>>It's not just teen pregnancies. Increasingly high # of infants born out of wedlock where parents are older, and on public assistance.

Unmarried parents do have worse outcomes, but it's not as useful a statistic. E.g. last year the American Community Survey reported that of 1.4 unmarried women giving birth in the preceding year, over 400K said they had a "partner" despite being in an unmarried household. IOW stats about marriage are as much about reduced relevance of WASP norms as anything else. Plus CDC says that >40% of kids by the age of 12 have lived with cohabiting parents, which is almost double those with divorced (unmarried) parents. How do those kids get on?

"Teen pregnancy" makes sense because it's directly measurable/not easy to fudge and definitely has association with poorer outcomes for baby AND mother. The trouble is that while US teen pregnancy rates remain high, there has been a 63% decrease since 1991- which is no good for a graph purporting to blame the "war on poverty."

IMHO if you can eliminate the social disadvantage, differences in outcome boil down to Mom’s education level.

Followed by mother's age. Older is better so if single mothers are getting older, that should be good news. Followed by living circumstance stability. If you have impoverished communities characterized by teen mothers and no dad, you need to consider whether the chicken or egg came first and surely the question to tackle, is how to lift mom's education. At which point the preference for "teen pregnancy" figure becomes relevant since teen mothers inevitably miss out, making that a good place to start. Blaming her or the deadbeat father for her predicament may carry truth, but doesn't seem to have worked, ever.