Law and Illegitimacy in Latin America

Illegitimacy, the birth and rearing of children outside legally recognized marriage, has been a ubiquitous and enduring feature of family and society in Latin America historically. Social norms of racial and class endogamy, the weak presence of the church in predominately rural societies, the cost of religious, and later civil, rites, slavery, and the lack of incentives to secure property transfer in societies in which most people were poor all contributed to cultural practices of non-marriage. In colonial Iberoamerica, illegitimacy was often referred to as an “infamy” or a “stain” and was central to colonial understandings of honor and blood purity. Extramarital natal status conferred lesser inheritance rights according to complex rules that recognized multiple categories of illegitimacy.Footnote ⁵ It truncated professional opportunities for men, narrowed marital prospects for women, and excluded affected persons from certain social honors and status privileges. At different times in the colonial period, illegitimate individuals could not be ordained as priests, assume posts in the royal bureaucracy, or enter the liberal professions, crafts, or trades.Footnote ⁶ Still, natal categories tended to be more fluid and flexible than in Anglo-American law, and through legal mechanisms (such as legitimation upon marriage), bureaucratic procedures (such as the purchase of legitimacy from the Crown), or simply flexible social practices, individuals could circumvent certain forms of discrimination or alter their natal status altogether.Footnote ⁷

After independence, the liberal republics of Latin America eliminated formal legal distinctions based on ethnoracial identity and noble/plebeian status, and gradually abolished slavery, but they retained and even intensified legal discrimination based on natal status. Even as rates of extramarital birth in many societies increased, newly promulgated civil codes limited rights to support and inheritance, and restricted or even abolished the legal investigation of paternity. The consequences of this juridical posture in societies in which extramarital birth was epidemic were profound and enduring.Footnote ⁸

Chile's Civil Code was particularly significant in this regard. Dating from 1855, it was among the first codes promulgated in an era of Latin American civil codification and would prove the most influential. The Chilean code was adopted essentially in toto in Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Venezuela and was used as a model in the elaboration of at least six codes across the region.Footnote ⁹

Article 285 of the Chilean Code declared, “the investigation or presumption of paternity is inadmissible.” It held that children born outside of marriage had no right to receive basic support from, or even to establish the identity of, their paternal progenitor. This clause was by no means original. It echoed the ban on paternity investigation in the French Napoleonic Code, which shaped family law across continental Europe and Latin America in the nineteenth century. But the Chilean code enshrined a particularly radical iteration of this principle and in so doing abolished rights long recognized in Iberian law and local judicial practice.

The rationale for prohibiting paternity investigation was that such suits threatened order, property, and public morals. Class relations figured prominently in these critiques. Critics contended that the suits empowered unscrupulous individuals to “speculate with the benefits of paternity of wealthy individuals” and wage an “assault” on a “status in society that does not belong to [them].”Footnote ¹⁰ The figure of the illegitimate interloper who sought to establish kinship in a well-off family would haunt discussions of natal politics down to the present.

However, this seemingly conservative defense of the legitimate family rested on quintessentially liberal principles: of privacy, defense of property, contract, and above all, free will. The law of paternity empowered men to acknowledge or reject extramarital progeny as they wished, and could not compel them to recognize or support offspring. Thus, fathers enjoyed unfettered freedom to construct their kin networks and dispose of their property according to personal preference. This staunch commitment to paternal will is evident in the Chilean Civil Code's unique natal taxonomy, in which extramarital children enjoyed different rights and obligations according to the type of recognition progenitors chose to confer on them. The Code retained natal categories present in older Iberian (and Roman) law, such as the distinction between natural children and adulterous or incestuous ones, but redefined them according to the logic of individual freedom, privacy, and contract. For example, a natural child referred not to the offspring of marriageable parents as it had in Iberian law but to a favored status, voluntarily granted by a parent, entailing rights that, although inferior to those of legitimate children, were superior to other categories of extramarital offspring. The Code invented a new category, “simply illegitimate,” for children whose parents, although recognizing them as biological progeny, chose to provide only minimal support, no inheritance rights, and no social membership in the family (such as use of the patronym). Simply illegitimate children were, therefore, legally recognized, yet legally orphans.

The status of both natural and simply illegitimate children had to be conferred through cumbersome legal procedures before a judge or notary. In so doing, the Code construed parent–child relations outside marriage as a voluntary contract. The logic of paternal free will to “contract” kinship was so powerful that some jurists argued that fathers who had recognized their illegitimate offspring should be permitted to rescind recognition if they later changed their minds. For extramarital progeny, the consequence of this system was that even individuals whose biological paternity was legally established could still inhabit different natal categories. Chilean family law thus self-consciously created relations of filiation rather than acknowledging independent facts of biological descent, and it made fathers the arbiters of those relations. Meanwhile, many extramarital children—probably the majority—did not fit into any of the Code's categories, because they enjoyed no recognition at all. And thanks to the sancrosanct principle of free paternal will, they had no right to contest this status.Footnote ¹¹

Meanwhile, in judicial practice, this legal taxonomy acquired meanings related to class status. An analysis of late nineteenth century paternity suits reveals how courts fixated on the question of whether the father had sought to confer his class position.Footnote ¹² If he had assimilated the child in question into his social position by providing the appropriate upbringing and education, then it was said that he possessed the will to recognize that child as natural. But if he had allowed the child to grow up in an inferior social and material milieu, then filiation was unproven or perhaps the child was “simply illegitimate.” The courts thus interpreted the Code's taxonomy in terms of class as much as of kinship.Footnote ¹³

Meanwhile, the various natal categories expressed fathers' different material and moral responsibilities not only to their children but also to the children's mothers. Implicit in the legal taxonomy of children was a moral taxonomy of women, distinguished by their sexual behavior and, concomitantly, by social status: women were either respectable, married middle-class or elite “mothers of families,” or else poor, single mothers. Thus, filiation expressed not just “descent between parents and children or the quality of son/daughter one has with respect to another person,” to quote a classic Hispanic juridical dictionary,Footnote ¹⁴ but also the moral, social, and legal relationship that existed between the mother and father.

Several aspects of this legal regime stand out as especially relevant for the twentieth century evolution of natal rights. First, it defined paternity as a social relationship, determined by the marriage or non-marriage of parents and the recognition or nonrecognition of fathers, rather than as a biological one. Whereas Iberian law and its Roman and canon antecedents had always distinguished different categories of filiation based on the marital status of parents, nineteenth century law widened the disjuncture between social and biological paternity. Simply put, a larger group of biological progenitors could now opt out of the rights and responsibilities of legal fatherhood, with greater facility and in more categorical terms. Second, paternity was expressed socially and established legally through fathers' class behavior, and it created categories of children and, implicitly, women with differing rights and social statuses. Thus, the legal architecture of filiation quite literally reproduced hierarchy, both biologically and socially. However, this architecture, considered an essential buttress of social order in the nineteenth century, would hobble democratic citizenship in the twentieth century. Changing class relations would, therefore, require reforming the legal definition of family.

