In common law, legitimacy is the status of a child born to parents who are legally married to each other; and of a child who is born shortly after the parents' divorce. In canon and in civil law, the offspring of putative marriages have been considered legitimate children. Analogously, illegitimacy is the status of a child born to unmarried parents; contemporary usage of the term illegitimate child is infrequent, even in legal usage, example euphemisms are extramarital child and love child. The concept of legitimacy was formerly of great consequence, in that only a legitimate child could inherit the estate of the father. In the United States, in the early 1970s, a series of Supreme Court decisions abolished most common-law disabilities imposed upon bastardy (illegitimate-child status), as violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.