California Wants to Ban Child Marriage. These Civil Rights Groups Are Trying to Stop It

Children have a right to marry, the ACLU argues, and stripping them of that right would take away a pathway to their emancipation and independent healthcare decisions. For Planned Parenthood, the freedom for children to marry is about allowing people reproductive choice and bodily autonomy.

Just two other states — New Mexico and Mississippi — have no minimum age to wed. And while minors can marry at any age in California, advocates say it’s hard to hire a divorce attorney before 18.

About 9,000 children are married each year in California, the vast majority of them girls marrying adult men, according to the nonprofit advocacy group Unchained at Last. Because the age of consent for sexual activity is 18, advocates say marriages between children under 18 and adults implicitly legalize a sexual relationship that would otherwise be considered statutory rape under state law.

The organization has worked for the past decade to push for bans in New York, Oklahoma, Washington and a dozen other states.

But their efforts have repeatedly failed in California, where Planned Parenthood and the ACLU have lobbied hard against restricting child marriage, although those groups have largely stayed silent on the issue in other Democratic-controlled states.

That can partially be explained by their outsize influence in California politics. Planned Parenthood advocates on behalf of some of  the most cherished liberal causes and has donated at least $2.7 million to Democratic lawmakers since 2002, according to CalMatters’ Digital Democracy database.

This year, Democrats faced different circumstances with the organization, prompting Democratic lawmakers in June to introduce Assembly Bill 1267 to finally bar children from marrying.

Assemblymember Gail Pellerin authored the bill through what’s called a “gut-and-amend” when lawmakers strip the language of an unrelated bill to fast-track a new one after the deadline to introduce bills the typical way had passed. Democrats missed the deadline because they wanted to make sure Planned Parenthood wouldn’t get in the way, according to advocates.

While the ACLU again opposed the legislation this year, there were no lobbyists to be found advocating for minors’ right to marry in committee hearings this summer, and Planned Parenthood stayed “neutral” on the bill, declining to take a position.

And even as some Democrats expressed hesitation about not allowing two teenagers in love to tie the knot, the ban passed the Legislature with near-unanimous support in August.

“We need to make it clear that girls, despite their perceived maturity, are children,” Pellerin said in an interview. “Children don’t have unprotected freedom.”

After nearly a decade of failed attempts to outlaw child marriage, the bill now awaits Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature or veto. He has until Sept. 30.

ACLU spokesperson Carmen King declined to respond to questions about why the group opposes the bill and did not make anyone available for an interview with CalMatters for this story.

In a June opposition letter, the organization wrote, “Prohibiting minors from marrying in every case is a departure from California’s longstanding commitment to honoring minors’ ability to make important personal decisions for themselves, particularly in the realm of reproductive autonomy.”

Planned Parenthood did not say anything official about the bill and spokesperson Shelby McMichael declined to make anyone available for an interview with CalMatters.

In an emailed statement, McMichael said the group “takes positions on a bill-by-bill basis each session. Given the ‘defund’ of Planned Parenthood health centers this past year, we made the decision to prioritize issues related to the Trump administration and congressional Republicans’ ongoing attacks on health care.”

‘Planned Parenthood’s voice matters’

Its abortion care services at more than 100 clinics across the state have made Planned Parenthood a symbol of reproductive freedom in California for decades, though the group notes that abortion services make up only a fraction of its services.

Its enmeshment with Democrats politics has only accelerated during the first and second Trump administrations as party leaders worked overtime to stave off federal defunding efforts.

In February, California lawmakers approved $140 million in emergency funding for the group to offset federal cuts. And on its website, Planned Parenthood keeps a scorecard of how often legislators vote in agreement with it.

On its 2025 scorecard, all but one Democrat had a score of 100%.

Two years ago, Irvine Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, a Democrat, introduced Assembly Bill 2924 to ban minors from marrying.

Assemblymember Ash Kalra told advocates that Planned Parenthood had to drop its opposition before lawmakers could consider voting on the legislation.

