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
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