The advice is straightforward and clearly from some patron of the religious Right: “But, as common sense tells us — there are precautions to be taken by the young and by the unmarried, especially for those who know that they are not remotely close to being ready for the unending responsibility of parenthood. If they want to have a future, it is imperative that our young, male and female alike — embrace the ultimate precaution, abstinence.”

 Well, as for front-page news, language like this from a pulpit or right-wing pol isn’t a surprise at all. But the advice isn’t from such a source: it’s from the last paragraph of a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Doug Wilder, then-Democratic governor of Virginia, in March 1991.

Some will consider the governor’s admonition quaint. Wilder went on, “For, as others have noted, the essence of chastity is the total orientation of one’s life toward a goal, and — in this instance — that goal must be a life of self-discipline, self-improvement, and an abiding spirit of selflessness — a willingness to work for the common good of family and community alike; to take full advantage of all opportunities which do exist and to make full use of the freedoms that are rightfully theirs.” Wilder was the first black governor of Virginia (or of any state), home to the capital of the Confederacy, and he made plain that his remarks, universal though they are, were primarily aimed at black adolescents. He opened his piece by citing a litany of data about unusually high crime and out-of-wedlock pregnancy rates among black youths.

Wilder’s eloquence on these points came to mind recently as a diverse group of think tanks released a new study of the effect of family structure on social behavior in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The study should offer a huge lift to commentators and political actors of all stripes, because what it definitively shows is that individual and social problems — crime, mental illness, education gaps, unwillingness to work — are sharply reduced by one key factor: the presence and parenting of a mother and father, especially a married mother and father, in the home. The remedies afforded by a thousand social programs and billions in tax dollars fall leagues short of what an intact family can do. And the effect transcends racial and economic boundaries. There is simply no excuse for any public leader not to be profoundly pro-family.

But Wilder takes the argument to another level, one that is sadly outside many people’s comfort zone, especially those who believe themselves to be realists about the possibility for, as Wilder said, “chastity.” For policymakers, chastity has been a scorned word for decades. The major departure from it occurred in 1970 with the passage of Title X of the Public Health Service Act and subsequent amendments that sharpened its ultra-pragmatic approach to contraception and sex education programs. Population control manifestos and the Supreme Court abortion decisions in 1973 compounded the bill’s materialistic approach to sex. Old hands will recall how the first high school programs of this nature were referred to as “marriage preparation,” a term that gave way to sex education slides, classroom condom demos, school-based clinics, and the demolition of parental involvement laws.

A half century later, the aftermath of these programs is reasonably clear in the across-the-board erosion of sexual mores, dismal data on family formation, and, increasingly, demographic decline via delayed marriage and rampant abortion. Racial differences in social statistics have hardened over time, contributing to a troubling resurgence in eugenically tinged language about the “Third World” and ethnic subgroups. If the numbers that disturbed Wilder so much in 1991 are recapped today, they tell much the same story regarding family structure that alarmed him: there were 3.6 million births in the United States in 2023, a decline of 2% from the previous year. Fully 40% of the births were out-of-wedlock, only marginally lower than the 2009 rate of 41%. The out-of-wedlock birth percentage for black Americans was more than half again as high, at 69.3%.

Meanwhile, total U.S. abortions have increased over the past few years, with an estimated 1,026,700 taking place in 2023. The Guttmacher Institute, a Planned Parenthood offshoot, has estimated a slightly higher number for 2024. Herein lies the contraception/abortion contradiction. In the wake of the dispersal of chemical abortion, abortion-friendly researchers and media typically assert that the drug is “safer than Tylenol.” If that is so, why rely on behavioral change — contraception if you are a “realist” from the Guttmacher school, or abstinence until marriage if you align with Wilder and other traditionalists — when a safe FDA-approved remedy is available through the mail or from the local pharmacy? Liberal or conservative, today’s reigning ethos in public policy downplays the “ultimate precaution” Wilder identifies. What prevails now is a formula for perpetually high abortion rates and a fortification for the decoupling of sex from marriage and the lifelong responsibility that allows men and women to achieve the maximum goods (including, as research shows, in terms of a happy and enduring sex life). The Tylenol trope, of course, is gravely false, but no matter to the pills’ marketeers.

The new Virginia study is a timely wake-up call about these matters. It brings powerful data behind the widely accepted concept of The Success Sequence. That idea, whose precise origin is elusive, documents the poverty-preventing impact of taking three positive steps in the proper order: graduating from high school, getting a full-time job, and getting married before bearing children. But the Sequence has its critics, including academics who think it ignores other profound factors that make it difficult or impossible for individuals in tough social settings to follow it. The challenge for these critics is to explain why there have been periods in American history, predating the Sexual Revolution, where intact families and effective fatherhood have existed across the full range of population subgroups, under conditions of general economic struggle relative to what our nation faces today. Family breakdown on today’s scale is what is new.

What voices like Doug Wilder’s were suggesting is an expansion of the Success Sequence. Yes, to do so would carry pro-life groups, for example, into issues some regard as marginal to their territory. But the data is compelling. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s statistics on abortion are incomplete, but in 2022 they showed that 87.7% of abortions from 38 reporting areas occurred among unmarried women. Only 12.3% occurred among married women. Even more to the point, the largest proportion of total abortions occurred among women in their 20s, what used to be marrying age. In 2022, more than half (56.5%) of all abortions occurred among women in their 20s. The lowest figures, meanwhile, are for girls under age 15 or over 40. Delays in marriage and the fading of the connection between sex and mutual, lifelong commitment are feeders for the globally high U.S. abortion rate. Calling abortion pills a close cousin to headache medicine is not a path to restore gravitas to the values at stake.

In a sense, America’s decades-long debates over the restoration of common values are a self-repeating tragedy. Today, perhaps, a key step has been taken with the 6-3 Supreme Court decision that allows the state of South Carolina to refuse Planned Parenthood entry to its Medicaid program. The decision rested on a question of legal standing. The U.S. Senate continues to wrestle with a reconciliation bill that would deny $700 million in federal funds to Planned Parenthood, an entity that has focused throughout its long history on what it regards as eugenics and vulnerable populations. Its goal was never really to create thriving married families with just the right count of desired children. If its program were going to produce that result and prevent “unwanted pregnancies” and children, it would have worked by now.

It is more than high time to take a Wilder course. Wilder is age 94 now, and therefore a reminder that wisdom is ageless: Our goal must be a full Success Sequence: “a life of self-discipline, self-improvement, and an abiding spirit of selflessness — a willingness to work for the common good of family and community alike; to take full advantage of all opportunities which do exist and to make full use of the freedoms that are rightfully theirs.” This is the way to a rebirth of faith, family, and freedom in America.