According to a Secular Humanist, writing in 2003, we should Legitimize Bastardy!.
And here's a 1989 college sociological history essay also concluding that Bastardy be eliminated as a crime: Bastardy and Baby Farming in Victorian England
The terms Bastardy and Bastard came to be seen as mean. Crude. Rude. "Bastard" was often applied as a most vile pejorative. By the 1970's the law establishment was swayed by the claims of heartlessness. Yet the remedy is worse. It is actual harm, massive harm, not just the sting of a nasty word.
Often the major concern of the Bastardy laws has been inheritance rights. Yet, as we have found -- by our generational experience in a society of wholesale rampant bastardy, those inheritance concerns are secondary.
The primary concern is in establishing cultural norms which encourage raising children in a stable home with BOTH a father and a mother. The fruit of alternative methods of childraising is risky, and the fate of those children born bastards to unmarried women is abysmal, they are lost, they tend to general immorality, theft and violence more readily. They have chips on their shoulders that won't come off , and ....
THEY are now, THEY are our future.
Much of the harm of any situation can be undone by seeing a situation for what it is and then acting in a proper thoughtful response. One can end up in a better place than ever before by so doing.
So it is I ask, having spoken my peace on the matter -- what see you in these bastards, what is the measure by you?
I see exactly what you see. Of the juvenile delinquents I’ve defended in the last two years, maybe only 5% come from intact nuclear families (and those tend to be substance abuse cases, where there is often a genetic predisposition).
Children of divorced parents are full of anger and resentment, they hate that their parents divorced, and typically blame one as being “wrong.” They do less well in school, and tend toward substance abuse issues.
Children of unwed mothers never had a real chance of success. They have no conscience, no remorse, and no souls. There is no reaching them because there was no teaching them. It also becomes multi-generational. I once prosecuted a mother who had 8 kids, all by different fathers. I’m now defending one of her daughters, who has two illegitimate children of her own.
The sad cases are the kids who lost a parent to premature death of one parent. The surviving parent rarely gets over their own grief, and so they make even less effective parents. The kids never get over the loss of the parent, and cannot cope with the ineffectiveness of the surviving parent. I’ve seen several of them who really just don’t care about life.
The real problem with bastard children isn’t that there are bastard children, it is that we are subsidizing them.
What we have is a government “command economy” in illegitimate children. The welfare state has created an artificial unlimited demand for illegitimate children. By applying simple laws of economics, it logically follows that we have an unlimited supply of them. And they are useless. Absolutely useless.