After reading the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne I came to believe that Adultery is a terrible thing and can have very bad repercussions, especially in the early to mid 1700s. Back then committing adultery was a very serious offense to not the just the community but to your family also. Adultery used to destroy family relationships and to this day it still does. Adultery is also more of a religious problem but also goes into social and legal consequences. When it talks about social consequences it is things like being exposed to the whole town and everyone knows what you did, things were very strict when it came to adultery. Not only were you exposed but because adultery was taking so seriously, whoever committed …show more content…
The paternity of children born out of adultery has been seen as a major issue. Most countries nevertheless have a legal presumption that a woman's husband is the father of her children who were born during that marriage. 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 - such as a certain number of years from the birth of the child) Establishing correct paternity may have major legal implications. Children born out of adultery suffered. In France, for example, 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. France was forced to change it by a ruling of the European Court of Human Rights.There has been a trend of legally favoring the right to a relation between the child and its biological father, rather than preserving the appearance. For example 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 to see the