A majority of states allow 16- and 17-year-olds to wed, and 17 states have no minimum age to marry, experts say. At least 10 states are currently considering legislation to raise the marriage age to 18.
for the first time the extent to which legal loopholes within the U.S. immigration system have enabled thousands of men to bring child brides or fiancées into the U.S. over the past decade.
“I got opposition from mostly legislators who felt there should be no limit," he said."They would say, ‘If you're going to limit this, what about if you're pregnant? You shouldn't be limiting that if a pregnancy is involved.’” “These people would say, ‘Oh, it’s two 16 year-olds, it's their business’,” she said. “It wasn’t two star-crossed lovers, it’s not Romeo and Juliet. It was a predatory marriage.”
State lawmakers are unaware of the problem and how it can harm young women, which leads to hesitation to outlaw it completely, Smoot added. “States where they have an age floor, maybe it's 16, or 16 to 17 years old, they have this wide-open potential for abuse for parents to pawn their daughters off to whoever will take them,” she said.
Khan added that she would like to see her state become “an example, like Delaware and New Jersey,” which outlawed marriage to anyone younger than 18, with no exceptions, last year.
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