Short answer. Under the old Civil Code rule, a spouse sharing the estate with legitimate children and certain illegitimate children took the same share fixed in the preceding article. That classification no longer applies — the Family Code abolished it, and today the spouse's and children's shares follow Family Code Articles 163, 165 and 176.
What the law says
the share of the surviving spouse shall be the same as that provided in the preceding article
Civil Code, Article 898 — Spouse With Other Illegitimate Children. Read the full provision →
What the law says
illegitimate children other than acknowledged natural, or natural children by legal fiction
Civil Code, Article 898 — Spouse With Other Illegitimate Children. Read the full provision →
The rule as originally written
Article 898 addressed a specific concurrence: a surviving spouse sharing the estate with legitimate children or descendants, together with illegitimate children who were not acknowledged natural children, or natural children by legal fiction. In that situation, the Civil Code fixed the spouse's share as identical to the share set out in the immediately preceding article of the Code.
That cross-reference meant the spouse's portion was not computed from Article 898 in isolation — it borrowed directly from the rule for spouses sharing an estate with legitimate children and acknowledged natural children, treating the two situations as functionally the same for the surviving spouse's own legitime.
Why the old classification is gone
The Civil Code once split children born outside marriage into several categories — acknowledged natural children, natural children by legal fiction, and other illegitimate children — each with different inheritance rules. The Family Code did away with these distinctions. Every child born outside a valid marriage is now simply an illegitimate child, with one uniform set of successional rights, regardless of which of the old categories they would once have fallen under.
What controls the spouse's share today
Because Article 898 depended on a distinction that no longer exists, it cannot be applied as written. The applicable rules today are Articles 163, 165 and 176 of the Family Code, which govern filiation and the rights of illegitimate children, read together with the Civil Code's surviving succession provisions for computing the surviving spouse's legitime.
In practice, this means a family working out a surviving spouse's share where illegitimate children are involved should look to current filiation law first, then apply the Civil Code's succession framework, rather than treating Article 898's old wording as a standalone formula.
Why this matters for estate planning
Families who assume the old article still controls risk miscalculating shares, especially where a deceased spouse leaves both a first family and children from another relationship. Because the interaction between the Family Code's filiation rules and the Civil Code's succession provisions is technical, and because facts like acknowledgment and timing of birth can change the outcome, this is a computation best confirmed with a lawyer rather than worked out from the bare text of Article 898 alone.
Related provisions
- Civil Code, Article 898 — Spouse With Other Illegitimate Children
- Civil Code, Article 897 — Spouse With Acknowledged Natural Children
- Civil Code, Article 899 — Spouse, Ascendants and Illegitimate Children