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This article suffers from the classic correllation/causation fallacy.

Childbirth out of wedlock, and cohabitation thereafter with the father (or with some other man) are, in the United States, massively correllative with poverty and with residing in the most downtrodden of inner cities and trailer parks. "Murphy Brown" and "Miranda Hobbes" just don't exist in meaningful number in the real world.

Crime and abuse of all sorts occur with greater frequency in those places, and to those people, regardless of whether or not they're married, or when they marry. And, even in the same hard-off communities and reduced economic circumstances, it is difficult to make an accurate analysis, since the kind of people who marry before they have kids are markedly different BEFORE they make those decisions in terms of religious, eductational, and social orientations from their neighbors who don't make that decision.

(It's the same fallacy, of course, that leads people to assert that cohabitation before marriage "causes" higher rates of divorce, when, of course, the statistics prove only that the sort of people who are reluctant to cohabitate are the same sort of people who are reluctant to divorce.)

This is isn't to say that I don't think marriage has its benefits, or approve of people raising families out of wedlock (I don't!), just that this study doesn't prove that, all else equal, marrying at a particular time has a positive effect upon the outcomes of particular individuals.