I’m with Katie Roiphe in disliking the term “love child,” and for some of the same reasons. She really loses me here:

What, one wonders is more legitimate in 2011 about the children of married people than those of people too busy, distracted, or original to be married? . . . .
Stepping back, though, what is a tiny bit subversive and possibly appealing about the term is the faint suggestion that the love child has something more to do with love than the baby born in wedlock, who is in a certain sense just doing his job, fulfilling the natural and upstanding function of holy matrimony. On some level, the existence of the love child is testimony to some special energy on the planet, to someone doing something not necessarily sanctioned by the Bible, on his or her own time, out of some extra industry or aspiration.

Yup, there’s nothing more original, in 2011, than having a baby without being married.