W. Bradford Wilcox
Person

Senior Fellow, Institute for American ValuesW. Bradford Wilcox is Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, and a member of the James Madison Society at Princeton University. Wilcox is also a Senior Fellow with the Institute for American Values.

Wilcox’s research focuses on marriage, fatherhood, and religion. His 2004 book, Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands, examined ways in which the religious beliefs and practices of Protestant men influence their approach to parenting, household labor, and marriage.

In addition to the challenges posed to children’s well-being by divorce and single-parent households, Wilcox warns about the growing popularity of donor insemination. Children that are products of this “assisted reproduction,” he reports, demonstrate the same yearning for a paternal figure as children in other fatherless households.

In a December 2005 Weekly Standard article, Wilcox wrote that “it’s time to bring children’s welfare into the discussion of donor-assisted motherhood.” He argues that the U.S. should emulate European nations, which are much more skeptical of the widespread use of in vitro fertilization and the use of anonymous sperm. Sweden, Italy and other countries now ban some or all of these procedures.