The tragic — and overlooked — fallout from the ’60s sexual revolution

Declining life expectancy, mass shootings, alarming rates of mental illness, rising white nationalism, the opioid crisis: By many measures, our society is in trouble, and we are ignoring a root cause: the unprecedented familial dispersion that followed the 1960s sexual revolution.

At heart, that revolution aimed to radically sever human sexuality from marriage and child-rearing, from the responsibilities society had hitherto imposed on the individual sexual appetite. Afterward, fatherless homes, family shrinkage and breakup, childlessness and abortion all became commonplace. The net effect of these changes is having fewer people...