The human toll of out-of-wedlock births

Indeed, the crux of the campaign is summed up in a poster that says, “If you finish high school, get a job and get married before having children, you have a 98% chance of not being in poverty.”

Not incidentally, nearly 90 percent of teen births are covered by Medicaid or other programs funded by taxpayers.

Before it launched the ads, the city held focus groups to test the messages. One theme that emerged was that many teens had, as Doar put it, “a higher sense of confidence about their ability to be successful parents than the facts justified.”

“We wanted to push back on that and expose the overconfidence,” he said. “We want people to understand how hard and complicated it is in the long run.”