The Child at the Altar
California is closing a door that Kabul has just flung open, and that Warsaw still keeps ajar.
Begin with a comparison that sounds like a provocation and is, in fact, a plain statement of law. For half a century, the civil code of Afghanistan contained something that California’s Family Code lacks to this day: a statutory minimum age for a bride. Article 70 of the 1977 code set it at sixteen; Article 71 allowed, by way of exception, the marriage of a fifteen-year-old with the consent of her father or a judge (some renderings of the code also name the paternal grandfather), and flatly forbade the wedding of any girl younger than that. California, which regards itself as the most progressive state in the Union, has never known such a floor. With one parent’s signature and a court order, a child of any age can, in theory, be married there.
The comparison needs honest annotation on both sides, because paper is not practice. Afghanistan’s statutory floor never protected anyone reliably; UNICEF estimates that about twenty-eight per cent of Afghan women married before turning eighteen. And in May of this year the Taliban’s Ministry of Justice published a code on the judicial separation of spouses that erases the floor outright, tying a girl’s eligibility for marriage to puberty and permitting her silence to be read as consent. In California, meanwhile, registered weddings of minors had dwindled to a curiosity long before anyone banned them. The real force of the juxtaposition lies elsewhere: in the summer of 2026, the two jurisdictions moved in opposite directions at almost the same moment. Kabul struck the age limit from its law; Sacramento is writing one in. Why the second operation took California’s legislature nine years of trying is a story that begins with a wedding in Las Vegas.
Las Vegas, May 20, 2011. Before a Nevada official stands Courtney Stodden, a sixteen-year-old aspiring singer and model fromWashington State, and beside her Doug Hutchison, a fifty-one-year-old actor whom audiences knew from “The Green Mile.” There is one small formality to resolve: the bride is a child, so her signature is not enough. Her mother signs the consent. Fifteen years later, in August, 2026, the California State Senate votes unanimously for Assembly Bill 1267, which would set an absolute marriage age of eighteen. Stodden, by now one of the most recognizable faces of the campaign against child marriage, celebrates the vote on Instagram and urges her followers to keep the pressure on.
It would be tempting to file all this under exotica, American and Afghan alike. It would also be a mistake. Poland’s Family and Guardianship Code still contains a provision under which a court may authorize a sixteen-year-old girl to marry. The phenomenon deserves to be examined from two directions at once: from the side of the law, which keeps such doors open, and from the side of psychology, which has spent decades measuring what happens to the people who walk through them.
Marriage law in the United States belongs to the states; there is no federal minimum age. As recently as 2017, the marriage of minors was legal in all fifty states. Since 2018, seventeen states have set the limit at eighteen with no exceptions (the count keeps climbing as new laws pass); in the remaining thirty-three, the loopholes survive. California remains one of only three states (the others are Mississippi and New Mexico; a fourth, Oklahoma, closed its loophole with a law signed in May, 2026, effective November 1) whose statutes specify no minimum age at all.
The scale of the practice was documented by Unchained At Last, an advocacy group that assembled marriage-certificate data from across the country, filling the gaps with estimates where states kept no usable records. Between 2000 and 2021, roughly three hundred and fourteen thousand minors were married in the United States. Eighty-six per cent were girls, most of them wed to adult men who were, on average, four years older. The vast majority, ninety-six per cent, were sixteen or seventeen, but the records include children as young as ten. At least sixty-six thousand of these marriages involved an age gap at which sex outside marriage would have been a crime under the relevant state’s law; in roughly nine cases out of ten, the wedding made it legal. Darcy Totten, of the California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls, dispensed with euphemism at the Senate hearings: marriage, she said, changes the status of the adult male involved “from rapist to husband.”
Assembly Bill 1267, a bipartisan effort (the Democrats Gail Pellerin, Cottie Petrie-Norris, and Sharon Quirk-Silva, joined by the Republican Diane Dixon), cleared the Assembly sixty-six to eight; in August, the Senate passed it without a single vote against. Once the Assembly concurs in the amendments and the governor signs, the ban takes effect on January 1, 2027.
