More from the State of the Union:

“…the number of children born to teenage mothers has been falling for a dozen years in a row.”

That’s a good thing. But there’s still a marriage crisis, and part of it is related to birth rates among unmarried women: Births to unmarried mothers reached a record high of almost 1.5 million and made up 35.7% of all births in 2004. Unmarried births made up the majority of Black (69.2%) and American Indian (62.3%) births, nearly half (46.4%) of Hispanic births, and 23.5% of Caucasian births. Source: Marketing to Women (Kaplan, 2006), p.3.

This phenomenon of course has many social effects, not the least of which is the increase of children born into poverty. More from the NYT on marriage and birth rates here.