Under-18 fathers will now be able to be legally recognised as parents after a legal anomaly was updated.

While the old law allowed mothers younger than 18 to be recognised as mothers, it didn’t grant the same right to fathers. Therefore, babies born to a father younger than 18 had to be registered as being born to a single mother with an unknown father.

This is despite the fact that the age of sexual consent has stood at 16 years old since 2018, with the law even allowing 16 and 17 year olds to get married with parental consent.

In 2022, PL MP Amanda Spiteri Grech flagged this legal anomaly in Parliament after encountering a 17-year-old man and a 16-year-old woman who were expecting a baby together.

The government agreed with her and proposed an update to the law, which passed its third reading in Parliament this week.

“I welcome the removal of the law that discriminated between under-18 mothers and fathers,” Spiteri Grech said.

“Politics puts you in touch with personal situations and it is our duty to help out. The closer you are to people, the more you realise how challenging life can be but it is very frustrating when you know you are right but the law doesn’t provide remedies to solve the injustice.”