One statistical detail from the legislative record deserves its own paragraph. Since the approval procedure was tightened, in 2018, California courts have signed off on fewer than twenty marriages of minors a year; in 2022, the number was nine; it has hovered near ten a year since. Yet in census surveys some eighty-eight hundred Californians between fifteen and seventeen reported, in 2021, that they were married. The figures are estimates, and the gap between them is imprecise, but the direction of the inference is hard to resist: alongside a handful of registered weddings there exists a much larger zone of religious and customary marriages, invisible to the state. A ban on registration does not end the problem. It ends the state’s endorsement of it, which turns out to be necessary and not sufficient.
Against this backdrop, Polish law looks tidy, though not beyond question. The rule is simple. Under Article 10 of the Family and Guardianship Code of 1964, no one under eighteen may marry. Then comes the exception: for important reasons, a guardianship court may permit a woman who has turned sixteen to marry, provided the circumstances indicate that the marriage will serve the good of the family about to be founded. A district court hears the petition.
Three features of this construction repay attention. First, the exception applies only to women; a Polish male cannot marry before his eighteenth birthday under any procedure whatsoever. The asymmetry is a relic of a 1998 amendment, which lowered the old marriage age for men from twenty-one to eighteen and left the escape hatch on one side only. Poland’s Commissioner for Human Rights has pointed out to the Ministry of Justice that a marriage age differentiated by sex sits uneasily with the constitutional guarantee of equality between women and men. Second, in courtroom practice the important reason is almost always a pregnancy, a newborn, or a long-standing informal union; the court is ratifying a fait accompli. Third, the construction contains a mechanism that is peculiar from the standpoint of systemic coherence: under the Civil Code, a minor who marries becomes, by that act, an adult, and remains one even if the marriage is later annulled. The wedding confers adulthood, rather than adulthood qualifying one for the wedding. The capstone: if the wife becomes pregnant, her husband loses the right to seek annulment on grounds of her age.
Polish treatise writers have combed Article 10 with a fine brush, and what they find adds texture the statute alone cannot supply. The catalogue of important reasons worked out in practice says more about the era of its birth than about the present: alongside pregnancy, a child, and a stable relationship, the commentaries list an immediate threat to the life of one of the parties and even the man’s mobilization in the event of war. The Supreme Court set the limit early, holding in 1958 (case III CO 19/58) that pregnancy alone does not suffice; the court must find that the marriage raises no objections from the standpoint of the family to be founded, a ruling still cited as good law. Purely economic motives, such as the need for a wife’s help on the farm, do not qualify.
The procedure has one feature American reformers might envy: only the girl herself may petition. Her parents and the public prosecutor have no standing at all, the judge must hear her and the intended husband in person, and the checklist the commentaries prescribe reads like a risk profile lifted from the literature on coercion, from the independence of her decision from family pressure to the man’s prior marriages, his child-support record, and any court orders barring him from his own children. Whether the design goes far enough is contested. The leading commentator Krzysztof Pietrzykowski argues that the provision remains unconstitutional insofar as it offers no permission route to a sixteen-year-old boy, and would even condition permission on parental consent, a proposal others resist, sensibly, given what parental consent has meant elsewhere. The legislative history stings a little: the government’s 1998 bill proposed a sex-neutral exception, and parliament narrowed it to girls; a later attempt in the Senate to equalize the rule failed. One honest caveat belongs on the record: the treaties binding on Poland, beginning with the 1962 New York Convention on consent to marriage and minimum marriage age, leave the minimum to national law. Eighteen without exceptions is Europe’s value judgment, not a treaty command.
The phenomenon is dying out, and this much is certain and well documented. According to Ministry of Justice data, Polish district courts received eight hundred and twenty petitions for marriage permission on grounds of age in 2010 and granted five hundred and eighty-eight of them; in 2024 they received a hundred and twenty-six and granted seventy-seven, and the first three quarters of 2025 brought eighty-six new filings. The share of weddings in which the bride was under eighteen fell over the same period from 0.25 to 0.04 per cent. Poland, in fact, reports this figure to the United Nations as indicator 5.3.1 of the Sustainable Development Goals, in the category of harmful practices that states have pledged to eliminate by 2030. Which produces a curious situation: every year, the state counts a phenomenon it has itself classified as harmful, while maintaining the provision that makes the phenomenon possible.
