system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why do/should researchers (not pundits) care about marital delay?

In all honesty, it's often framed as a social problem that men and women are marrying at later ages. Leaving ideological stakeholders aside, why do social scientists care? 

Problems linked to late pregnancy are obvious.  But it's not clear to me that marital delay and age at first childbirth are that linked since more than half of American children born today are to unwed mothers. So let's just pretend for now that marital delay and later pregnancy aren't the same thing.

So aside from baby-making problems, why do social scientists research marital delay as a social problem? What reasons have researchers given to make other researchers see that it's a topic worthy of inquiry? What is the interest around it as a social phenomenon?
gpt
Well the late pregnancy is a big issue - the increased amount of disabled children are an issue both on personal and social levels. 

Another big issue is women marrying too late and not being able to have children in time before menopause at all. Sad if it was part of their life plan, significant welfare implications for the people affected.

Most importantly from an economist's point of view, a stretching of the gap between generations from 20-25 to 35 years will create an inverted population pyramid until the generation gap stabilises again. (I.e. the 40-year old parents now support both their 5-year-old child and their retired 65 year-old parents and 85-year old grandparents.) On a macro scale, the increased dependency ration that results from this is part of the reasons for the fiscal problems with most developed countries' welfare state systems -- US medicare, for instance.