The availability of legal separation and annulment of marriage under the Family Code enhances, rather than deters, the need to legalize absolute divorce.

If legal separation and annulment of marriage are allowed, then the fuller relief or remedy of divorce is legal, logical and reasonable.

The remedies of legal separation and annulment of marriage are inadequate to completely liberate distressed spouses from irremediably broken and dead marriages.

In legal separation, while the spouses’ separation is legalized, they are prohibited from contracting a second marriage.

The consequence is the spawning of illegal second or more cohabitations where the parties are liable for adultery or concubinage.

Annulment of marriage as provided for in the Family Code refers only to the voiding of marital unions due to causes “existing at the time of the marriage.”

Annulment does not cover grounds which happen or supervene after the solemnization of the marriage like insanity, impotency and affliction with a sexually transmissible disease of either spouse, and grounds for legal separation due to marital infidelity, abandonment, addiction to drugs and alcohol, violence or grossly abusive conduct, imprisonment of more than six years, homosexuality, bigamy, and attempt against the life of a spouse.

The “after the marriage” grounds are more numerous causes for the break up of marriages beyond repair, which the State must positively address.

The inadequacies of legal separation and annulment of marriage are answered by the legalization of absolute divorce based on grounds which occur during the marriage and which allows the divorced couples to remarry even as the custody and support of the children and alimony for the innocent spouse are likewise decreed or secured.

Even as absolute divorce is instituted, the concerned couples still have the option of filing for legal separation or annulment of marriage under the Family Code which provisions are not repealed.

Incidentally, the Family Code, which contains provisions on annulment and legal separation, was enacted on July 6, 1987, five months after the ratification on February 2, 1987 of the current Constitution, notwithstanding that the 1987 Constitution has adopted tenets protective of marriage and the family.

EDCEL C. LAGMAN