October 26, 2026:

California became the 18th state to ban child marriage in the U.S. on Sept. 30, when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation setting the state’s minimum age for marriage at 18 years old. He called the law a “long overdue measure to protect young Californians and minors.”

The Golden State previously set no minimum marriage age. California saw an estimated 9,000 teens wed per year in 2021, according to the U.S. Census data. 

Now, just two states—New Mexico and Mississippi—have no minimum age for marriage. Kansas and Hawaii allow teens to wed at 15. Texas, Louisiana, Idaho, and more than a dozen others set the age at 16. In 19 states, parental consent can lower the legal age of marriage. 

Many of these states also have something else in common: outlawing or restricting abortion access. For me, this association raises an important question: As more teenagers are compelled to carry their pregnancies to term, more will also get pressured into marriage?

Abortion restrictions and child marriage in the 21st century

Marriage has long served the function of “moral channeling,” according to the legal scholar J. Shoshanna Ehrlich. In other words, matrimony has historically been the socially acceptable outlet for sex and childbearing. 

In three states, pregnancy is still a first step in getting judicial approval to lower the legal age of marriage for a girl. 

Unchained At Last is a national nonprofit dedicated to ending forced and child marriage. Founder Fraidy Reiss said that parents play a crucial role in facilitating underage marriages, including in cases where girls become pregnant before they are legally old enough to consent to sex.

Sometimes, they push marriage in hopes of avoiding social stigma. Sometimes, she said, they don’t want the male perpetrator to face criminal consequences. 

“Parents are willing to sacrifice their daughter … so some nice guy gets to walk free,” Reiss said. 

In states that allow underage marriage with parental or judicial consent, pregnancy “is often treated by state laws and by judges as definitive proof that marriage would be in the minor’s best interests,” according to the Tahirih Justice Center, a legal nonprofit representing victims of gender-based violence that also works to end forced marriage.

There is significant overlap between states that restrict abortion access for young people and states that still allow child marriage if a judge or parent approves of the union. These places, then, put the marriage decision into the hands of the same authorities who can deny a pregnant teen an abortion.

Legislative efforts to outlaw child marriage have run up against these traditional views of sex, marriage, and childbearing. In 2017, New Hampshire politician David Bates argued against a proposal to raise the minimum marriage age to 18, claiming it would “ensure forever that every child born to a minor will be born out of wedlock.” 

In October 2026, Rep. John McGuire of Virginia cited a similar reason to explain why he voted against banning child marriage in his state in 2024. 

“If a young man and a young girl get pregnant, they need to have a marriage,” the Republican said in an interview with a Virginia TV station. That statement is now being used in a midterms attack ad against McGuire by his Democratic opponent for Congress, Tom Perriello. 

How pregnancy and child marriage reinforce each other

In the decades after the Supreme Court in 1973 federally protected reproductive rights in Roe v. Wade, abortion frequency dramatically rose and fell, peaking in the 1990s. 

Roe itself did not greatly increase abortions, but it helped more kinds of pregnant people access care. Before Roe, most people getting abortions were white women of means. After Roe, more poor women, teens, and Black people could access care. 

Teen birth rates plunged in that same period. But after the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022, those gains slowed. This slow down was driven by higher teen pregnancy rates in states that banned abortion, which are particularly concentrated in the South.

What happens when a state has a strict abortion bans, higher teen pregnancy numbers, and legal child marriage? 

Post-Dobbs, that question is perhaps best answered in Texas. In 2022, Texas’ teen birthrate for 15-19 year olds rose for the first time in 15 years. The state also has the country’s highest number of child marriages, according to Unchained At Last data.

But Reiss cautioned against treating child marriage as a regional issue. 

“Child marriage is happening everywhere,” she told Rewire News Group.

The U.S. has never imposed a national minimum marriage age. The U.S. Constitution says minimum age requirements for marriage can only be set at a state level. 

As recently as 2018, child marriage was legal in all 50 states. While most teen weddings were of 16- and 17- year olds, Reiss told The 19th back then that she had seen a child married at 10.

