Legitimate This!

Legitimate This!

February 23, 2012, 12:01 am

“It used to be called illegitimacy,” began last Sunday’s lead article in The New York Times, “Unwed Mothers Now a Majority in Births in 20’s.” Indeed, it did, until the Times Style Book and, now, the AP Stylebook got hold of it.

The phrase “illegitimate child,” according to the AP’s perhaps belated entry in its online version, is “stigmatizing, and unfairly so,” according to the Stylebook editor David Minthorn. Like those following The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (which made up its mind about the term in 1999), AP reporters are encouraged to replace the offending adjective with phrases like “whose parents were not married.” Now, I have inveighed elsewhere against those who argue that politically sensitive descriptors are too clumsy, but you have to admit, this one is a mouthful. Still, culturally attuned readers and listeners—like Sigmund Roos, parent of two adopted children, who weighed in on an NPR report last July that used the phrase “illegitimate children”—believe the adjective “implies a cultural value that no longer has any currency, and can be seen as insensitive—or even—offensive.”

Offensive to whom, exactly? Well, those taking umbrage believe the first victims are the children, to whom the descriptor “illegitimate” attaches as a core value, as it would, say, to an illegitimate argument. And certainly, if the term implies what Julie Drizin of the Journalism Center on Children and Families calls “something wrong with” a child born to unmarried parents, I for one find it unacceptable. The second group of victims would presumably be the mothers, like those whose children Sigmund Roos adopted. If “illegitimate” attaches to their pregnancies and the results thereof, we are employing notions of morality and sinfulness that scarcely apply in a society where more than 50 percent of women in their 20s give birth without being married.

But let’s look back at the examples in a fuller context, and at a different use of “illegitimate child” that these style guides don’t address. The articles using the phrase that offends Julie Drizin were discussing John Edwards, Jesse Jackson, Strom Thurmond, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The NPR broadcast concerned Prince Albert of Monaco. None of these men has been stigmatized for being born out of wedlock, nor are they being accused of giving birth at all, much less outside marriage. The stigma, if that’s what it is, attaches to these public figures as fathers, specifically as fathers who have not cemented their ties with their offspring through legal channels.

That is, after all, what the word means: not legal. A biological difference exists between men and women on this point. When the baby emerges from the mother’s body, you know it is (legally, in our time, unless she gives it up for adoption) her child. Not so for the father. Almost all the discussions today regarding illegitimacy have to do with the rights and responsibilities of putative fathers and children. Illegitimate children, for instance, cannot inherit their father’s estate, presumably because the father has not conceded that these children are his and so such claims might be frivolous. Nor can an illegitimate child sue for the wrongful death of his or her father. Conversely, a man who swears he’s the father of a presumably illegitimate child cannot simply exert claims upon that child—cannot, for instance, demand custody or visitation rights willy-nilly.

Now, most states (my research here is spotty), allow for a process of legitimation—which can be effected by marriage to the child’s mother, but can also be effected by an oral or written acknowledgment of paternity, which has nothing to do with marriage. In these cases, the child “whose parents were not married” is a legitimate child—and yes, the difference matters, at least in a court of law and probably to the child’s (and perhaps the father’s) well-being.

I don’t have a solution for this snarl of language politics. I do, however, think we should be careful when we toss out valid and significant terms because they seem to us to convey a certain stigma that’s more open to interpretation than we realized. And speaking of stigmas, look back at that Times headline. The new online version reads “For Women under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage.” I guess someone raised heck about the pejorative phrase “unwed mothers,” and I say good for them. That one’s got an easy replacement: “single.”

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bizdean

“…because the father has not conceded that these children are his and so such claims might be frivolous.” Outmoded idea also, in this age of DNA testing.

“fathers who have not cemented their ties with their offspring through legal channels…” What legal channel would that be? Adoption? You can’t be talking about marriage, which cements legal ties with a spouse, not with offspring. Ah, you might say, marriage plus adoption would do it. (Unless there’s some modern version of the Victorian “acknowledgment.”) But consider divorce, which severs ties with spouses but not with children. The logic would need to hold up in both directions, and it doesn’t.

