Few parts of the law are better than family law to mirror the cultural underpinning of law's development and change. In this paper some reflections are made with special reference to the position of children born out of wedlock. For significant reasons I refer to Sweden, as during the last four or five decades the country has gained an entrenched reputation for being one of the most secularised in the Western world - a view strongly supported by the findings of the value map. To the foreign observer, the exceedingly low commitment to traditional values and the absence of religion in everyday life may perhaps seem quintessentially Swedish. However, this is true for the last half century only. Contrary to popular perceptions about Swedish pornography, sin, social technology and disappearance of traditional family values, post-war Swedish society of the late s was still affirming solid conservative family ideals even though there were influential radical undercurrents mainly from pressure groups to the left of the political spectrum. Even in the s neither liberals nor social democrats accepted free cohabitation; society almost demanded that young couples should first marry and then have children. By the mid-s only ten per cent of the children were born out of wedlock. As these percentages indicate, the Swedish welfare state of the s was a society where social control still prevailed.4 A decade later, the ten per cent group had increased to almost fifteen and in it had risen to twenty-one per cent. The aftermath of the revolutionary s opened a floodgate. In, the number of children born by unmarried mothers 116 Swedish family law: an indicator of the most advanced post-modern society? 4 Y. Hirdman, Att lägga livet till rätta: Studier i svensk folkhemspolitik. (Stockholm 1989: Carlsson.) - A. Agell, Samboende utan äktenskap: Rättsläge och rättspolitik, 18-19. (Stockholm 1982: Liber.)
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