of live births. Everybody knows that illegitimacy is a second-class way of life, because the fact of birth outside a family places the child outside of the prevailing social norms. What is realized less generally is that much of the burden of illegitimacy is imposed by law and has very little to do with the unavoidable fact of birth outside of marriage. There are public and private aspects to the law of illegitimacy. In the public sector the answers lie in education and welfare services, includ ing care for children already born, distribution of contraceptives, vol untary sterilization, and perhaps, instead of fluoridizing water supply, putting the Pill into it. But this is not our topic. I shall limit myself to the private sector. Here the focus is on those private resources that the law should make available to the illegitimate to provide him an even start in life. These resources are his parents, especially his father. Public relief can alleviate some of the worst aspects of illegitimacy, but in a society that thinks in terms of individual?not collective?respon sibility, the relief that is the subject of this talk must take over as much of the task as possible.