Numbers and their Meanings

Law's treatment of natal status has been especially significant in Latin America because of the sheer ubiquity of non-marriage. By the turn of the twentieth century, Latin America had the lowest marriage rates and highest illegitimacy rates in the world.Footnote ¹⁵ In the 1920s and early 1930s, extramarital birth rates ranged from more than 20% (Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Uruguay), to 30% (Chile, Ecuador), to more than 50% (Guatemala, Venezuela), to more than 60% (El Salvador, Panama, Paraguay).Footnote ¹⁶ In some subnational regions and communities, they were higher still. By way of comparison, illegitimacy rates in most European nations were in the low single digits.Footnote ¹⁷

“Non-marriage” as a category probably obscures more than it reveals. It masks heterogeneous social formations such as Catholic unions lacking civil recognition, stable unions not formalized in law (“common-law marriage,” in Anglo-American parlance), and indigenous marriage rites not recognized by states, among others. But for law's purpose, all were unrecognized and the children born of them were illegitimate. Finally, although demographic patterns exhibited marked cross-national and cross-regional variation, everywhere non-normative family forms were associated with poor, usually non-white, populations.

Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, some countries witnessed a notable shift in these patterns, with a decline in illegitimacy rates and a corresponding increase in marriage. These trends, most apparent in countries such as Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Uruguay, coincided with the emergence of state-led industrialization. The expansion of formal employment, through which some working-class men could earn family wages and support a dependent wife and children, likely contributed to the establishment of legitimate, patriarchal households. New state-sponsored benefits provided further incentives.

Chile represents an especially dramatic case of family transformation. Extramarital birth rates peaked at almost 40% in the mid 1920s; by the early 1960s they dipped below 16%, the lowest in the region. Both the Chilean state and international capital actively worked to constitute legal patriarchal families as both a strategy of labor discipline and as part of a project to confer gendered forms of social citizenship among the working class. They did so through a series of material incentives, including a family wage for some workers as well as a burgeoning array of social welfare benefits available only to legally recognized family members, including social security, insurance, and health programs.Footnote ¹⁸ Meanwhile, even as extramarital birth rates decreased in some countries, the lowest national rates in Latin America still continued to outstrip the single digit rates of European countries.Footnote ¹⁹

The emergence of this “traditional” family structure—which was anything but traditional—in Chile and elsewhere, proved relatively short lived. Marriage rates peaked, and illegitimacy reached a low point throughout the region in the 1970s, only to experience yet another reversal as neoliberal structural adjustment and its attendant economic dislocations chipped away at the material bases of the formally constituted, working-class patriarchal household. The restructuring of labor markets amplified male unemployment even as women entered the paid labor force in greater numbers. Female household headship increased throughout Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s, as did extramarital birth.Footnote ²⁰ Today, rates of “out of wedlock” birth have surpassed the high-water marks of the early twentieth century. By the 1990s, extramarital birth rates in Chile had returned to their mid-1920s peak, and according to the latest census figures, now hover above 60%.Footnote ²¹ Changing family forms thus reflect the vicissitudes of labor and economic citizenship, especially among the numerically predominant working classes.

As the numbers evolved, so too did the social meanings of illegitimacy and political attitudes toward it. According to most interpretations, the twentieth century witnessed a steady improvement in the juridical status of extramarital children globally.Footnote ²² Latin America was no exception, except that the stakes of this process were enhanced by the sheer magnitude of nonmarital family forms. And whereas public discussion of extramarital birth was hardly unique to twentieth-century Latin America, the degree of intellectual and political energy accorded the issue may well have been.

By the turn of the twentieth century, what had previously been a moral scourge became a social problem, as illegitimacy was folded into that critique of modern societal ills known as “the social question.”Footnote ²³ A new generation of jurists attacked the discriminations of filiation law and in the early decades of the century wrote constantly about it. Among Chilean law students, filiation was a more popular thesis topic than labor law.Footnote ²⁴

The plight of extramarital children was also a major preoccupation of child welfare efforts. Social reformers associated illegitimacy with infant mortality and morbidity, child abandonment, juvenile delinquency, “racial degeneracy,” and a host of other problems. The Pan-American Child Congress, a hemispheric conference that met every 3 years beginning in 1916, issued calls throughout the 1920s and early 1930s to reform natal rights. The Fifth Congress, convened in 1927 in Cuba, for example, declared “as fundamental causes of the suffering and adverse condition (malestar) of children in America, the irresponsibility of parents and the abandonment of children, and in consequence, it recommends that paternity investigation be established within the juridical framework of each country” in order to “make paternal responsibility effective.” In 1948, the Congress issued the Pan-American Children's Code; of the ten inalienable rights set forth by this document, two related to natal status (the right to know the identity of one's parents and the right not to suffer stigma because of birth condition).Footnote ²⁵

Child welfare efforts in Latin America often advanced under the umbrella of maternalist women's mobilizations. It is, therefore, significant that women's movements did not wholeheartedly embrace the cause of illegitimate children and their legal rights. Their ambivalence is especially conspicuous given the role feminists played in advancing natal equality elsewhere. In France, feminists were instrumental in the success of a 1912 reform legalizing paternity investigation, prohibited since the Napoleonic Code. Elsewhere on the continent, feminists also lobbied on behalf of natal rights.Footnote ²⁶

In contrast, Latin American women's movements, which in the first decades of the twentieth century were gaining in political visibility in many countries, had an inconsistent relationship to the issue. Some feminists mobilized on behalf of natal rights for the same reasons their European counterparts did: namely, that the fate of extramarital children and their mothers was intertwined. Conceived of in this way, the problem of illegitimacy fit comfortably within existing paradigms of maternal and child welfare advocacy on both sides of the Atlantic. In Uruguay in the 1930s, the Partido Independiente Democrático Feminista listed paternity investigation and natal equality second only to women's equality in its platform.Footnote ²⁷

However, not all women's activists saw the amelioration of extramarital children's juridical status as advancing “women's” interests, and natal equality did not follow seamlessly from women's rights advocacy. The ambiguity that some middle-class and elite activists harbored toward natal rights stemmed from the issue's thorny class politics, because whereas natal equality improved the lot of the disproportionately poor mothers who bore the burden of rearing extramarital children, it could be detrimental to married women. For wives, who as a whole tended to be better off than their unmarried counterparts, husbands' extramarital children were a potential threat to themselves and their legitimate children. If natal reform ameliorated the economic condition of some women, it undermined the material interests of others.