BlueLoom

“What legal channel would that be? Adoption?”

In some states, including the state in which I live, a child born to a woman who is married is presumed (legally, e.g., for the purposes of inheritance) to be the child of the man to whom she is married. If does not matter if, in fact, the father of the child is a next-door neighbor or the postman, or whoever.

mbelvadi

You seem to talk around this point but please let me hone in on it – there is an underlying sexist assymmetry to the term makes it unacceptable today. The child may have a fully legal (that is, recognized by law) tie to the mother, but that doesn’t make the child “legitimate”. Only the legal relationship to the father matters to this label. It’s a throwback to the days when a family (children AND wife) were seen as the property of the male head of household, not merely a recognition of the asymmetry of childbirth as you suggest.

jffoster

First, “unacceptable to whom”? Youm?

2nd, as Ferris points out in what I regard as one of her best columns on this blog, it has to do with legal paternity and with things like lawful inheritance rights, and standing to sue for wrongful death of a parent, ….&c.

dank48

Good heavens. As an adoptive father, I had to help explain the term “illegitimate” to our daughter years ago when she came across it somewhere. As one can imagine, the emotive force of the term varies, depending upon whether it’s referring to someone else in the abstract or to oneself or to someone one loves. At the time, I leaned on Dear Abby’s (or maybe it was Ann Landers’s) decades-old comment that there is no such thing as illegitimate children, but there are illegitimate parents. That’s a tad judgmental too, of course, but it seems less of an injustice to assign the responsibility to those who made the baby than to the baby itself.

Fortunately, we’re not seeing any social fallout from this trend.
11182967

Yet another example of the pernciousness of tying all sorts of things to a formally recognized state of attachment denominated “marriage.” Children’s rights and parents’ responsbilities should have nothing to do with the formal legality of the attachments between and among the parties (except, obviously, in case of adoption). The argument about what to call ”illegitimate” children would be moot if there simply were no such children by definition. Then maybe the awkwardness would be over what to call “children conceived and born within the context of a formal relationship legally defined as marriage.”
darccity

Wow! First, didn’t anyone watch Downton Abbey’s second season? Illegitimate was once the “politically correct” substitute for “bastard”, which the maid’s child was called by the father’s parent. Try defending that term your article! In any case, marriage is today divided into civil and religious aspects which have little to do with one another. And what about the old “living in sin” for cohabitation and common law and civil union and living together and shacking up. Or notice how often the politically correct has moved from the indirect euphemisms “in a family way” and “with child” of the Jane Austin and Victorian age through the 1950s I Love Lucy to the direct, harsh, clinical, or even shock-value of pregnant or “knocked up.”

On the other hand, it is always hilarious how political correctness seldom settles for one euphemism for very long before that too becomes stigmatized and requires an even more sanitized word. Example 1: Economic “panics” occurred for over a century, but disappeared from the language as too disturbing. So it was replaced by the less scary term “depression.” But the Great Depression made that term too loaded, especially for the party in power that allowed it. So we had the even milder description of “recession” which in turn became downturns, corrections. Example 2: underdeveloped countries because developing countries (as if all are). Prison guards became corrections officers, even though they are neither correcting nor are officers.
whatthe

I guess someone raised heck about the pejorative phrase “unwed mothers,” and I say good for them. That one’s got an easy replacement: “single.”

Really? ‘Unwed mothers’ is widely considered synonymous with ‘single mothers’? That’s very surprising – it’s absolutely not so for me (in the UK, if that’s relevant).

If a couple in a stable cohabiting relationship but who have not chosen to (or have chosen not to) marry have a child, the mother is of course ‘unwed’ (eech), but I definitely don’t consider her a ‘single mother’. A birth outside marriage doth not a single mother make, if the woman is not in practical terms and in living arrangements ‘single’; contrarily a woman who is married but separated can be a ‘single mother’ despite her marriage certificate.