Earlier this month, the ruling coalition put together a bill to change part of the Civil Code that determines the paternity of a child under certain circumstances. The planned revision, which editorial writers supported for its acknowledgment of practical reality, nevertheless split the Liberal Democratic Party along ideological lines, and the bill, which was expected to sail through the Diet, now seems to be dead in the water.
Article 772 of the Civil Code, which was enacted in 1898, states that a child born to a woman within 300 days of her divorce is legally regarded as the child of her ex-husband, even if the woman has remarried in the meantime and her new husband is the biological father. Though this law has been a source of contention for decades, it has never seriously been challenged within the government until now. In recent months the media has focused on a number of cases in which the names of newborn babies of remarried women were placed in their ex-husbands' family registries. Some politicians took note.
These lawmakers and the media in general regard the law as an anachronism that makes no practical sense nowadays, especially given the rise in the divorce rates and improvements in medicine that make premature birth less dangerous and thus more common, meaning more babies of remarried women arrive before the 300-day cutoff point. Even the usually conservative Yomiuri Shimbun said that the law should be changed to conform to current conditions.