The direction of travel in Europe is unambiguous. In 2017, Germany passed a law against child marriage that set the age at eighteen with no exceptions and declared marriages of anyone under sixteen void by operation of law, including marriages concluded abroad. Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court, in February, 2023, accepted the age line itself but ordered the legislature to regulate the consequences of voidness, including maintenance and the option of confirming the union once both parties come of age; an amendment took effect in 2024. England and Wales raised the minimum from sixteen to eighteen through the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Act 2022, in force since February 27, 2023; the law reaches religious and customary ceremonies that were never registered, and an adult who brings about a child’s marriage faces up to seven years in prison, while the child herself faces nothing. Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Norway, and Sweden, among others, have adopted eighteen without exceptions. Poland, with its carve-out for sixteen-year-old girls, remains in a shrinking club of European states that keep the door open.
The law asks whether there was consent; psychology asks about the conditions under which the consent was produced. Two decades of research on the adolescent brain, much of it associated with the psychologist Laurence Steinberg, yield a coherent and well-replicated picture. The capacity for logical reasoning approaches adult levels relatively early, around sixteen. What matures much later is the set of functions researchers call psychosocial maturity: impulse control, resistance to pressure from the people in the room, the weighing of distant consequences. The prefrontal cortex, which carries these functions, keeps developing until roughly age twenty-five, while the adolescent reward system runs hot. In a calm conversation, a sixteen-year-old can reason like an adult. Under emotional pressure, in love, pregnant, watched by her family, seated next to an older partner, her decisions drift, with statistical reliability, toward whatever earns the room’s immediate approval. Marriage law encounters her in the second state, not the first.
Add to this the asymmetry of power. The relationship between a sixteen-year-old and a grown man, particularly one older by a decade or three, is not a relation between equal contracting parties. The adult typically controls the housing, the money, the transportation, and the narrative presented to the outside world; the minor contributes her dependence. The psychology of coercive relationships has described this configuration for a long time: isolation from peers, interrupted schooling, and economic dependence entrench one party’s advantage, and formalizing the union does not balance the advantage; it notarizes it.
The hardest element of the construction to defend is parental consent, which the law treats as a safety device. A parent’s consent is not the child’s consent. Worse, in cases of forced marriage the parents are often the source of the pressure; American advocacy groups have repeated for years that parental consent can mean, in practice, parental coercion. Where the law sees a safeguard in the parent’s signature, psychology sees a potential conflict of interest that the procedure cannot detect, because on paper everything is in order.
The American case adds a purely legal trap. In most states, a married minor cannot file for divorce on her own, cannot retain a lawyer, and cannot be admitted to a domestic-violence shelter, because each of these acts requires the age of majority. The wedding gives the adult the full set of rights and gives the child a ring. It is only fair to note that the Polish construction removes this particular trap: a married minor becomes an adult and can therefore, formally, sue for divorce. Formal capacity, though, does not dissolve the economic and emotional dependence in which the decision to marry was made.
The consequences of early marriage are among the better-documented subjects in the literature. A 2011 study in Pediatrics, by Yann Le Strat, Caroline Dubertret, and Bernard Le Foll, drew on a nationally representative sample of nearly twenty-five thousand American women and found that those who had married before eighteen were significantly more likely to have experienced a psychiatric disorder in their lifetime: fifty-three per cent of them, against forty-nine per cent of women who married as adults, with the risk remaining significantly elevated after demographic adjustment and rising most sharply, by more than forty per cent, for major depression. The economist Gordon Dahl, in a 2010 paper in Demography, used variation in state laws as a natural experiment and showed that early teen marriage increases the risk of dropping out of school and of later poverty, causally, not merely by correlation. American data further indicate that seventy to eighty per cent of marriages entered before eighteen end in divorce, and that women married before nineteen carry a risk of serious physical illness in adulthood roughly twenty-three per cent higher.
Analytic honesty requires marking the limits of these findings. Some of the association is selection: poverty, violence at home, and interrupted schooling often precede an early wedding rather than follow from it. But the direction of the overall conclusion is secure, and only the magnitudes are in dispute. No serious study has found that early marriage improves the life prospects of minor wives, and designs that exploit natural experiments, like Dahl’s, find a causal effect wherever one can be isolated.
If the data are this unambiguous, why did the loopholes survive for decades? The answer lies less in the law than in the psychology of the institutions that administer it.
