It’s a clash of the titans – Prime Minister Freundel Stuart and legal luminary Sir Henry Forde, a former Attorney General.
And at the heart of the dispute is responsibility for outlawing bastardy in Barbados and for dramatically improving the status of women and children.
While Stuart credits his Democratic Labour Party’s “revolutionary” policies for achieving those landmarks, Sir Henry contends it was the Tom Adams administration that abolished bastardy through the 1980 Status of Children Reform Act and later used the Family Law Act to ensure that women enjoyed rights they never had before.
Stuart, in a recent address in Brooklyn to more than 200 guests of the Friends of Barbados (DLP) Association’s 25th anniversary dinner, said: “The Succession Act, which the Democratic Labour Party passed in 1975, that abolished the distinction between children born in wedlock and those outside of wedlock, abolished the term bastard (and if they had not abolished it, I would still be a bastard); and made available to women, single women who cohabited with single men for five years or more, the same rights as women who were actually in a marital relationship.”
Read the full story in today’s SATURDAY SUN.