This tension was reflected in the hostile engagement of some women's groups with the issue. In the nascent women's movement of early twentieth century Cuba, filiation reform became a highly divisive issue that drove a fatal wedge between progressive and moderate activists. When progressive Cuban feminist Ofelia Domínguez Navarro introduced a resolution for natal rights at a women's congress in 1925, some audience members stood on chairs and stamped their feet in protest, prompting the more progressive delegates to walk out.Footnote ²⁸ It is telling that she was subsequently invited to address the issue by the Cuban Communist Party. In succeeding years, moderate feminists would warm to natal rights, but it continued to be a divisive issue. Fifteen years later, a proposed article to the new Constitution granting full equality to illegitimate children provoked heated opposition, including 14,000 letters of protest from Cuban women. The offending clause was replaced by a more generic statement of children's rights.Footnote ²⁹

Likewise, when a Bolivian constitutional convention in the late 1930s narrowly approved articles providing for the equality of children and legal recognition of nonmarital unions, a major protest erupted in which women figured prominently. The organizers of a rally held in front of the Government Palace called on the convention to revoke equal inheritance rights for illegitimate children, and elite women inundated the press with letters and telegrams expressing their opposition to the article.Footnote ³⁰

Populist and Social-Democratic Advances

Allthough natal equality found a conflicted reception in women's politics, it would be taken up with greater consistency in other quarters. In particular, the amelioration of extramarital children's legal status was a recurring, if controversial, plank of populist and social-democratic political projects in mid-twentieth-century Latin America. Examples from three countries illustrate the resonance that natal politics enjoyed within these projects and how in this context they were framed as a class issue as much as a women's or children's rights issue.

One arena for airing debates over natal equality was in the context of debates over constitutional reforms. Beginning in the first decades of the twentieth century, many Latin American countries promulgated new constitutions that, departing from the classic liberal model, enshrined broad principles of state responsibility for citizens' social and economic well-being.Footnote ³¹ The first constitutional initiative addressing the legal and social status of illegitimate children took place in Bolivia. In 1938, a convention was convened to enact the first major reform of the constitution since 1880. An “expression of Bolivia's emerging populist project” and an embodiment of the principles of social constitutionalism, the constitutional convention would prohibit forms of exploitive rural labor, accord greater rights to workers and women, and open some political space for Indians and peasants.Footnote ³² The convention's delegates also took up the issue of natal discrimination and paternity investigation. Anticipating debates that would take place elsewhere in Latin America, they argued about whether a clause permitting extramarital children to establish their origins threatened marriage, the legitimate family, and Bolivian society, or challenged hypocrisy and safeguarded the welfare of women and children.Footnote ³³ Ultimately, the debate culminated in a tie, with the president casting the decisive vote in favor of the provision, which stated, “the law does not recognize inequalities between children, all have the same rights” (article 132).Footnote ³⁴ The provision was a harbinger of things to come, both in Bolivia—where subsequent constitutional conventions in 1945 and 1966–67 also granted full natal equality—as well as elsewhere in Latin America.

Parallel developments were emerging in Guatemala. In 1944, Guatemala's first democratically elected government came to power, initiating the unprecedented democratic opening known as the “ten years of spring” (1944–1954). The Constitution of 1945, best known for its provisions regarding civil and labor rights, land reform, and female suffrage, also established natal equality, declaring “legal inequalities among children are not recognized…Rankings regarding the nature of filiation are abolished.” The Constitution prohibited distinctions of natal status in official documentation and legalized paternity investigation.Footnote ³⁵ Although the document was nullified after a 1954 coup cut short Guatemala's popular-democratic spring, the clauses on natal equality survived: the subsequent Constitution of 1956 eliminated many of the progressive elements of its predecessor but, as in Bolivia, retained natal equality without modification.Footnote ³⁶ Once established, natal rights were rarely retracted.

The very year of the Guatemalan coup, in Argentina, the president of the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of Congress) introduced a bill granting equal rights to support and inheritance for all children regardless of natal status. It was Juan Perón's second tenure in office, and as historian Isabella Cosse notes, the initiative drew on the more radical strains found within a fractious Peronist movement. But the proposal aroused the fervent opposition of Catholic elements, and the Peronists, unwilling to risk open war with a powerful church, quickly substituted a less radical but still significant reform. Approved in 1954, the revised bill eliminated the historic distinction between natural children (defined as those whose parents could marry) and adulterous and incestuous children (whose progenitors could not marry and who suffered the most acute legal and social discrimination). Substituting this taxonomy for a simpler distinction between “matrimonial” and “extramatrimonial” children, the reform also doubled the inheritance rights of the latter.Footnote ³⁷ As Cosse suggests, in Argentina “granting rights to illegitimate children was a logical and necessary corollary of the broadening of social citizenship to workers and popular sectors.”Footnote ³⁸

Her observation applies not just to Peronist Argentina but also to self-styled populist and social-democratic projects across Latin America. In all three examples, natal equality figured within the gradual expansion of social and economic citizenship and was actualized as a political issue within national-popular class projects. Extramarital children fit seamlessly into the corporatist models of society that these projects espoused. As one Mexican civil law professor and future Supreme Court justice declared in 1969: “more than workers, more than peasants [ejidatarios], more than the middle class, extramarital children are those who need the jurist to attend to them…such that…justice is achieved not only in the countryside and the factory, but also in the very heart of the family.”Footnote ³⁹ Like these other constituencies, children were envisioned as citizens within a progressively more democratic polity and as beneficiaries of special rights and protections provided by the state. The difference was that extramarital children were a constituency defined not by class, labor, ethnicity, or gender but by differential access to social and economic resources because of the way in which law and society defined kin relations.

Even conservatives espoused a version of this vision. For them, natal discrimination was not necessarily a blight on democratic citizenship, but it was a worrisome source of political radicalism. The authors of one well-known study of a working-class household in turn-of-the-century Santiago warned that those left “outside the law” in concubinage and illegitimacy presented a “goldmine” that “socialist doctrines [would] exploit.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The solution, however, was not necessarily natal equality, an idea that conservatives often denounced as Marxist in inspiration, but moral education and legal regularization. Although they might differ on the solution, both progressives and conservatives, therefore, understood class order and natal rights to be inseparable.

Ultimately, the idea of natal disenfranchisement was so familiar as to become a generic metaphor for other forms of exclusion. Thus, Peronism cast workers as Argentina's desheredados (disinherited ones), and one well-known Chilean social critic characterized “the poor class of Chile” as “the Great Orphan, disowned within its own country.”Footnote ⁴¹ Natal dispossession was thus absorbed as a generic analogy of political parlance. Not only were illegitimate children a corporate group in their own right, but they also provided a potent language for denouncing class exploitation broadly.

