The long history of family fragility notwithstanding, how-ever, sophisticated scholarship now identifies divorce as asource of instability particularly threatening to children’swell being. Sociological and ethnographic studies appearingsince the mid-1990s suggest that the fate of the “family oforigin” is of systematic and enduring importance to manycentral features of children’s lives, and that the damageensuing from divorce has a strong tendency to reach wellinto adulthood, at least in contemporary American culture. Judith S. Wallerstein, Julia M. Lewis, and Sandra Blakesleeargue in The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce (2000) thatdivorce impairs children’s ability to consolidate their identi-ties as mature adults and to form their own enduringintimate relations, in a way that is apparently different andseemingly graver than other forms of familial disruption andreconfiguration. Some of this damage would seem to be afunction of features that often attend divorce: the subse-quent inability of parents to provide reliable, timely, andwell-directed care, the tendency of noncustodial parents—particularly fathers—to attenuate or even abandon theirconnections to their children, economic losses leading to areduced ability of custodial parents to spend time withchildren, and so forth.
Some damage, however, apparently isattributable to divorce itself. Even when parents divorce relatively amicably, maintain continual and substantial en-gagement in their children’s lives, do not require theirchildren to “take care of them” emotionally in inappropriateways, and are able to support their children’s fiscal andemotional needs without interruption, children undergolosses in their expectations and abilities concerning themaintenance of their own long-term intimate relationships,and seem to suffer a measurable delay in their movementinto adulthood. These decrements seem to be of a differentand more severe character than the harms that affect child-ren who have grown up in families where the parents werecontinually unhappy but did not divorce.While many questions remain to be answered—forexample, why these harms seem to be more pernicious in theUnited States than in, say, Scandinavia; and whether di-vorces in which care is taken to protect the children areworse on the whole than other ways in which families havecome unglued throughout history—recent social scientificstudies make it difficult to regard divorce as a feature ofcontemporary life that children can simply get over.
These results may have implications for bioethics aswell as for healthcare practice and policy. Is the process oftransferring ever more intensive forms of care from hospitalto home made more morally suspect by the possibility thatchildren with divorce in their pasts will be less willing toprovide such attention with the consistency and qualityrequired for good health outcomes? Is the role of familymembers as presumptive proxy decision makers cast under acloud? Is the apparent willingness of many physicians and atleast some bioethicists to recognize family interests as rele-vant to medical choices rendered more problematic bythese data? And, given the emotionally complex, internallycontested, and structurally protean character of people’saffiliative and kinship patterns, what counts as a familyanymore, anyway?