Adultery

===Legal issues regarding paternity===
{{Further|Paternity law|Legitimacy (family law)}}
[[File:Jana2Navarra hlava.jpg|thumb|250 px|right|[[Joan II of Navarre]]{{snd}}her paternity and succession rights were disputed her whole life because her mother [[Margaret of Burgundy, Queen of France|Margaret of Burgundy]] was claimed to have committed adultery.]]
Historically, paternity of children born out of adultery has been seen as a major issue. Modern advances such as reliable [[contraception]] and [[DNA paternity testing|paternity testing]] have changed the situation (in Western countries). Most countries nevertheless have a legal presumption that a woman's husband is the father of her children who were born during that marriage. Although this is often merely a [[rebuttable presumption]], many jurisdictions have laws which restrict the possibility of legal rebuttal (for instance by creating a legal time limit during which paternity may be challenged{{snd}}such as a certain number of years from the birth of the child).<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.biojuris.com/natural/3-2-0.html |title=Natural Selection in Family Law |publisher=Biojuris.com |access-date=26 February 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304213345/http://www.biojuris.com/natural/3-2-0.html |archive-date=4 March 2016 |url-status=dead }}</ref> Establishing correct paternity may have major legal implications, for instance in regard to [[inheritance]].

Children born out of adultery suffered, until recently, adverse legal and social consequences. In [[France]], for instance, a law that stated that the inheritance rights of a child born under such circumstances were, on the part of the married parent, half of what they would have been under ordinary circumstances, remained in force until 2001, when France was forced to change it by a ruling of the [[European Court of Human Rights]] (ECtHR) (and in 2013, the ECtHR also ruled that the new 2001 regulations must be also applied to children born ''before'' 2001).<ref>{{cite web|url=http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/sites/eng/pages/search.aspx?i=001-116716#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-116716%22]}|title=HUDOC - European Court of Human Rights|work=coe.int}}</ref>

There has been, in recent years, a trend of legally favoring the right to a relation between the child and its biological father, rather than preserving the appearances of the 'social' family. In 2010, the ECtHR ruled in favor of a German man who had fathered twins with a married woman, granting him right of contact with the twins, despite the fact that the mother and her husband had forbidden him from seeing the children.<ref>[http://sim.law.uu.nl/SIM/CaseLaw/hof.nsf/d0cd2c2c444d8d94c12567c2002de990/db5e85a236de283dc1257803004974b7?OpenDocument] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140226171503/http://sim.law.uu.nl/SIM/CaseLaw/hof.nsf/d0cd2c2c444d8d94c12567c2002de990/db5e85a236de283dc1257803004974b7?OpenDocument|date=26 February 2014}}</ref>