The social-democratic impulse to improve the status of extramarital children was not limited to Bolivia, Guatemala, and Argentina. In Uruguay, the pioneering efforts of a progressive welfare state culminated in the 1936 Children's Code. At the vanguard of children's rights worldwide, the code consecrated paternity investigation and the right to parental identity, support, and surnames; it would also serve as the basis for the Pan-American Children's Code.Footnote ⁴² Elsewhere, the 1940s and 1950s witnessed the proliferation of constitutional reforms enshrining natal rights. Some constituted quite radical statements of equality, such as Panama's Constitution of 1946, which abolished “all rankings of the nature of filiation” and granted full equality including in intestate succession (articles 58 and 59).Footnote ⁴³ Others, such as Argentina's 1954 reform and Ecuador's Constitution of 1946, permitted inheritance discrimination but ameliorated other aspects of illegitimate peoples' status.Footnote ⁴⁴ Many constitutions declared the abolition of natal classification, proscribed the notation of birth status in official documentation, or made general statements of equality. Often these statements were ambiguous and open to interpretation. The Nicaraguan Constitution of 1948 held that parents had the “same duties” toward all children regardless of natal status (article 72), and El Salvador's Constitution of 1950 called for “equal rights in terms of education, assistance, and protection” (article 181). Similar language was used in Costa Rica's Constitution of 1949 (articles 53 and 54) and Venezuela's Constitution of 1947. What exactly did parental “duties” or “protection” consist of? When a constitution declared, as did the Honduran Constitution of 1957, “distinctions between children are not recognized,” (articles 102 and 104), was this a blanket provision that extended, for example, to matters of inheritance?

Clearly constitutional expressions of equality were often ambiguous and open to interpretation, and even categorical principles might be altered or diluted in practice. In Bolivia, where the egalitarian constitution coexisted with a discriminatory civil code, jurisprudence shows that some courts continued to invoke the code to find against illegitimate petitioners, but other courts—including at times the Supreme Court—cited the new constitution to justify extramarital children's right to know their origins and obtain parental support and even inheritance.Footnote ⁴⁵ Only additional research can determine how lofty principles of equality actually shaped the social and legal life of families.Footnote ⁴⁶ Also unclear are the origins of natal equality. Did midcentury reforms institutionalize de facto norms and practices already observed in courts or civil society? Did their proliferation reflect jurists' affinity for cross-national borrowing and transnational influences such as the Pan-American Child Congress?

However uneven their initial impact or hazy their origins, the fact that constitutional principles of natal equality were invoked, time and again, in the documentary bases of nationhood, is significant. At least a dozen countries eventually enshrined natal equality in their constitutions, and the principles of equality expressed in these documents, as well as in civil codes and in legislation, helped define the structures of social and legal possibility. And as we have seen, members of constitutional assemblies, legislatures, and civil society argued bitterly over natal reforms, suggesting that these issues mattered deeply to many people.

Ultimately, the reforms emanating from midcentury popular-nationalist projects presaged a historical about-face in the social and legal treatment of children, a trend that would culminate in the absolute equality of children across the region. By 1993, all countries in Latin America but one had granted full equality to all children regardless of birth status.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is the one exception that perhaps best highlights the significance of even elusive statements of principle. This exception was Chile, where civil law remained tenaciously wedded to natal discrimination until the dawn of the twenty-first century.

The Limits of Reform in Chile

The discriminatory provisions of Chile's 1855 Civil Code remained not only untouched, but indeed undiscussed for a half century after their promulgation, but by the early twentieth century, Chilean social workers, philanthropists, jurists, and legislators, like their counterparts elsewhere in the region, began to contemplate the amelioration of illegitimates' social and legal status. In Chile, however, juridical reform would prove tentative and restricted in scope. In 1935, an initial revision eliminated the categories of adulterous and incestuous children. A subsequent revision, Law 10.271 of 1952, was more far reaching but still circumscribed. The message from the president to Congress introducing the bill reflects these limits, as the reform sought to balance two contradictory objectives: “following the example of other legislations, it is time to take a new step and widen the field of responsibilities deriving from illegitimate filiation.” “But at the same time, the interests of the legally constituted family have been retained, in order to assure its integrity.”Footnote ⁴⁸

The reform allowed for paternity investigation in some narrowly defined circumstances and granted enhanced rights to inheritance and support to natural children, but it left intact the fundamental logic of the Civil Code's legal regime. For example, it retained the dual categories of natural and simply illegitimate children, revising the means to obtain these statuses but, significantly, preserving their class connotations. As the author of the reform noted, the existence of two categories of extramarital progeny reflected the dictates of “social reality,” and, specifically, “the existence in Chile of very distinct classes.” Because the status of “simply illegitimate” was easier to obtain but accorded no inheritance rights, it was intended, the author explained, as an expedited legal option for the poor, for whom child support was important and inheritance largely moot.Footnote ⁴⁹ Although this practical consideration may have been justified, it also preserved the logic by which filiation law ordered class inequality.

Moreover, even as the reform subtly recalibrated the meanings of natal categories, it did not alter the radical consecration of paternal will that was at the heart of civil law's construction of paternity. The status of natural child continued to be “voluntary, because, though initiated by the child, it has no origin other than the will of the father.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Although simple illegitimacy could in theory be established against paternal will, in practice the conditions for this to occur proved so restrictive that it too remained purely voluntary. Civil law thus reinstantiated an understanding of paternity as volitional rather than declarative, as social rather than biological. Fifteen years later, an exhaustive study by a University of Concepción legal team concluded the law was “totally ineffectual” in according children the right to establish illegitimate parentage.Footnote ⁵¹

Following these reforms, natal politics seem to have largely disappeared from public discussion. Little was written about the issue in succeeding decades, a notable exception being the Concepción study, which proposed a modest reform that went nowhere. Meanwhile, the Code's prohibition of paternity investigation and the power of fathers to grant or withhold legal kinship were faithfully observed in the everyday practice of the courts. Extant judicial documentation from the period 1930 to 1998 suggests that suits to establish paternity and secure support for unrecognized children were almost never successful.Footnote ⁵² A government study found that between 1980 and 1992, a total of only twenty-two such suits were filed in the thirty civil courts of Santiago, a city of approximately 4,000,000 people.Footnote ⁵³

Such statistics cannot account for possible extrajudicial mechanisms for enforcing paternal responsibility. Aside from the likely existence of community pressure on wayward fathers, a growing phalanx of social workers arbitrated disputes over paternal support on the margins of the court.Footnote ⁵⁴ Still, the rigid constraints of the law set the terms for these extrajudicial interactions. As one social worker noted in the 1960s, it was difficult to convince fathers to recognize their offspring if they had previously consulted someone knowledgeable about the law, because the fathers inevitably learned they could not be legally obligated to do so.Footnote ⁵⁵

