What would it take to end child marriage? There’s a new federal push to limit it.

The 19th reports on a new federal push to end child marriage in the United States: legislation expected to be introduced in both the House and Senate on Thursday, cosponsored by Democrats including Representative Gwen Moore and Senator Dick Durbin. Roughly three hundred thousand minors — the vast majority of them girls — were legally married in the U.S. between two thousand and twenty eighteen, and as of twenty twenty-six only seventeen states have banned the practice. Because the Constitution leaves marriage age to the states, the bill serves mainly as a roadmap and awareness tool — but it would close one federal loophole by requiring parties to spousal and fiancé visas to be at least eighteen, after a Senate committee found more than eight thousand five hundred such visa petitions involving a child were approved over a decade. Survivors who consulted on the legislation, per The 19th, call it the first concerted congressional effort to prevent child marriage domestically.

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