Eh. I think it’s kind of crazy to call a 17 year old getting married “child marriage.” It’s not like something magic happens on the 18th birthday that makes someone a full adult. It should probably line up with the voting age but it’s obviously not the same thing as the states with no minimum age requirement at all. I’m a lot more concerned with the four states with no limit at all, and the fact that many states have only added minimum marriage ages at all in the past decade. I knew a girl in high school who got married to an adult who got her pregnant at 14 because that was legal with parental consent in my state back then. That’s the sort of thing that we should be focused on, not juicing the numbers with states having slightly different ages of consent
Eh. I think it’s kind of crazy to call a 17 year old getting married “child marriage.” It’s not like something magic happens on the 18th birthday that makes someone a full adult. It should probably line up with the voting age but it’s obviously not the same thing as the states with no minimum age requirement at all. I’m a lot more concerned with the four states with no limit at all, and the fact that many states have only added minimum marriage ages at all in the past decade. I knew a girl in high school who got married to an adult who got her pregnant at 14 because that was legal with parental consent in my state back then. That’s the sort of thing that we should be focused on, not juicing the numbers with states having slightly different ages of consent
If they’re too young to drink in the eyes of the law, they’re too young to get married.
In the US that would be older than literally every marriage age because the drinking age in the US is 21.