As we have seen, natal reform in Latin America often emerged in the context of midcentury populist-democratic initiatives. Chile, also, experienced its popular-democratic moment, embodied in the Popular Front government (1936–1941) and a series of popular center-left coalition governments thereafter. Why, therefore, was the tenor of law and judicial practice in Chile so much more cautious and conservative than elsewhere? There are several possible explanations. One was that at the very moment the plight of extramarital children was being taken up by Latin American reformers as a form of class vindication, Chile's high illegitimacy rates had, as was mentioned, begun a steep decline. This trend, which authorities of all political stripes regarded with relief, may have alleviated any sense of urgency about the issue. Newly organized popular sectors apparently ignored the issue as well, perhaps because poor, illegitimate children and their mothers fit awkwardly within their imaginary gendered political framework. For these sectors, the cradle of working-class militancy and virtue was the patriarchal family, composed of the husband-father-worker and his dependent wife and children.Footnote ⁵⁶

Meanwhile, Chile's vaunted constitutional stability may have worked against public consideration of the issue. In contrast to the many examples we have seen elsewhere in the region, Chile had no new constitutions between 1925 and 1980. Hence, children's equality lacked the political forum that elsewhere vaulted it into a broadly conceived, public debate about civic and social rights. Instead, the reform of family law in Chile remained a technical issue in the hands of a small coterie of legal experts who designed the modifications to the civil code.Footnote ⁵⁷ The author of the 1952 reform of the Civil Code praised “the good sense” exhibited by Congress when it passed the reform without debate, “because bills of this nature…cannot be the objects of a detailed discussion in Chambers that are political in character.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Here was a vision of filiation reform as a technical, legal matter sapped of the far-reaching associations with citizenship and equality that it acquired in other mid-twentieth-century Latin American contexts. Nor was Chilean civil law particularly amenable to reform. Taking constancy as a sign of its modernity, Chilean legal culture prided itself on its stability. The venerated 1855 Civil Code was at the heart of this nationalist self-fashioning. Piecemeal reforms were one thing, but a thoroughgoing revision of the fundamental bases of family law seemed neither advisable nor necessary.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, family distinctions had become such an entrenched feature of the Chilean cultural landscape, so intimately bound up with class and status hierarchies, that the transformation of filiation law threatened power relations well beyond the family itself. Although an exploration of class structures in Chile and Latin America is beyond the scope of this article, it seems that in Chile, family—understood in both its legal and social dimensions—became particularly central to the demarcation of status differences, class categories, and social dependencies.Footnote ⁵⁹ This was not because of the persistence of some “traditional,” colonial, Catholic moral ethos; Chilean filiation law was buttressed instead by the modern liberal logic of free will, privacy, and contract. Therefore, mid-twentieth-century jurists tinkered with the most egregious injustices of the Civil Code's treatment of illegitimacy but left the organizing logic of paternal will, social paternity, and natal inequality intact. In 1997, with filiation reform stalled by intense resistance in the Senate, one progressive congressman explained, “to make all children equal is a change in the power structures of society.”Footnote ⁶⁰

His comment could easily be extended from the Senate of the 1990s to the history of natal politics in modern Chile, and Latin America. It is not by chance that the single initiative to grant natal equality was championed by the leftist government of President Salvador Allende (1970–73), who envisioned a revolutionary transformation of Chile's economic and political structures. Echoing earlier popular-democratic initiatives, Allende's proposal declared natal reform to be “the indispensable basis for the formation of a new morality inspired in values of solidarity and social justice, banishing forever the individualism that inspired the bulk of civil law.”Footnote ⁶¹ The proposal was under discussion in the Chamber of Deputies when the 1973 coup d'etat triggered the death of Allende and the collapse of democracy, inaugurating almost two decades of military rule. Legal reform would not be revisited again until after the return to democracy.Footnote ⁶² When it was, the class valences attached to filiation would re-emerge, although in a new historical context they would find different expression. Chile's trajectory of reform may have differed from that in other countries, but this very difference demonstrates the imbrication of filiation law, class politics, and social citizenship that has characterized Latin America's twentieth century.

Reforming Chilean Filiation Law at the End of the Millenium

In 1990, a peaceful transition process heralded the end of the 17 year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Chileans elected a coalition composed of the centrist Christian Democrats and parties on the left, and headed by President Patricio Aylwin. The coalition took as its mandate the task of deepening the democratic foundations of Chilean society after the traumas of authoritarian rule, while simultaneously retaining the neoliberal economic model that the regime had put in place. As with earlier instances of filiation reform in Latin America—in Argentina under Perón, in Guatemala during the “democratic spring,” Bolivia's populist experiment in the 1930s, and in Chile itself in the 1970s under Allende—filiation reform would be championed by a self-styled democratizing regime at a moment of political opening. The transition from authoritarianism formed a crucial historical backdrop for debates over legal reform: its proponents would portray natal justice for children as a natural, logical step in a broad process of democratic transformation involving not just the political system but the very fabric of Chilean society.

However, the milieu that shaped debates over filiation law in Chile in the 1990s differed in critical ways from earlier hemispheric cycles of reform. For whereas in the past, popular-democratic initiatives were accompanied by populist, state-led economic models, the Chilean initiative took place in a neoliberal era of state retrenchment and privatization. As many critics have observed, Chile's precocious, fundamentalist experiment with free-market reform under Pinochet not only produced an economic system that became a model globally but also left a profound mark on Chilean public culture and individual subjectivity.Footnote ⁶³ Notions of self-reliance, individual responsibility, freedom, and private property, all concepts associated with this neoliberal construct, pervaded the filiation debates. In several instances, these ideas had clear antecedents in nineteenth century discussions of illegitimacy, but gained new resonance in the contemporary neoliberal milieu. Although such ideas were usually espoused by opponents of reform, they also appeared in the arguments of advocates. Meanwhile, class allusions infused these as past debates on filiation law, but they did so more quietly: now reformers tended to avoid open appeals to social justice, and opponents only obliquely referenced the patrimonial issues at stake.

Filiation reform appeared on the legislative agenda almost immediately following the re-establishment of Congress in March 1990.Footnote ⁶⁴ Within 6 months, members of Congress had introduced the first of four separate bills to reform filiation law.Footnote ⁶⁵ In each case, the bills would emerge only to become ensnared in the thorny landscape of legislative politics. Finally, in 1993, President Aylwin presented a fifth bill involving a complex and comprehensive reform of the Civil Code's filiation regime. The initiative was subsequently taken up by his successor, President Eduardo Frei, and with the strong backing of the executive, shepherded through Congress by representatives of the newly established Ministry of Women’s Affairs.

