Scotland abolished illegitimacy as a legal status only in 2006
For centuries a child born to unmarried parents could be barred from inheriting land, from priesthood and from a parent's nationality. Most of those barriers have fallen within living memory, and in 2018 births outside marriage were the majority in eight EU countries, France leading at 60 percent.
Common law defined a legitimate child as one born to a married couple. England's Statute of Merton in 1235 labelled any child born before the parents wed a bastard, including children whose parents could never marry each other. The Poor Act 1575 aimed to punish the mother and presumed father and spare the parish the cost of support, and a 1576 act made presumed fathers pay. Such a child could not inherit real property, with one odd exception: an elder illegitimate son who took over his father's lands could hand them on as though he truly owned them.
Scotland was gentler. A later marriage legitimated a child if the parents had been free to marry at conception, and royal natural sons founded dynasties, such as the Stewarts of Bute, granted estates by Robert II in the 14th century. In 2006 Scots law declared that nobody governed by it is illegitimate. England moved in steps: the Legitimacy Act 1926 legitimised children whose parents later married, the 1959 act widened that, and the Family Law Reform Act 1969 let illegitimate children inherit when a parent died without a will. Neither of the first two acts touched succession to the throne or to peerages.
Elsewhere, US Supreme Court rulings in the early 1970s struck down most such disabilities under the Fourteenth Amendment, though nationality law still treats children of unmarried parents differently, a rule upheld in Nguyen v. INS in 2001. France fully equalised children's status only through laws of 2002 and 2009, after pressure from the European Court of Human Rights. The Catholic Church stopped requiring dispensations for illegitimate men to become priests in 1983, and Pope Francis attacked priests who refused to baptise the children of single mothers.
The social shift is large. In 2009, 41 percent of American children were born to unmarried mothers, against 5 percent half a century earlier. Across the EU the share was 42 percent in both 2014 and 2018. Religiosity partly tracks the pattern, but not neatly: devout Portugal stood at 56 percent in 2018.
Source: Legitimacy (family law)
