Since so many Christian zealots helped write Project 2025, you’d think we’d see more of what the prophets, the law, the psalms and the apostles all urge: caring for fatherless children and widows in poverty.
Tag: Divorce
When spouses legally dissolve a marriage, their experiences before, during and after are often shaped by gender.
Could You Be ‘Framed’? New Book Exposes How Domestic Abuse Victims Are Set Up in Family Court
In their groundbreaking new book, Framed: Women in the Family Court Underworld, Dr. Christine M. Cocchiola and Amy Polacko expose the gender biased injustice in family courts. Through the stories of 22 real women from the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia the authors shine a light on how women are accused, arrested, abused and can even lose custody of their children—to their abusers.
“Most people have no idea what really happens when you get divorced—until they find themselves entering the world of family court. It is an abuser’s playground,” said Polacko.
Surprised a Colorado Mom Was Jailed for Protecting Her Kids? Don’t Be.
Rachel Pickrel-Hawkins was jailed for objecting to court ordered “reunification therapy” that sought to mend the relationship between her children and their father, a man charged with sexually assaulting three of their daughters and physically abusing their son.
As a divorce coach and coercive control expert, who are both domestic abuse survivors, we see these mind boggling, trauma-inducing decisions by family courts every day. This Colorado mom could be any mom. That’s why it’s time that America deals with our family court crisis head on.
If Conservatives Want Stronger Marriages, They Should Look to Liberal Solutions
Conservative politicians are complaining about childless cat ladies, declining marriage rates, unstable families and single-parent households. Their strategy so far has been to ban abortion, offer families no real support, do nothing to help struggling Americans find greater financial stability, promote a deeply misogynistic worldview to young men, and then yell at young women that they need to get married and have babies. Shockingly, this is not working very well.
On the other side, liberals have de-emphasized marriage and the nuclear family as the primary organizing unit for society, while offering women and men alike more choices about when, how, and if to start families, and more support if they do. And while marriage and childbearing rates are down generally, the prototypical Democratic voter—the college-educated woman working for pay in or near a large city in a blue state—is more likely to find herself in a happy, stable marriage than the prototypical Republican voter.
This isn’t a coincidence.
Tradwives Are Doing Conservatives’ Work for Them
Project 2025 paints a picture of a future where all American women are tradwives.
Will Divorce Be the Next GOP Target Against Women?
For many women, divorce means escape. Right-wing Republicans like JD Vance and Mike Johnson are targeting it.
Vance said leaving “unhappy or even violent” marriages “didn’t work out for the kids,” suggesting that people trapped in violent marriages should stay in them to preserve family stability. You know what’s worse for children than divorce? Domestic violence.
It’s Been a Year Since Catherine Kassenoff’s Assisted Suicide. Has Anything Changed in Family Court?
After she lost custody of her three daughters in a divorce proceeding that labeled her behavior “harmful” and unhinged, Catherine Kassenoff decided to end her life in a Swiss assisted suicide facility on May 27, 2023.
“She couldn’t live without her children and the court was saying she couldn’t live with her children,” said Wayne Baker, the executor of Kassenoff’s estate, “so where did that leave her?”
Many in the family court reform movement thought the dramatic death of an astute legal mind like Catherine—who still couldn’t win in our backward system—would finally mark a watershed for reform. One year later, what has changed?
Texas Supreme Court Considers Taking Up Question of Whether Frozen Embryos Are People
The Texas Supreme Court is considering whether to take up a case that could have Alabama-esque impacts on in vitro fertilization in Texas.
What began as a Denton divorce has grown into a larger battle over whether a frozen embryo can be defined as a person. The court has not yet said whether it will take up the case, which centers on three frozen embryos created by Caroline and Gaby Antoun.
Earlier this year, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos qualify as people under the state’s wrongful death statute, leading fertility clinics to halt their work until the legislature stepped in and granted temporary protections. While the details are different, legal experts and fertility doctors say the results of this Texas case could be similar.
The Hypocrisy of a Post-Roe Mother’s Day
This Mother’s Day—like the countless that have come before it—conservative politicians who fancy themselves members of the party that upholds “family values” will send out social media posts praising the moms among us. They’ll wax poetic about the “decision” to become a mother and how it’s the “most selfless, most important job in the world.” Some may even go so far as to task their speech writers with crafting some moving message about how vital mothers are; how we’re raising the next generation of prolific thinkers and world leaders; how we should be revered “not just today, but every day.”
And in the post-Roe world they created with their anti-abortion policies that have forced people into motherhood, attacked IVF and fertility treatments, and left doctors terrified to treat pregnant patients to the point that women are slipping into comas, miscarrying in hospital lobby bathrooms and enduring unnecessary C-sections instead of receiving common abortion care, it will all be one big, giant pile of bullshit.
Elder Care Law Is Not Designed for Working Mothers in the Sandwich Generation
Being a working mom of children doing virtual school during the pandemic, also in the middle of a graduate degree, and suddenly caring for a delusional and aggressive senior parent, while being forced to educate every single business on what guardianship legally appointed me to do was overwhelming.
Why do businesses expect a senior citizen diagnosed with an irreversible disease of the mind to make financial or health decisions? Why wasn’t the court order enough? Because a woman with legal power isn’t enough.
Working mothers and adult daughters who make up the majority of the sandwich generation need the ability to also care for their own mental and physical well-being to avoid burnout.