It would take 5 years for the legislation to wind its way through Congress, where it sparked intense controversy and met stalwart resistance from conservatives, particularly in the Senate. Dozens of witnesses, ranging from scholars from Chile's main law schools to theologians and ecclesiastics, weighed in on the proposal, which generated ongoing press coverage as well as an intense media campaign by the government. The bill went through repeated revisions and amendments, including, at one point, a 452 page report of proposed changes by a Senate commission that came close to killing some of its chief provisions. This contentious and protracted process would ultimately culminate in a reform that, although incomplete, would nevertheless be hailed by both supporters and critics as a transcendental revolution in Chilean family law. The debates surrounding natal equality exemplified the post-transition political moment in which they occurred, but also reflected the astonishing historical persistence of certain ideas about family and class in Chilean, and Latin American, law and society.

For proponents, the reform embodied several key principles. Most importantly, it would abolish discrimination and ensure equality for all children regardless of natal status, including equal rights to material support and inheritance as well as the right to know their origins. The reform also addressed the social stigma of illegitimacy by eliminating degrading notations of natal condition from birth certificates. Innocent children would no longer be penalized for the transgressions of their parents. Finally, the bill redefined not only paternity but other kin relations. Whereas in the prevailing legal regime even recognized natural children had no legal relationship with their paternal grandparents, aunts, and uncles, the bill established a juridical bond between extramarital children and their extended kin that was no different from that for legitimate ones. Thus, the law gave fathers to extramarital children and also inserted these children into a broad family network.Footnote ⁶⁶

In Congress, in the press, and in civil society, supporters of filiation reform presented it as a self-evident and long-overdue corrective to the unjust and atavistic legal structure. Family law, they argued, was hopelessly out of sync with the realities of modern Chilean society and in violation of both the constitutional mandate of equality before the law and various international rights conventions to which Chile was a recent signatory.Footnote ⁶⁷ Above all, the case for reform was couched in the language of democracy. One women's rights group condemned existing laws as an “antidemocratic aberration,” declaring “equality between people without distinction of birth, sex, race, religion, or civil state [estado civil] is an indissoluble principle in the construction of a just and democratic society.” At stake in the reform was, therefore “the equality of rights among future citizens.”Footnote ⁶⁸ One senator echoed this invocation, declaring “what should be sought with this legal change is justice for that forty-three percent of our citizens [born extramaritally], justice that is not necessarily found in the existing legal framework…How will we achieve a solid democracy…if we have forty-three percent of children growing up, being educated, and developing in fear and uncertainty?”Footnote ⁶⁹

In making these arguments, proponents of reform drew on a lexicon borrowed from opposition politics and human rights discourse during and after the dictatorship. The existing legal structure allowed for “impunity”: a term commonly used by human rights activists to call for prosecution of the dictatorship's crimes. Filiation reform would provide for “truth” and “justice”: again, terms that resonated deeply with the human rights struggles of the previous two decades. For supporters, Chile's violation of international legal norms governing children's rights harked back to its status as global human rights pariah during the military dictatorship. Clearly the language of democracy, equality, citizenship, and rights enjoyed a near hegemonic moral and political legitimacy. It was the tremendous power of these principles at this particular historical juncture, and the reformers' successful appropriation of them, that explains the success of a bill that provoked profound unease among some of the most economically and politically powerful sectors of Chilean society.

Critics countered the case for natal equality with a formidable arsenal of moral and philosophical counterarguments that focused on how making all children equal would weaken marriage and the family. If reformers invoked the constitutional guarantee of equality before the law, opponents invoked Article 2 of the Constitution, which declared family “the fundamental nucleus of society” and directed the state to protect it. They further critiqued their opponents' paeans to equality as reductionist: the reform erred in seeking to equalize situations that were, in reality, different. As a conservative bishop put it, “To equalize that which is different is unjust.”Footnote ⁷⁰ If illegitimate children suffered a diminished position in society, it was as a result of the intrinsic disadvantages of their natal situation, not the law's treatment of that situation. As jurists at the Catholic University put it, their unfavorable status was “not a punishment” but an unfortunate “fact of nature.”Footnote ⁷¹ One analysis even likened illegitimacy to “a congenital disease or a physical defect”: a lamentable circumstance that was not the fault of the victim, but one that the law could not remedy in any meaningful sense.Footnote ⁷² All children enjoyed ontological equality as human beings, these critics argued, but that did not make them equal in relation to the family. What is more, by attempting to remedy illegitimates' legal status, the bill would destroy a powerful incentive to procreate within wedlock, thereby undermining marriage and the family and fomenting the birth of even more extramarital children.

For conservatives, law's function was essentially pedagogical; rather than recognizing social realities it should project an ideal family to which Chilean society could aspire. In aping legal trends observed elsewhere, they warned, Chile slighted its own cultural values and storied legal tradition and invited the familial disintegration so apparent in more “advanced” countries. One editorial warned that “permissive legislation” elsewhere had led to the scourges of modernity: “violence, drug addiction, delinquency, homosexuality, abortion, alcoholism, suicide and AIDS.”Footnote ⁷³ In this line of reasoning, Chile's discriminatory filiation regime was to be defended in the name of legal nationalism, cultural tradition, and societal preservation.

Chile's Reform in Comparative and Historical Perspective

The debate over natal politics in the 1990s raises the question of why Chile took so long to adopt social and legal principles embraced elsewhere in the region a half century earlier. And why, when finally proposed, did they encounter such tenacious resistance? One obvious explanation is that the Pinochet dictatorship froze the progress of social legislation during its 17 year tenure, leaving intact anachronistic legal structures, including that governing natal status. Undoubtedly this argument has some merit. Political scientists have shown how Chile's authoritarian government impeded the development of gender-based and family legislation.Footnote ⁷⁴ As mentioned, a proposal to reform filiation law had been on the table when the coup transpired. What is more, even after the return to democracy, the legacy of authoritarianism lived on in the form of nine unelected “institutional” senators (of a total of forty-seven), appointed by the outgoing dictatorship, who formed a conservative voting bloc.Footnote ⁷⁵ In the protracted debates over reform, several members of this group were outspoken opponents.Footnote ⁷⁶

