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Posthumous birth

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A posthumous birth is the birth of a child after the death of a parent.[1] A person born in these circumstances is called a posthumous child or a posthumously born person. Most instances of posthumous birth involve the birth of a child after the death of its father, but the term also is applied to infants delivered after the death of the mother, usually by caesarean section.[2]

Posthumous birth has special implications in law, potentially affecting the child's citizenship and legal rights, inheritance, and order of succession. Legal systems generally include special provisions regarding inheritance by posthumous children and the legal status of such children. For example, Massachusetts law states that a posthumous child is treated as having been living at the death of the parent,[3] meaning that the child receives the same share of the parent's estate as if the child had been born before the parent's death. United States law holds that posthumous children of U.S. citizens who are born outside the United States have the same rights to citizenship that they would have had if the deceased U.S. citizen parent had been alive at the time of their birth.[4]

A posthumous birth has special significance in the case of hereditary monarchies where cognatic primogeniture applies. This principle allows a female to succeed to the throne only if she has no living brothers and no deceased brothers who left surviving legitimate descendants. Before modern medical techniques, if the queen had been pregnant at the time of the king's death and if the living heir were a female, it would have been necessary to wait until the birth of the child to determine its sex, which would in turn have determined the succession. If such a situation were to arise today, it would still be necessary to determine the sex of the fetus. A baby boy would supplant any heiress and be born a monarch, although a regent would have to be appointed until the child comes of age.

Posthumous conception by artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization, whether done using sperm or ova stored before a parent's death or sperm retrieved from a man's corpse, has created new legal issues.[3] When a woman is inseminated with her deceased husband's sperm, laws that establish that a sperm donor is not the legal father of the child born as a result of artificial insemination have had the effect of excluding the deceased husband from fatherhood and making the child legally fatherless.[5] In the United Kingdom before 2000, birth records of children conceived using a dead man's sperm had to identify the infants as fatherless, but in 2000 the government announced that the law would be changed to allow the deceased father's name to be listed on the birth certificate.[6] In 1986 a New South Wales legal reform commission recommended that the law should recognize the deceased husband as the father of a child born from post-mortem artificial insemination, provided that the woman is his widow and unmarried at the time of birth, but the child should have inheritance rights to the father's estate only if the father left a will that included specific provisions for the child.[6] In 2001, the Massachusetts Supreme Court was asked to consider whether the father's name should appear on the birth record for a child conceived through artificial insemination after her father's death, as well as whether that child was eligible for U.S. Social Security benefits. The court ruled in January 2002 that a child could be the legal heir of a dead parent if there was a genetic relationship and the deceased parent had both agreed to the posthumous conception and committed to support the child.[3]

In the Middle Ages, it was traditional for posthumous children born in England to be given a matronymic surname instead of a patronymic one. This may in part explain why matronyms are more common in England than in other parts of Europe.[7]

Notable people born posthumously

Royalty and nobility

Others

Other

The Irish Republican song The Broad Black Brimmer was about a boy whose father died before he was born.

The Charles Dickens character David Copperfield was a posthumous child, whose father had died three months before he was born.[8]

See also

References

  1. ^ THE ETHICAL AND LEGAL QUAGMIRES OF POSTMORTEM REPRODUCTION, by Christie Brough, 21st National Conference on Undergraduate Research, Dominican University of California, April 2007
  2. ^ a b c Christine Quigley, The Corpse: A History, McFarland, 1996, ISBN 0786401702, pages 180 to 181.
  3. ^ a b c Renee H. Sekino, Posthumous Conception: The Birth of a New Class, Boston University Journal of Sci. and Tech. Law, 2001.
  4. ^ U.S. Department of State Foreign Affairs Manual Volume 7 – Consular Affairs, 7 FAM 1180 Posthumous Children, 4-07-2006
  5. ^ Report 49 (1986) — Artificial Conception: Human Artificial Insemination, 12. AIH and Posthumous Use of Semen, Law Reform Commission, New South Wales
  6. ^ a b Posthumous fathers to be recognised, BBC News, 25 August 2000
  7. ^ Bowman, William Dodgson. The Story of Surnames. London, George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1932. No ISBN.
  8. ^ [1]
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