Problems of filiation in the light of modern medical developments

Abstract

It is common knowledge that a child's status at law derives from its blood relationship with its parents. If the parents are legally husband and wife the child is deemed legitimate, illegitimate if they are not. This relationship determines all of the child's primary legal attributes; its whole social and legal identification. Generally speaking, it is only a legitimate child who has a legal relationship with both parents. Automatically, at birth, he becomes their child by operation of law. A natural or illegitimate child has, in a great number of legal systems, not two but only one parent, his mother, who alone exercises the rights and duties typically attached to parenthood.