However, the power and legacy of the dictatorship, however strong, go only so far in explaining the faltering trajectory of natal reform.Footnote ⁷⁷ A comparative historical perspective suggests that reticence surrounding such reforms long predated the ascent of Pinochet. As we have seen, most Latin American countries passed significant reforms of filiation law in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, so that by the time reforms were proposed in Chile in 1973 (prior to the coup), supporters already considered them belated. As Allende declared, “for a long time it has been suggested that all children…should be equal before the law.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Another explanation for the resistance is the enduring power of the Catholic church. It is commonly asserted that in post-Pinochet Chile, the church has enjoyed outsized political power because of the moral capital it accumulated during the dark days of the dictatorship, when Catholic authorities spoke out against human rights abuses. Indebted to an alliance forged during those years, the center-left ruling coalition—which included the Christian Democrats—was reluctant to press for legislation on gender, family, and sexuality displeasing to the church. Such reasoning explains not only resistance to natal reform but also why Chile had no divorce law until 2004, and why it continues to have one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the region.Footnote ⁷⁹

In this argument, the church's defense of “traditional” marriage, the family, and, by extension, natal discrimination, is predictable. The Archbishops of Concepción and Puerto Montt and the Bishops of Rancagua and Valparaíso publicly opposed the bill,Footnote ⁸⁰ as did the Bishop of San Bernardo, Orozimbo Fuenzalida Fuenzalida, who expressed his reservations in much-cited letters to the largest Chilean daily El Mercurio, and in a lengthy statement read on the floor of the Senate: “I would like future generations when they study the history of [this] law…to know that we Catholics did what we could to avoid the evils we will come to regret.”Footnote ⁸¹ Beyond the ecclesiastical hierarchy, many of the law professors who came out against the reform were affiliated with the law faculty of the Catholic University. Significantly, several prominent critics can be traced to Opus Dei, the ultraconservative Catholic lay group that enjoys a significant following among Chilean elites.Footnote ⁸²

However, attributing entrenched opposition to the bill to a conservative church turns out to be a simplification, not least because the bill was sponsored by Aylwin and then Frei, both Christian Democrats. “The church” hardly constituted a monolithic foe of the reform. There existed no official Catholic position on natal equality, and different religious authorities staked out widely divergent positions that more or less mirrored the fault lines of the debate in general. The Archbishop of Santiago, the Bishop of Punta Arenas, a conservative cardinal serving as president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, and the prominent Jesuit theologian and ethicist Tony Mifsud all came out in favor of the reform.Footnote ⁸³ In a controversial appearance in Congress, Mifsud argued that in assessing the moral bases of filiation law, the ends (protecting marriage and family) did not justify the means (violating the basic rights and dignity of innocent children). His argument was widely invoked by parliamentarians during the protracted debates, presumably because they found his reasoning compelling, but also because they sought public confirmation that the reform did not contravene Catholic morality. As the bill entered a final round of contentious debate in the Senate, the Chilean Episcopal Conference released an ideologically capacious statement that reminded legislators of their duty both to “give solidity to the constitution of the family” and also to ensure the “equal dignity and rights of every child.” The statement was widely interpreted as obliquely endorsing the bill.Footnote ⁸⁴ Ultimately, according to one analyst, any influence the church as an institution might have exerted over the fate of the reform was nullified by the deep divisions within it.Footnote ⁸⁵

What is more, antagonism toward natal rights emerged not just from conservative Catholic sectors but from other ideological quarters as well. Although critics tended to emphasize the protection of marriage and family in their public opposition to the bill, another set of arguments, which we might characterize as (neo)liberal, also circulated. These arguments drew on the sanctity of individual freedom and economic liberty, and if they had powerful resonance in the Chile of the late twentieth century, they were by no means new, recapitulating nineteenth century treatments of filiation law. One pro-reform senator alluded to these ideological antecedents when he chastised “those who possess a great capacity to believe in economic liberty, but restrict other liberties and responsibilities.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Such a position challenged opposition to reform, but, notably, accepted the critics' terms of debate, in which liberty and responsibility were the metrics of good legislation.

According to (neo)liberal arguments, the filiation bill erred not because of its consequences for marriage, family, and morality, but because it violated the individual's economic freedom to dispose of his (and it was almost always a masculine “his”) patrimony as desired. As one conservative intellectual summarized the argument, filiation reform compromised freedom because although progenitors might have a moral obligation to support and recognize their extramarital offspring, it was not the state's role to enforce this obligation.Footnote ⁸⁷ Here was a bald statement of unfettered liberal freedom that echoed with almost perfect pitch the nineteenth century arguments about illegitimate paternity.

Perhaps the most outspoken proponent of this line of reasoning was Liberty and Development (Libertad y Desarrollo), a high-profile conservative think tank dedicated “to promoting liberty in the political, economic, and social realms.” Defending the principle of testamentary freedom (libertad de testar), a Liberty and Development position paper argued that the law should “make flexible the facility that people have to dispose of their assets after their death” and “to attempt to materialize the intentions of [the individual] if they made a will.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Natal equality compromised the testator's free will by mandating equal shares for extramarital offspring in all cases. Where moral opposition to the bill dwelled on its unconstitutional contravention of family integrity, Liberty and Development argued that filiation reform violated the constitution's protection of private property.Footnote ⁸⁹

(Neo)liberal preoccupations with individual freedom were never far from issues of property. The legitimate family was simultaneously a patrimonial family; described by its defenders in terms of its moral features and legal status, it also evinced particular class attributes that were acknowledged only obliquely. As such, arguments about protecting marriage and the family had strong, if often veiled, class implications, which became more explicit in liberal arguments about free will. Placing the Chilean debates in historical perspective, we can discern the extent to which class interests subtly informed these, as all discussions of filiation in modern Latin America.

Such interests were evident in a scenario that haunted discussions of paternity in 1995 as in 1850: that of the legitimate family whose patrimonial interests were threatened by the claims of the husband's extramarital child. The argument was summarized by a conservative bishop: “The patrimony of a family results from the collaboration and cooperation of all who comprise it, and it does not seem fair that the fruit of an illicit act (adultery), extracts a part equal to that of the legitimate children.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Although it was not necessarily stated, this family was clearly assumed to be economically well off and the extramarital progeny of a correspondingly lower status. The scenario thus raised the specter of iniquitous speculation, of paternity suits filed for “reasons of economic retribution more than…considerations of the child's identity or of an affective nature.”Footnote ⁹¹ It was apparently this perceived threat to legitimate family members that led the Senate to introduce into the bill provisions improving the succession rights of widows.Footnote ⁹²

