Chelsea Clinton has a strange new interest: Child marriages.
Chelsea recently brought her campaign against child marriage to California in November, pressing state lawmakers to ban marriages for anyone under 18 years old in the state — and it has put her at odds with some of the most powerful pro-Democratic Party organizations in the state.
Surprisingly, California currently has no minimum age requirement for marriage.
Clinton was at the University of California, Los Angeles on November 12 with the nonprofit Unchained at Last, focusing on what she called California’s “child marriage problem.” The event highlighted California’s status as one of only four states without any minimum marriage age when parental consent and judicial approval are obtained.
California, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Oklahoma do not specify any minimum age for marriage, according to a September 2025 study by Unchained at Last. As of September 2025, only 16 out of 50 states have set the minimum marriage age at 18 without exceptions.
Clinton wrote the foreword to the Unchained at Last study, which found that an estimated 314,154 minors were legally married in the United States between 2000 and 2021. The study showed that 86 percent were girls, and most were wed to adult men an average of 4.02 years older than them.
“At a time when human rights – especially women’s and girls’ rights – are being rolled back around the world, it is more important than ever that we stand together as advocates, lawmakers, survivors and allies to close legal loopholes, ban child marriage everywhere and protect the rights of girls where we can, defend them where we must and advance them wherever possible,” Clinton wrote.
The study found that at least 66,415 of these marriages occurred at an age or with a spousal age difference that should have been considered a sex crime. Nearly 90 percent of those marriages represented what researchers called a “get out of jail free” card for a would-be child rapist, due to state laws that allow within marriage what would otherwise be considered statutory rape.
California attempted to ban child marriage in previous years but faced opposition from numerous Democratic organizations. The liberal American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) argued in 2018 that a total ban would “unnecessarily and unduly intrudes on the fundamental right of marriage.”
Phyllida Burlingame, the pro-abortion policy director at the ACLU of California, told PBS that the organization was “not convinced that banning legal marriage will stop these coercive relationships from happening. They will push these young women further from the reach of social services.”
Planned Parenthood also opposed California’s previous ban attempt, arguing that prohibiting marriage under 18 would “impede on the reproductive rights of minors and their ability to decide what is best for them, their health, and their lives.”
The study found that child brides in the U.S. are 50 percent more likely to drop out of high school, four times less likely to finish college and close to a third more likely to end up in poverty. They face a 23 percent higher risk of heart attack, cancer, diabetes, and stroke than women who married between 19 and 25, and an increased risk of various psychiatric disorders.
Since 2018, 16 states have banned marriage before 18 without exceptions. Delaware became the first state to do so in May 2018, followed by New Jersey later that year. Maine became the 14th state to ban child marriage in 2025, and Missouri and Oregon are expected to follow.
California currently requires minors under 18 to obtain both parental consent and a court order before marrying. Since January 2019, state law requires parents and partners of minors wishing to marry to meet with court officials separately to determine if there is any coercion. Minors must also wait 30 days to get married unless they are 17 and have completed high school, or one of them is pregnant.