Same reason the House is out of session to avoid releasing the Epstein files?

The vision of a child bride is a deeply foreign concept to most Americans. Underage marriage is regarded by most as an abroad problem, or the type of detestable horror committed by isolated malcontent cult leaders, later to be turned into a true crime documentary one laments over with their friends.

But child marriage remains legal in the majority of U.S. states, and getting rid of it has proved supremely difficult.

Thirty-four U.S. states still permit a child under the age of 18 to marry — usually with the consent of their parents or a judge. Four states — California, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Oklahoma — establish no minimum age for a minor to enter into a binding legal and social contract. According to a new report from Unchained at Last, a nonprofit advocating for the end of underage marriage exceptions in the United States, and Equality Now, a gender equality nonprofit, over 314,000 marriages involving minors — most between the ages of 16 and 17 — were registered over the course of the last two decades.

Over 80 percent of those marriages involved a girl who was underage (some as young as 10), and most of those marriages were to adult men. The organization’s report found that in that same time frame, over 60,000 of those marriages involved a child that was not legally old enough to consent to sex with their spouse.

If you aren’t irate yet, here are two explanations for opposition:

In New Hampshire, where an underage marriage ban was enacted in 2024, one Republican state representative argued that underage marriage was a “legitimizing option” for girls of “ripe, fertile age” who became pregnant before adulthood. In Missouri, a Republican-authored ban was opposed by members of the same party, with one member of the GOP arguing that eliminating child marriage would increase incentives for the pregnant child to seek an abortion.

Let’s go back to “some as young as 10.” There’s no fucking defense for that. The argument is literally, “If you get a preteen pregnant, you should be able to marry her so she doesn’t seek out an abortion.”

I’m not a total prude here … I get that there are edge cases like one high-schooler having just turned 18 while his girlfriend is still a sophomore, which to my mind is a morally grey area, but if that’s about a pregnancy, that’s a separate issue from marriage itself.

This said, knocking up someone one-third your age and needing the law to swoop to your rescue shows some extremely twisted thinking that probably mean being part of the general public is risky. It shouldn’t be rewarded with a literal get-out-of-jail-free card.