Illegitimate Children

ILLEGITIMATE CHILDREN, in pre-revolutionary Russia, and in most other countries at the present time, represent a particularly unfavorable population group from a socio-hygienic perspective. With the sharp predominance of family upbringing over social upbringing, with insufficient legal protection for the mother and child, and the preferential rights of the husband, illegitimate children in bourgeois countries are to a significant extent doomed to perish. Thus, according to German statistics, infant mortality per year (per 100 born) was: Years: 1875-1880 (19.4 among legitimate children, 35.3 among illegitimate children); 1881-1890 (19.4, 35.4); 1891-1909 (19.0, 35.5); 1901-1910 (16.8, 30.8); 1911-1920 (13.9, 25.8); 1921-1925 (11.1, 21.1). According to Austrian statistics, cited by Amann in the Münchener medizinische Wochenschrift for 1918, No. 41, out of 1,000 legitimate children, 696 survive to the second year of life, and 512 to the 19th year, while out of 1,000 illegitimate children, 332 survive to the second year, and 136 to the 19th, i.e., 4 times fewer than legitimate children. In England and Wales, per 1,000 live births in 1926, 70 legitimate infants died, and 130 illegitimate children died. There are also indications of lower physical and mental resilience in illegitimate children. If one considers that before the war in Germany up to 180,000 children were born out of wedlock per year, and the number of illegitimate children under 14 years of age was about 1 million, then the seriousness of this problem in a number of bourgeois countries becomes evident. In terms of their social composition, the mothers of illegitimate children belonged, mainly, to the group of domestic servants, factory workers, and seamstresses. Attempts to resolve the issue of illegitimate children in bourgeois countries are half-hearted in nature and usually do not go beyond measures of a social-charitable nature. Only in recent years has a decisive shift been outlined in this area in the Scandinavian countries, especially in Norway and partly in Germany. In the Soviet Union, all legal distinctions between children born in wedlock and out of wedlock have been erased. The rights of the mother and child do not depend on the registration of marriage; the duty of material support for the child is placed independently of the existence of the family as a private-law unit. As a result of this, child abandonment has sharply decreased in the USSR, and the problem of illegitimate children is being resolved by the general Soviet system of protection of motherhood, infancy, and childhood, and the fight against child homelessness. -See also the articles: Child Abandonment, Protection of Motherhood and Infancy, Infant Mortality, Marriage, Homelessness, Alimony (Russian literature is also cited there). Lit.: Kuhn Ph., Uneheliche (Handwörterbuch d. Sexualwissenschaft, hrsg. v. M. Marcuse, Bonn, 1926); Keller A., Uneheliche Kinder (Handwörterbuch der sozialen Hygiene, hrsg. von A. Grotjahn u. J. Kaup, B. II, Lpz., 1912); Engel St. u. Behrendt H., Säuglingsfürsorge (Handbuch der sozialen Hygiene u. Gesundheitsfürsorge, hrsg. von A. Gottstein, A. Schlossmann u. L. Teleky, B. IV, B., 1927).