• Globally around 21% of young women were married before their 18th birthday.
• 650 million girls and women alive today were married as children.
• 12 million girls under 18 are married each year.
• In the United States, more than 200,000 minors were married between 2000 and 2015. 
• Child marriage is currently legal in 46 states (only Delaware, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania have set the minimum age at 18 and eliminated all exceptions), and 20 U.S. states do not require any minimum age for marriage, with a parental or judicial waiver.
  Most of them were girls and more than 80% of them were married to an adult.
•  In the state of Michigan, over 4000 minors were married in the years between 2000 and 2010 (the youngest was fifteen) 
• In 2019, Reps. Sarah Anthony, Graham Filler, and Kara Hope introduced a trio of bills that must all pass together to end marriage before 18 (HB4003, HB4004, and HB4005, respectively). All three bills died at the end of the 2020 legislative session. These representatives along with Rep. Daire Rendon introduced a new package of bills in 2021 (HB4226, HB4227, HB4228) to end child marriage. 
• HB4226 would remove the parental consent exception for 16 and 17-year-olds; HB4227 would eliminate the judicial approval loophole for those 15 and younger; HB4228 would eliminate the right to marry for emancipated minors, and HB4229 would eliminate the judicial approval process.

Child marriage must end everywhere but we in our home state of Michigan. 

Will you stand against child marriage?