As we have seen, the trope of the illegitimate interloper had long been a staple of paternity debates. This was so even as adulterous progeny, in the 1850s, as in the 1990s, almost certainly accounted for a tiny proportion of extramarital births. In the latter period, available demographic data show that approximately half of extramarital births corresponded to convivientes (unmarried, cohabitating partners) and a growing number to adolescent mothers; in a significant number of cases, unmarried parents formed a relationship following the birth.Footnote ⁹³ But if the adulterous interloper was probably relatively rare statistically speaking, the figure loomed large in the imaginations of critics, presumably because of the outsized threat such scenarios could pose to the reproduction of class status among a specific set of elite families. Such scenarios circulated as narratives in the broader culture as well. Once the reform passed, of the thousands of paternity suits filed in Chilean courts, those broadcast in the press invariably involved poor individuals spurned by wealthy fathers whose patrimonial claims unleashed havoc among legitimate kin. With headlines such as “The Landowner's Bastard” and “Unrecognized Son of Estate Owner Named Heir of Fortune,” the coverage evoked the colorful plots of telenovelas.Footnote ⁹⁴ Coded classism likewise figured prominently in post-reform suits. After the well-known sociologist and writer Pablo Huneeus recognized an adulterous child in 2004, his wife filed a suit challenging the child's paternity and suggesting that her husband had been the object of politically motivated blackmail. “In an older couple, both passionate about Greek philosophy and classical music,” stated her suit, “the eruption of a young person brought up in another sort of environment [formado en otro ambiente] necessarily causes tensions in the human relationship.”Footnote ⁹⁵ The class connotations of these contrasting cultural milieux were circumspect but unmistakable.

The consequences of such suits were not only economic, but also social. Again, just as in the nineteenth century, conservatives warned that reckless paternity investigation would lend itself to “abuses and extortions” and threaten “the honor of individuals and their families.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Even the sponsors of the bill—the president and the women's ministry—repeatedly assured that special safeguards would prevent frivolous lawsuits that could threaten “family peace and harmony.”Footnote ⁹⁷ For conservatives, the rights to patrimony, liberty, discretion, and reputation were so strong as to trump the rights of children. In a particularly bold statement of this position, Liberty and Development concluded: “against the right of the child to know his/her progenitor are the rights of people and families to their honor, privacy and stability.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Such arguments suggest the abiding power of liberal values of freedom and privacy, values that in turn served as a protective carapace for patrimonial interests.

A final commonality that some critiques of filiation reform shared with nineteenth-century antecedents was a tendency to draw a distinction between a volitional, social paternity and a biological one. Liberty and Development observed that social filiation, as distinct from biological filiation, encompassed “elements of affect, of responsibility, of the fact that a person wishes to assume paternity or maternity, etc.”Footnote ⁹⁹ This understanding echoed the nineteenth century position that blood alone was an insufficient condition for establishing kinship, which came into being only through paternal intention and the performance of certain social behaviors. Liberty and Development criticized the reform for privileging a narrowly biological paternity over and above its socially meaningful forms. Chilean filiation reform thus presents a highly paradoxical scenario in which conservatives marshaled a social constructivist concept of kinship in defense of the “traditional” family, even as reformers mobilized a “natural,” biological family to argue that all children had a right to the support of their progenitors.

Although the class allusions lurking in these critiques become conspicuous when they are read against nineteenth century antecedents, opponents of the bill generally avoided explicit references to class. In public discussions, they emphasized moral arguments about protecting marriage and the family; it was only in closed-door committee discussions that some legislators raised pointed questions about the threat that natal rights posed to patrimonial interests.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Significantly, one conservative public intellectual who explained the liberal argument about parental freedom to an inquiring researcher requested to be quoted anonymously.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Evidently opponents of reform recognized that these arguments had little political traction and chose to downplay them publicly.

Perhaps less obvious is the motivation of pro-reform legislators for eliding the class politics of natal reform. In private interviews with researchers, reformers also gestured to the patrimonial interests that motivated resistance to the bill, expressing the belief that beneath the cloak of family rhetoric, opposition to natal equality boiled down to fears about its threat to class privilege.Footnote ¹⁰² However, in public fora, these advocates doggedly stuck to more general arguments about democracy and equality. Meanwhile, because extramarital birth and extralegal family forms were disproportionately concentrated among the poor, natal rights could logically have been promoted as a measure targeted at Chile's notorious social inequality. But advocates largely avoided talking about the most obvious beneficiaries of the reform, namely, poor children and poor mothers. In a postauthoritarian society in which the traumas of political polarization were still fresh, even the left pointedly avoided discussions of class.Footnote ¹⁰³ Therefore, the children who would benefit from reform were generic children, not poor ones, just as the families who, according to opponents, would be threatened by it, were, likewise, generic, not wealthy ones. The elision is all the more striking when compared with discussions of natal politics at earlier historical moments, in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America, when struggles for natal equality were animated by open invocations of class and strident metaphors of class exclusion.

If both left and right eschewed mention of class, they both embraced another concept, this one derived from a (neo)liberal lexicon: individual responsibility. A recurring argument of natal reform's advocates was that it would encourage “responsible paternity” by making fathers legally liable for supporting all children they engendered.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ A mantra of Latin American public policies related to gender, ”responsible paternity” appealed to feminist aspirations for gender equity as well as neoliberal advocacy of self-reliance and individual accountability. Meanwhile, opponents, too, claimed that their position promoted responsibility, arguing that the lack of differentiation among children based on natal status would promote irresponsibility by encouraging people to procreate outside of marriage. Liberty and Development even argued that by empowering mothers to hold fathers accountable, the reform would inadvertently encourage female sexual irresponsibility.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Therefore, arguments for and against legal reform that apparently hinged on two entirely irreconcilable worldviews shared a common conceptual lexicon (responsibility) as well as common elisions (class).

Finally, if certain neoliberal concepts and sensibilities informed arguments on both sides of the debate over filiation reform, it is difficult to ignore the functionality of natal reform to a neoliberal economy and society. Across Latin America, as social safety nets have withered, families have taken on ever expanding welfare functions. “In the interests of bolstering self-reliance among the population,” write two scholars, “‘the family’ has increasingly been emphasized as a means of strengthening grassroots ‘social capital’ and bolstering survival in conditions of economic insecurity.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Chile has been no exception to these trends. Its precocious neoliberal experiment was characterized by a wide-ranging and aggressive privatization of social security, education, healthcare provision, and housing programs under Pinochet. The regime sharply curtailed a social welfare structure that had expanded progressively since the 1930s, and although per capita public social spending increased after the return to democracy, the free-market structures elaborated under Pinochet have remained largely intact.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In this context, the family in Chile, as elsewhere, has been called on “to compensate for the withdrawal of State protection.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Filiation reform served such policy objectives by expanding and strengthening legal kinship ties at the very moment that those ties were sustaining a heavier burden of social provision. For the first time in almost 150 years, Chilean civil law held fathers accountable for the material support of children they bore out of wedlock. And not only fathers: the reform also recognized an extended network of grandparents, aunts, and uncles who had previously had no legal relationship with extramarital children, even those recognized by their fathers. Given the proportion of Chilean children born out of marriage—more than 40% during the debates of the mid- to late 1990s, and more recently, in excess of 60%—the potential implications of this legal reform were far reaching.