For a couple of decades now, social scientists, journalists, and other observers of the human condition have been expressing alarm about social ills attendant to a growing notion that fathers are expendable. In an influential magazine article published in 1993, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead declared, “Divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth are transforming the lives of American children” (“Dan Quayle Was Right,” The Atlantic, Apr. 1993).