The San Jose Democrat, who chairs the Assembly Judiciary Committee, said banning minors from marriage would threaten their right to an abortion, which he said California hadn’t yet codified into law.

Voters enshrined the right to an abortion in 2022, two years before the 2024 bill was introduced.

Some lawmakers were also skeptical about whether the data on child marriages was accurate, Kalra said.

He never gave the bill a hearing.

“I think that absolutely was one of the factors, certainly,” Kalra said of Planned Parenthood’s opposition and his decision to kill the legislation. “Planned Parenthood’s voice matters in that, and in other issues that come before us in the Capitol.”

This reasoning harkened to earlier failed attempts, including in 2017 when Democrats killed another bill to change the state’s child marriage laws over similar reasons.

Then-Sen. Jerry Hill said he sought an outright ban on the practice after he learned of a 13-year-old girl in his district who was engaged to a 38-year-old man from another country.

“I thought, ‘Who could oppose that? Who could say that it was wrong?’” Hill said of the bill he introduced to ban child marriage. But he was left perplexed that what he thought was a commonsense policy proposal evolved into a larger debate about cultural differences, childhood freedom and bodily autonomy.

In some cultures it’s acceptable for girls to be wedded to older men or be placed into arranged marriages, according to a United Nations report.

Lawmakers in recent years have proposed measures to clamp down on forced marriages, which are already a crime. Kalra is among them, this year authoring Assembly Bill 2534 which would allow victims to file a restraining order against anyone coercing them into a marriage.

Kalra and women’s rights groups say it would be the first policy of its kind in the country if enacted into law. Planned Parenthood supports it.

On the 2017 child marriage legislation, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood were staunch opponents, and then-Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, a Democratic labor leader who chaired the Assembly Appropriations Committee at the time, told Hill she wouldn’t let a ban move forward unless it was amended to lower the minimum age to 16- or 17-year-olds instead of 18.

That bill was eventually weakened to become current law: Any young person can get married if a parent and the courts sign off.

Hill said his attempt and others were killed by special interest groups.

“They’re so powerful, these interest groups in Sacramento. They have a lot of say and sway over what comes out of the Legislature,” said Hill, who represented Silicon Valley for 12 years. “Politics trumps policy about 80% of the time.”

Gonzalez recalled it differently. While it’s true she refused to let an outright ban pass, she said, she doesn’t remember Planned Parenthood opposing the bill or considering it in her decision-making.

She said when older teenage girls in her district got pregnant, it was common for some Latino families to encourage them to marry the father if he was the same or of similar age.

“I had girls where they were telling me this is the best choice,” Gonzalez told CalMatters. She said the difference in age between partners seemed to matter more than the marriage itself. “At the time, it seemed very classist” to impose an outright ban, she said.

‘At least we’re here now’

President Donald Trump’s push to defund Planned Parenthood clinics put more political pressure on the group than usual in recent years and made the organization more reliant on state funding.

Things were made worse last November, when a New York Times opinion piece criticized the ACLU and Planned Parenthood for their roles in blocking legislation against child marriage while Republican-controlled states such as Arkansas and Louisiana imposed tighter restrictions.

For survivor and advocate Sara Tasneem, California’s failure to act for several decades allowed her to be forcibly married at 15 to a 28-year-old man by her father, who she said was part of a Northern California “Sufi cult” that orchestrated it. When her father learned Tasneem was dating a high school classmate, he found someone for her to marry, she said.

“I was handed over to this complete stranger who I just met,” she said. She dropped out of school and was repeatedly raped, feeling trapped and unable to leave before she turned 18 because she couldn’t hire an attorney as a minor. Tasneem said she had two kids with her rapist, who she left in 2003, at age 23, taking her children.

Looking back and realizing she “didn’t grow up with a lot of power,” Tasneem turned to advocacy more than a decade later.

Most advocates are hopeful Newsom will sign the bill.

“Should it have happened a decade earlier? Yes, it should have,” said Unchained at Last executive director Fraidy Reiss, who at 19 was forced to marry an older man in her New York Orthodox Jewish community. “But at least we’re here now.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.