Eighteen states have since raised the minimum age to 18. Two currently have no age floor, and the other 30 fall somewhere in between. Girls under 18 make up the vast majority of child marriages, and most of their spouses are adults. Some are decades older than the minor bride. 

Pregnancy and child marriage can reinforce one another. Pregnancy can be used to justify or pressure a girl into marriage. And global research shows that marriage puts girls at greater risk of further loss of reproductive autonomy and intimate partner violence. 

Teen pregnancy can have a slew of other negative impacts on both parent and baby. 

Low birth weight newborns, preterm deliveries, and preeclampsia are more frequent among adolescent mothers. A pregnant teen is less likely to finish high school, go to college, or complete a college degree. One 2010 study found teen pregnancy increases a person’s risk of poverty by 31 percent.  

Teen struggle to access abortion, even when it’s legal

Young people face numerous obstacles to accessing abortion care. 

In a majority of U.S. states, minors are legally required to get parental permission or notify their parent when seeking an abortion. Thirty-seven states make exceptions to these laws for medical emergencies. 

But obtaining the legal approval needed for an abortion can take a long time, which may push girls into a stage of pregnancy that requires an in-person procedural abortion, rather than medication abortion. 

Alternately, terminating a pregnancy in a state without parental requirements could require teens to travel hundreds of miles. 

One way to get abortion care closer to home is via telehealth, with mailed medications. That method became much more common after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 Supreme Court case that overturned Roe v. Wade. As of 2025, medication abortions accounted for about 30 percent of U.S. abortions. 

Teens aged 15-17 who lived in states with laws requiring parental notification or consent to get an abortion also saw higher rates of requesting abortion pills via telehealth post-Dobbs. But telehealth abortion care can present problems for teens, too. They may lack private internet and mail access, and fear that their parents will uncover their order. 

Some providers in blue states use shield laws, which allows them to prescribe abortion medication to patients in abortion ban states, to prescribe to teens. But one report found only two reproductive health-care providers willing to prescribe abortion pills to adolescents 15 and up in all states. 

Even then, there are challenges. Children generally lack confidential insurance coverage, and credit card companies usually require the owner to be at least 18. A medication abortion runs around $580-$800, according to Planned Parenthood.

Missing data on child marriage

Reiss said there is strong anecdotal reason for concern that abortion bans will lead to more child marriage. 

“In some cases, a pregnancy lead[s] to a child marriage,” Reiss said. “But what we see almost across the board is a child marriage leading to a teen pregnancy.” 

Reiss stressed that her assessment is based on the organization’s experience and anecdotal evidence, because there is no single, federal dataset showing how often child marriage leads to pregnancy. 

States, for their part, have little incentive to track marriage rates since the National Center for Health Statistics suspended its collection of this data in 1996. Some either restrict public access to marriage data or don’t track it at all, according to Unchained At Last. 

And the CDC hasn’t released abortion data since November 2024. 

That lack of data makes it difficult to determine how abortion restrictions actually affect the reproductive lives of married minors. To determine the prevalence of child marriage, the numbers must be painstakingly culled from various sources, including state governments, research organizations, and global indices. 

Unchained At Last is working to fill this gap. Reiss said the organization launched the Dobbs Project in 2022 to establish a pre-Dobbs baseline for child marriage so researchers can eventually determine whether rates change after abortion access was restricted. 

“We just don’t have the data on that yet,” Reiss said. 

No ‘tipping point’ in sight

In 2024, Unchained At Last helped to ban child marriage in New Hampshire. Today, it is one of 18 states where child marriage has dropped to zero, alongside Maine and New York. These states have firm laws requiring people who marry to be 18 or older, no exceptions.

California’s new ban on child marriage is another win for those pushing to end child marriage, but Reiss believes the path to a national minimum age is long.

“Every state, we say, ooh, this is gonna be the tipping point,” she said. “So far, it hasn’t felt … like we’ve reached a tipping point.” 

Meanwhile, an attempt to federally regulate marriage age has stalled. 

In July 2026, the Child Marriage Prevention Act of 2026 was introduced in both the House and Senate. Among other things, the bill would set up a commission to study child marriage and close the few federal loopholes, mostly in immigration law, that allow child marriage.

As of October 2026, it has not received a committee hearing or vote. 

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