California could soon end child marriage after years of debate

“I’m glad California is finally here,” Assemblywoman Gail Pellerin, a Democrat and one of the chief authors of the bill, told The 19th after state lawmakers passed the bill on August 26. “We’re unfortunately late to this movement, but it is absolutely incredible that children now will have this protection.”

Previously, children could get married in the state with judicial approval and the consent of one parent. California was one of only three states that had no minimum age to marry.  (The others are Mississippi and New Mexico.) Nearly 24,000 minors were married in California between 2000 and 2018 — making California the state with the second-highest number of child marriages in the country, according to data from Unchained At Last, an advocacy nonprofit. Texas has the most, with nearly 42,000 children married in the same time period. In 2017, Texas banned child marriage in most cases, allowing it only for people 16 and older who are legally emancipated from their parents or guardians.

Pellerin said the first effort to ban child marriage in California was in 2017 when state Sen. Jerry Hill introduced a similar bill. Since then, other bills have been introduced and data has been collected on the issue — but there was opposition from the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, which voiced concerns that a ban on child marriage could remove personal choice and limit access to legal protections and reproductive care. Planned Parenthood agreed to be neutral on the most recent bill after early discussions, Pellerin said.

The ACLU, however, submitted formal opposition letters against the measure.

“Just as minors have the right to decide to have an abortion or to carry a pregnancy to term (or to seek a restraining order) on their own, they should maintain the right to marry, with robust protections in place to prevent coercion and abuse,” the ACLU wrote in June.

Pellerin said she sees momentum building across the country to end child marriage, and she saw it as an opportunity to make change in California. Before 2018, child marriage was legal in all 50 states. Since then, 18 states have passed bans, and federal lawmakers have introduced a bill that would provide states with a practical roadmap to end the practice.

“Studies have shown that kids that get married lack financial independence,” Pellerin said. “They end up lacking access to education, social opportunities and autonomy. I mean, it’s considered a human rights abuse on a global stage.”

Girls are far more likely to be wed as children than boys: 86 percent of minors wed between 2000 and 2018 were girls, Unchained found. And girls who marry before they turn 18 are about 50 percent more likely to drop out of high school and four times less likely to finish college — actions that are associated with higher poverty rates later in life. A recent report led by Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Meta and founder of Lean In Foundation, and Columbia University highlighted the global cost of inaction on the issue — estimating that child marriage costs the world up to $175 billion per year from lost productivity and increased health risks.

While drafting the bill, Pellerin said California lawmakers heard moving testimonies from women who were married as children. One of them was Courtney Stodden, an American media personality, model and singer who was 16 when she married 51-year-old actor Doug Hutchinson. A Girl Scout troop from San Jose also spoke to legislators and testified in support of the new bill. They spoke about their interests in sports, education and poetry — highlighting how their dreams would be changed by a forced marriage.

“They were so articulate and inspirational,” Pellerin said. “And this is what it’s all about: protecting these kids and making sure that they are not robbed of that childhood. And we did it.”

Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva, a Democrat and another chief author of the bill, said that Chelsea Clinton met with the California Legislative Women’s Caucus in March to advocate for the ban. She brought women who were very young when they were married, and Quirk-Silva said they all said the same thing: They didn’t feel like they had a choice and they were not able to achieve their goals, particularly around education.

As a former classroom teacher for more than three decades, Quirk-Silva said she saw firsthand how children’s brains are just developing and the impact that getting married and pregnant can have on young people.

Quirk-Silva said that she understands from even more of a personal experience. She is one of 10 children, and her mother was only 15 when she started having kids.

“She was a wonderful mother and did everything she could with the tools she had, but she wasn’t able to complete her education,” Quirk-Silva said.

But times have changed, she said. There’s a growing national conversation around how to better protect children. Quirk-Silva pointed to the public focus on the Epstein files and increased scrutiny of human trafficking.

“If you go back to the 1920s and 30s, child marriage was very common, but now it’s 2026, and it definitely feels like we need to stand up and support young girls,” Quirk-Silva said.