The Press FRIDAY, JUNE 6, 1969. "Illegitimacy” Removed From The Statutes

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32007, 6 June 1969, Page 8

The Press FRIDAY, JUNE 6, 1969. " Illegitimacy” Removed From The Statutes

When the Minister of Justice, Mr Hanan, introduced the Status of Children Bill to the House of Repfesentatives last September he described it as a bill to remove from the law the remaining discrimination against children born out of wedlock. The bill, returned to the House recently from the Statutes Revision Committee, provides that “ for all “the purposes of the law of New Zealand the “relationship between every person and his father “and mother shall be determined irrespective of “whether the father and mother are or have been “ married to each other ...” This is the wording of the key clause in the bill The effect of this clause, of the subsequent clauses in the bill, and of the consequential amendments to other laws touching on the status of children is to remove from the Statutes all references to legitimacy and illegitimacy. The law, of course, continues to recognise and provide for children bom outside a marriage; when this bill is passed the law will nowhere impose an inferior status on the child of an unmarried mother or regard a child as anything but the child of its parents, married or unmarried.

The main surviving disability of a child bom out of wedlock is that he is not a child at all for the purposes of a will or other legal document; he has no right of inheritance if his father dies without making a will, even if his unmarried parents have lived together as a family unit. Earlier changes in the law ensured many improvements in the rights and standing of children bom outside a marriage. This bill completes the process. It removes the remaining deficiencies in the law on citizenship by descent and one remaining in the Social Security Act—a section preventing an “illegitimate” child from receiving an orphan’s benefit Most of the other amendments made by the bill merely remove the reference to illegitimacy from other laws. The Legitimation Act itself is rendered superfluous and is repealed. None of the changes affect the legal provisions for adoption or diminish the special provisions in the law for the security and welfare of the children of unmarried mothers. A possible objection to the bill is that the abolition of the legal concept of illegitimacy does not, by itself, improve the position of a child. This is true: the father of a child must still acknowledge his parenthood—or paternity must be proved to the satisfaction of a court—before a relationship may be traced for the purpose of succession to property or for the execution of a will or trust This, however, is no reason why the law should not reflect what must surely be the public conscience in the matter. It might also be objected that by removing the notion of illegitimacy, the law appears to condone the conception of children out of wedjock. Clearly, this bill was not designed to influence a social problem one way or another except to ensure the equal legal standing of all children. If it does more than this by inference it ought to emphasise what is explicit in other parts of the law: that parenthood, within or outside marriage, involves continuing obligations to a child. Mr Hanan has taken this view of the bill; and he is, surely, correct.