Taken into Custody:
The War Against Fatherhood,
Marriage, and the Family
by Stephen Baskerville

"Each divorce is the death of a small civilization," wrote novelist Pat Conroy. "No-fault" divorce, which 50 states adopted between 1969 and 1985, means that one spouse, without the other’s consent, can destroy the "small civilization" the two have built together. In two-thirds of divorces, it is the wife who does so; and she can do it with the near certainty that she, not her husband, will win custody of their children.

When a father loses access to his children, uninformed onlookers may tacitly assume he must have done something wrong. They assume that in our free country, a father couldn’t lose his children for no good reason. Taken into Custody disproves that myth. The family court system has the power to break up families, estrange parents from their children, and enforce one spouse’s will over the other’s.

In most states, a mother can get a restraining order against a father without demonstrating that he has done anything wrong. As months go by and it is illegal for the father to come near his own children, the already small likelihood of joint custody steadily decreases. Family courts subvert due process by punishing fathers who have not broken any law.

Baskerville shows that policies intended to protect abandoned low-income wives and mothers have actually created huge financial incentives for middle- and upper-class women to divorce their husbands. Family courts create a functional "police state" at the mother’s service, enforcing her right to her children over her husband’s, and giving her control over most of her husband’s income through child support payments. The subtitle of one popular divorce book for women describes the process: Judges, Lawyers, and Therapists Share Winning Strategies on How to Keep the Kids, the Cash, and Your Sanity.

The "war against fathers" is also a massive expansion of state power. "The criminalization of the father is, quite simply, unavoidable so long as we are willing to enforce unilateral divorce with children," writes Baskerville. "With the father an outlaw, the children may be in the 'custody' of the mother . . ., but it is more accurate to say that ultimately they have become wards of the state, which establishes what amounts to a puppet government within the family." Every American needs to know about the horrifying abuses of power this book exposes.

(Cumberland House, 2007, 368 pps., $24.95)