A family-court judge facing a pregnant sixteen-year-old, her older partner, and parents who favor the wedding is deciding under concrete pressure against abstract risk. Approval looks like an act of repair: it settles the child’s status, calms the family, closes the file. Refusal means confronting the petitioner and her relatives here and now, in the name of a statistical risk spread over the coming decade. Institutions optimize for the defensibility of a decision, not for its distant consequences, and a guardianship court never sees the couple ten years on, so the feedback loop that might correct the practice simply does not exist. This is not an indictment of judges. It is a description of the incentive architecture in which they are asked to rule.
The second mechanism is normalization by rarity. If Polish courts issue a bit more than a hundred such permissions a year, and California lately registered nine underage weddings annually, it is tempting to conclude that the problem is marginal and the law can stay as it is. The inference should run the other way. Precisely because the practice is dying, closing the loophole costs almost nothing, and each of the few remaining cases is not a statistic but a particular child, on whose situation the state is placing a seal it could not defend ten years later.
Fairness requires giving the strongest counterargument its due, because one exists. During the California debate, State Senator Akilah Weber Pierson observed that the law permits a seventeen-year-old to bear and raise a child while forbidding her to marry the child’s father, even if he is seventeen himself. Organizations such as the A.C.L.U. have historically opposed the bans in the name of minors’ autonomy. The argument is serious and deserves a serious answer. First, pregnancy has no expiration date as far as marriage is concerned: the wedding can wait for the eighteenth birthday, and paternity, parental authority, and child support require no rings. Second, the ledger of risks is asymmetric: postponing a wedding by a year or two is cheap and fully reversible, while a premature marriage can be costly and hard to undo. Third, the practice itself betrays whose interest the exception serves. In Poland, it operates exclusively on girls; in the United States, eighty-six per cent of married minors were girls wed to grown men. An exception designed as a valve for autonomy functions, in reality, as a channel through which adults formalize their relationships with children.
De lege lata, as the lawyers say, Poland sits within the minimal international standard: the U.N. committees on the rights of the child and on discrimination against women have in the past allowed, as an absolute exception, the marriage of a sixteen-year-old approved by a court that has examined her maturity. But the European standard has moved visibly further, toward eighteen with no exceptions, and the Ministry of Justice’s own figures show the practice under Article 10 expiring of natural causes.
De lege ferenda, the legislature has three roads: keep the status quo, equalize the sexes, or abolish the exception altogether. The first preserves a gender asymmetry that is hard to defend under the constitutional equality clause. The second, extending the exception to men, restores formal equality while widening a door that Europe is closing. The third, urged by the Ombudsman himself, aligns with the region’s direction, with developmental psychology, and with the pledges Poland itself renews each year when it reports indicator 5.3.1. Predicting legislatures is a mug’s game, but the weight of the argument now rests on one side.
The decisive point of the whole debate fits in a sentence. Marriage is the only contract known to Polish law that makes a child an adult by the act of entering it, instead of requiring adulthood as a condition of entry. A system that will not let a sixteen-year-old buy an apartment or take out a loan has trouble explaining, coherently, why it lets her perform an act whose consequences reach further than either. Courtney Stodden put it more simply: “Children should be protected. Not married.”
Robert Nogacki – licensed legal counsel (radca prawny, WA-9026), Founder of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec.
There are lawyers who practice law. And there are those who deal with problems for which the law has no ready answer. For over twenty years, Kancelaria Skarbiec has worked at the intersection of tax law, corporate structures, and the deeply human reluctance to give the state more than the state is owed. We advise entrepreneurs from over a dozen countries – from those on the Forbes list to those whose bank account was just seized by the tax authority and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning.
One of the most frequently cited experts on tax law in Polish media – he writes for Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, and Parkiet not because it looks good on a résumé, but because certain things cannot be explained in a court filing and someone needs to say them out loud. Author of AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto: Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator. Co-author of the award-winning book Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy (Security of a Modern Company).
Kancelaria Skarbiec holds top positions in the tax law firm rankings of Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Four-time winner of the European Medal, recipient of the title International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.
He specializes in tax disputes with fiscal authorities, international tax planning, crypto-asset regulation, and asset protection. Since 2006, he has led the WGI case – one of the longest-running criminal proceedings in the history of the Polish financial market – because there are things you do not leave half-done, even if they take two decades. He believes the law is too serious to be treated only seriously – and that the best legal advice is the kind that ensures the client never has to stand before a court.
