Parenthood and Parental Responsibility of the Underage Parents in the Era of Childrenʹs Rights

Abstract

Legal status of the underage parent comprises conflicting roles of a parent and a child in the same person. It triggers many legal issues primarily revolved around underage parents' capability to exercise parental responsibility. Using their natural ability to bear the child, the underage parents actually step out of the boundaries of childhood moving into to world of adulthood despite of the fixed age limits accepted by the law in order to separate, somehow artificially, those two domains. Since life usually precedes the law, giving birth to a child by the underage parents creates a legal mess where the rights and interests of the various participants are at stake. However, the lawmakers are torn between two basic ideas to protect the rights of the newborn and to enable natural parents to acquire parental responsibility so they can perform their duties as parents. This has been shown to be quite complicated task involving the consideration of different concepts such as reproductive liberty, legal parenthood, active legal capacity and child's rights. Those issues have been considered by the author having in mind the complex picture of child's rights, comparative law and national substantive family law rules. The attention is also paid to the solutions proposed by the draftmakers of Serbian Civil Code which could be adopted in the near future.