| 释义 |
legitimacy
n. The legal status of a child born to parents who were married at the time of his conception or birth (or both). (See also legitimation). There is a presumption of legitimacy in all cases when the mother is married to or in a civil partnership with a man, so that children of the marriage are presumed to be the offspring of the mother’s husband/civil partner. This may be rebutted, however, either by showing that the husband/civil partner was impotent or absent on the date on which the child must have been conceived or, more commonly, by scientific tests. This was traditionally done by blood tests, which can show that a man is not the father; however, the development of DNA testing now enables paternity to be determined with virtual certainty. Children born of a voidable marriage annulled since 1949 are legitimate; those born of such a marriage annulled between 1937 and 1949 are legitimate only if the grounds of nullity were that the other spouse was of unsound mind or epileptic or suffering from a sexually transmitted disease. Since 1959, children born of a void marriage are treated as legitimate if at the time of their conception or insemination at least one of their parents reasonably thought the marriage was valid and the father was domiciled in England at the time of the child’s birth. The Family Law Reform Act 1987 provides that a child conceived, by a party to a marriage, through artificial insemination by a donor, is to be treated as a legitimate child of that marriage. The same Act removed most of the remaining legal distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate children. Under certain conditions (specified in the Family Law Act 1986) a person may seek a court declaration of his legitimacy (see declaration of parentage). See also illegitimacy. |