This is one of those issues that does deserve attention, but around which enormously dishonest rhetoric seems to thrive. The statistics are often presented in l

This is one of those issues that does deserve attention, but around which enormously dishonest rhetoric seems to thrive. The statistics are often presented in lurid and misleading fashion as well. Pew did a bit about this as part of the 'community survey' back in 2015-2016 and my first reaction is, "We have much bigger fish to fry than this" and "I am not surprised by these demographics". https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/11/01/child-marriage-is-rare-in-the-u-s-though-this-varies-by-state/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/11/01/child-mar... It's good to get legislation to close these loopholes, but I think we're kidding ourselves if we take the "300,000 children" statistic at face value. The other thing to point out is that this 2025, so marriage is hardly a prerequisite to sex, and in fact a lot of these marriage licenses are granted when one someone turns up pregnant. Personally I think this is a pretty clear-cut case of papering over a much bigger issue: parts of this country have really poor educational and financial outcomes for whole communities of people. As we've seen around the world, when you raise the standard of education and wealth, within a generation or two people change their habits around marriage, reproduction, etc. But of course that's a lot harder to fix than just passing a bill. tl;dr Instead of further regulating people's lives as the OP suggested, there are other more effective levers you can push. Changing the legal age of marriage to 21 will stop marriages under than age, but not relationships, pregnancies, and dropping out of education/work.