Republican Who Got Married at 15 Wants to Ban Child Marriage

Missouri Republican state Senator Holly Thompson Rehder, who was married when she was 15, is leading a state Senate bill that would ban child marriage.

Reflecting on growing up around addiction, sexual abuse and domestic violence, Thompson Rehder told Newsweek in a Friday interview: "At 15, I married my 21-year-old boyfriend, because I wanted out.

"As I got older, I started realizing I wasn't old enough to make that decision. My life would have been on a much better path had I actually toughed it out, had I stayed in high school, not gotten married, finished high school."

Senate Bill 767 would prohibit Missouri from issuing marriage licenses to anyone under 18 under any circumstances. Current state law allows 16- and 17-year-olds to marry with parental consent, although marriage between a minor and anyone 21 or older is banned.

The legislation, which would take effect August 28, has made its way out of the Judiciary and Civil and Criminal Jurisprudence Committee and into the Senate but has not debated on the floor yet. If passed, Missouri would join 10 other states that have banned child marriage. It is one of nine states where legislators are considering a bill that would end all child marriage before 18.

Thompson Rehder said banning child marriage in Missouri would be especially significant given that the state had among the most lenient child marriage laws in the nation until 2018, when it bumped up the minimum marriage age to 16. The law passed in 2018 aligns with Missouri's statutory rape law, which prohibits anyone 21 or older from sexual intercourse with anyone under 17.

"Seeing a state like Missouri pass [a child marriage ban] will be, not just encouraging to these other states, but will absolutely show, 'Hey, Missouri, did it. We can do this, too,'" she said.

Thompson Rehder, who detailed her experience with child marriage in her memoir Cinder Girl: Growing Up on America's Fringe, said getting married at a young age hadn't seemed like a big deal because so many girls that she grew up with had done the same. It wasn't until she took a job opening mail at a cable company and met people who did not grow up around those norms that she realized, "I completely set myself up for failure."

A 2021 study from the advocacy group Unchained at Last found that between 2000 and 2018, 8,007 children were married in Missouri. Nationally, 86 percent of children who were married over this time period were girls, and most were to adult men. Various studies have said that child brides are more likely to drop out of school or get pregnant earlier.

"Now, we have all these statistics showing that girls who wait until they're an adult to get married have much better rates of success," Thompson Rehder said. "Anything you can do at 17, you can do it at 18, It's not going to hurt to wait another year, but it can make a huge difference in your decision making and what you feel is best for you."

Opponents of child marriage bans have cited religious freedoms or parental rights, but Thompson Rehder argued that if Missouri is already setting marriage laws and the marrying age, "Why not set it at 18?'

"We're already setting the timeframe, so let's set that timeframe to when we don't have children getting married," she said. "Because anyone under 18 is a child."