Fragmenting Fatherhood: A Socio-Legal Study (review)

Normally, on an 8:00 p.m. flight from Montreal to Vancouver, I would read a novel or indulge in a video, after a brief, ultimately futile, effort to do some work. Not this time, since the work foray took the form of reading Fragmenting Fatherhood, by UK socio-legal scholars Richard Collier and Sally Sheldon.¹ This book held my attention well beyond the flight's dinner hour (what dinner, on Air Canada, you may ask). Well written and extremely well documented, this book situates the (legal) fragmentation of fatherhood within the history of critical and feminist thought on "the family." It reflects an excellent collaboration between a scholar of masculinity, fatherhood, and law, who situates his work within feminist literature-indeed, cites it generously-and a feminist scholar who works primarily on medical and reproductive law. This book is their second collaborative product published by Hart Publishing, the first being an edited collection of essays on the fathers' rights movement.²

Fragmenting Fatherhood is not actually a family law text so do not stop reading if you do not regard yourself as a family lawyer! Instead, it works across several different fields-natural and assisted reproduction, fatherhood within intact families, post-separation fatherhood, and unmarried fatherhood-to argue that the idea of fatherhood has become fragmented, just as the idea of "family" has become fragmented over the past couple of decades.³ Despite the ongoing power of the ideology of the family, there is no question that the traditional framework provided by the laws of marriage, parenthood, and the (hetero)sexual family has been disturbed by developments such as divorce, unmarried cohabitation, assisted reproduction, and same-sex parenting. For instance, the legal status of a father is no longer established mainly through a man's legal relationship with a birth mother (for example, marriage). Assisted reproduction, in particular, has produced the possibility of different aspects of a fatherhood role being shared, potentially, among a number of men. In a post-divorce scenario, the work of fathering can be shared between a birth father and a step-father who both play roles in a child's life. As well, the very idea of fatherhood has become somewhat amorphous, with some using it to denote the "father as progenitor" and others the "father as carer." Finally, fragmenting fatherhood refers to specifically legal trends to reinforce the legal status of a genetic father at the same time as some social fathers are being legally recognized. Overall, Collier and Sheldon argue that no one kind of fatherhood is now recognized in law and policy. They also recognize the extent to which debates about fatherhood have become increasingly politicized, in particular, as some groups (for example, fathers' rights groups) express anxiety about a perceived decline in paternal authority and the collapse of marriage as a dominant social institution. Moreover, the fragmentation of family and fatherhood described earlier can have both positive and negative consequences, particularly if one analyzes it from a feminist perspective.

Feminist work holds pride of place in Fragmenting Fatherhood, despite-or perhaps because of-the authors' stated intention to provide a socio-legal study of fatherhood. The book's key relevance to Canadian feminist legal scholars is that it raises questions about fathers' rights and women's reproductive rights in the face of changes that challenge the notion that men's and women's roles in reproduction and parenting are radically distinct. Chapter 2, for instance, suggests that the responsibilities of fatherhood, hitherto often assumed to be the mainly indirect support of mothers by financial, emotional, or other means, are shifting to more primary roles that may arise even prior to the birth of a child (for example, in relation to responsibility for contraception or fetal health). These new responsibilities, in turn, raise complex questions about whether the legal system should prioritize the rights of the mother (because of her role in gestation, for instance, or caregiving) or whether parenthood should be an entirely gender-neutral...