Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Children are the big losers from the decline of marriage

(Credit: Getty images)

Funny, isn’t it, the way people bandy the word ‘bastard’ nowadays, without any notion that it pertains to the condition of being born outside marriage? It says lots about how illegitimacy was once regarded that its descriptive noun is now simply a bad word. And yet most children who were born last year are what we’d once have called illegitimate; the Office for National Statistics finds that 51.3 per cent were born to mothers who were neither married nor in a civil partnership. It’s the first time this has happened since records began, in 1845.

The most troubling aspect about it is that we’re really not troubled. Time was, this situation would have raised uproar in the press. Politicians would have sounded off. And everyone would have asked what the established church was doing about it. Now, well, how many MPs are even talking about it? What about the Archbishop of Canterbury, poor thing? 

But the situation is the inevitable consequence of the decline of marriage. The number of heterosexual couples getting married in 2019 was the lowest since records began – a fall of 50 per cent since 1972. We’re in new territory here in so many ways.

Marriage is increasingly the preserve of the middle classes

My father was illegitimate and when he was born it was a calamity for the mother. The child, it was said, didn’t have a name – that is to say, a father’s name. Now, in more tolerant times, we do not distinguish between parents in terms of marital status. The inheritance rights of those born outside lawful marriage are pretty well the same as those born within it. It’s quite hard nowadays for young audiences to get their heads round the parallel plot in King Lear, premised as it is on the notion that giving equal standing to bastards and lawful children is asking for trouble.

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