12 Million Girls Become Brides Every Year. Most of Them Are Still Children When They Give Birth.

Apr 14, 2026

Every three seconds, somewhere on this planet, a girl becomes a bride. Not a woman. A girl. She might be 14. She might be 12. She might live in sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia. She might live in California.

That last part stops people cold. It stopped me.

I have spent more than four decades in courtrooms across this country, representing families, fighting for the rights of people who had no voice. I have seen the legal system fail people in ways that made my stomach turn. And I thought I had a decent understanding of where the law gets it right and where it falls short.

Then I read about what Hillary Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg are doing together in a recent Forbes article by Maneet Ahuja.1 And what I found underneath their effort shook loose something I did not expect: the realization that child marriage is not a faraway tragedy. It is a legal loophole hiding in plain sight across most of the United States and the world.

The Numbers That Should Keep You Awake

More than 640 million girls and women alive right now were married before they turned 18. Two hundred million of those girls were married before they turned 15. According to UNICEF, roughly 12 million girls under 18 are still married every single year.

Read that number again. Twelve million. Every year.

Nearly half of all child brides live in South Asia. One in five live in sub-Saharan Africa. India alone accounts for a third of the global total. The scale of this is staggering. And the consequences ripple across generations.

Girls forced into marriage almost always drop out of school. Their bodies are not ready for pregnancy, and teen pregnancy carries severe health risks. Roughly 260,000 women died during or following pregnancy and childbirth in 2023 alone. The overwhelming majority of those deaths, more than 90 percent, happened in low and lower income countries. These are the same countries where child marriage rates are highest.

There is a direct line between a girl being married at 14 and a girl dying at 16 in childbirth.

The $175 Billion Problem Nobody Talks About

Here’s what hit me when I read the Forbes piece on this.

The human cost is what keeps me up at night. These are children. Their safety, their health, their futures. That is the heart of this.

And there is something else you need to know. Something most people never think about. This crisis carries an economic price tag that would stagger you. It affects your community. It affects the global economy. It affects markets and workforce pipelines and health care systems in ways nobody is talking about.

So let me talk about it.

In March 2026, the Women’s Initiative at the Institute of Global Politics at Columbia University released a report that reframed this crisis in terms the business community needs to hear. Clinton and Sandberg co-authored the foreword.

The report includes a new economic analysis from the Center for Global Development. The annual global cost of child marriage is $175 billion. By 2040, the cumulative losses will reach nearly $2.5 trillion.

Think about that for a second. Those losses come from reduced workforce participation, lost wages, declining health outcomes, and the cycle of poverty that child marriage locks into place.

Clinton said it plainly: “This is an economic problem for communities, nations and the world because when these young women are married so early, their education stops. Their economic participation becomes more limited.”

Sandberg, who first studied these patterns as an economist at the World Bank in the 1990s, put it another way: “You have 14-year-old girls having babies, and their bodies aren’t ready for that. That decreases their health and welfare and traps us in a cycle of poverty.”

Here is what most people miss. If this were framed as an economic issue from the start, everyone would be paying attention. Not only those who care about women’s rights. Everyone who cares about GDP, about market growth, about workforce readiness, about the global economy.

The report also found that a $1.3 billion investment would reduce the global rate of child marriage by 30 percent in five years. That is one of the most cost effective interventions in global development. The math is not complicated. The will to act is the missing piece.

This Is Not Happening Somewhere Else

Here is where this gets personal for every American reading this.

As of today, 34 states in this country still allow a child under 18 to marry. Four states, California, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, have no minimum age at all. A judge and a parent can sign off, and a child of any age can be handed over in marriage.2

Between 2000 and 2021, more than 314,000 children were legally married in the United States. The vast majority were girls. Most were married to adult men. In tens of thousands of those cases, the child was not even old enough to legally consent to sex with the person they were married to.

That is not a policy gap. That is a legal system sending children home to be harmed under the protection of a marriage certificate.

Only 16 states have fully banned child marriage with no exceptions. Delaware led the way in 2018. Missouri became the most recent in 2025. The other 34 states continue to allow it, often through loopholes involving parental consent, judicial approval, or pregnancy.

A married minor in most states cannot file for divorce. Cannot enter a domestic violence shelter. Cannot sign a lease. In some states, a minor who leaves a forced marriage is treated as a runaway. The system that allowed the marriage in the first place offers no escape from it.

Three Priorities That Change Everything

The Columbia report identifies three strategies for reducing child marriage worldwide.

First, invest in girls’ education through secondary school. When a girl finishes high school, her likelihood of being married before 18 drops dramatically. Education does not change a single statistic. It rewrites her entire future.

Second, expand access to reproductive health services. Adolescent pregnancy and early marriage are deeply connected. Giving girls control over their own health decisions reduces the pressure that drives early marriage.

Third, change the cultural attitudes that normalize the practice. Laws alone are not enough. In dozens of countries, and in states across America, legal prohibitions exist alongside cultural traditions that override them. Sandberg addressed this directly: “A lot of this gets excused as tradition or culture. Well, there are a lot of things in the world that were cultural that were terrible and are long gone.”

What You Should Do Right Now

You now know something that most people around you do not.

You know that child marriage costs the global economy $175 billion a year. You know it is legal in 34 American states. You know that more than 314,000 children were married in this country in the past two decades. You know that organizations like Unchained At Last, Girls Not Brides, and Equality Now are fighting to close these loopholes state by state.

So here is what I am asking you to do.

Find out whether your state allows child marriage. If it does, contact your state representative and ask one question: why?

Share this information with your community, your colleagues, your family. Do not assume this is someone else’s fight.

Clinton, Sandberg, and a growing coalition of advocates have put the economic case on the table alongside the moral one. The data is clear. The solutions are known. The cost of acting is a fraction of the cost of doing nothing.

Every three seconds, a girl becomes a bride. You now know that. And knowing changes the math on whether you can stay silent.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Former U.S. Secretary Of State Hillary Clinton And Sheryl Sandberg Join Forces To End Child Marriage by Maneet Ahuja (April 12, 2026 Forbes)

California remains one of just four US states with no minimum legal age for marriage. Under Section 302 of the Family Code, any person under the age of 18 can obtain a marriage license if they have written consent from a parent or guardian with legal custody and a court grants an order for permission to marry. That’s it. Parental consent plus a judge’s approval. No age floor whatsoever. California’s age of sexual consent is 18. Sex with a child is a crime, either a misdemeanor or a felony depending on the age difference and the facts of the case, unless the perpetrator marries the child first. Five separate attempts to set the minimum marriage age at 18 have failed in Sacramento. The most recent, AB 2924 in 2024, was pulled after opposition from California chapters of the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the National Center for Youth Law, who argued a ban could drive young people in abusive relationships further underground. California state Senator, Aisha Wahab told CBS news: “We don’t even allow people under the age of 25 to rent a car. We don’t allow people under the age of 21 to drink, people under the age of 18 to enlist in the military. And yet the state allows a child of any age to enter a binding marriage contract.”