Sacramento lawmakers appear poised to close a loophole that has allowed children of any age to marry in California, ending a decade-long standoff with two of the state’s most influential progressive advocacy groups.
Assembly Bill 1267, authored by Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, D-Santa Cruz, cleared the Legislature in August with overwhelming bipartisan support. It now sits on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk, awaiting his signature before a Sept. 30 deadline. If signed, California would join the vast majority of states that have already set a minimum marriage age, leaving only New Mexico and Mississippi without one.
The bill’s path to passage was anything but straightforward. For years, efforts to ban child marriage in California have collapsed under opposition from the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood — two organizations with deep ties to Democratic politics and significant sway at the Capitol.
Both groups have historically argued that restricting marriage for minors would infringe on young people’s rights to make their own decisions, including about reproductive health and bodily autonomy. The ACLU has contended that marriage offers minors a legal path to emancipation, while Planned Parenthood has framed the issue as one of personal choice.
Critics, however, say those arguments ignore the reality facing thousands of California children. According to Unchained at Last, a nonprofit that tracks and campaigns against child marriage, roughly 9,000 minors marry in California each year, the overwhelming majority of them girls wed to adult men. Because the state’s age of consent is 18, advocates argue that these marriages effectively legalize relationships that would otherwise be considered statutory rape.
This year, lawmakers took an unusual route to get the bill moving. Pellerin used a legislative maneuver known as a “gut and amend,” stripping the language from an unrelated bill and replacing it with the child marriage ban after the normal bill-introduction deadline had passed. Advocates say the timing was deliberate — an effort to keep the proposal off Planned Parenthood’s radar until it was too late for the organization to mount effective opposition.
The strategy appears to have worked. While the ACLU again registered its opposition, no lobbyist showed up to defend minors’ right to marry during this year’s committee hearings. Planned Parenthood, meanwhile, took a “neutral” stance, declining to formally support or oppose the measure.
“We need to be clear that girls, no matter how mature they may seem, are still girls,” Pellerin said in an interview. “Girls don’t have freedom without protection.”
Neither organization agreed to make anyone available for an interview with CalMatters. In a June letter outlining its opposition, the ACLU wrote that “prohibiting marriage for all minors would represent a departure from California’s longstanding commitment to respecting minors’ ability to make important personal decisions for themselves, particularly in matters of reproductive autonomy.” The ACLU’s press office declined to answer further questions about its position.
Planned Parenthood spokesperson Shelby McMichael said in an emailed statement that the organization evaluates legislation on a bill-by-bill basis each session. “Given the funding cuts to Planned Parenthood health centers last year, we chose to prioritize issues related to the Trump administration and the ongoing attacks from congressional Republicans on health care,” she wrote.
Planned Parenthood’s influence in Sacramento is substantial. The organization has donated at least $2.7 million to Democratic lawmakers since 2002, according to CalMatters’ Digital Democracy database, and it operates more than 100 clinics statewide. The group also publishes an annual legislative scorecard tracking how often lawmakers vote in line with its positions — in 2025, nearly every Democrat scored 100%.
That influence became even more pronounced after President Donald Trump moved to cut federal funding to Planned Parenthood clinics, pushing the organization to rely more heavily on state support. In February, California lawmakers approved $140 million in emergency funding to help offset those federal losses.
The current fight echoes a similar battle two years ago, when Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, D-Irvine, introduced a nearly identical measure, Assembly Bill 2924. That bill never received a hearing. Assemblymember Ash Kalra, D-San Jose, who chairs the Assembly Judiciary Committee, told advocates at the time that Planned Parenthood needed to drop its opposition before he would allow a vote. Kalra said he was also concerned the bill could jeopardize minors’ abortion rights, even though California voters had already enshrined abortion rights into the state constitution in 2022 — two years before that bill was introduced.
“I think that was certainly one of the factors,” Kalra said of Planned Parenthood’s opposition and the bill’s failure to advance. “Planned Parenthood’s voice matters on this issue, and on other matters that come before us at the Capitol.”
The pattern dates back further. In 2017, then-state Sen. Jerry Hill introduced similar legislation after learning that a 13-year-old girl in his district had been engaged to a 38-year-old man from another country. “I thought, who could possibly oppose this? Who could say this is wrong?” Hill recalled. Instead, his proposal ran into fierce debate over cultural differences, adolescent autonomy and bodily rights.
Then-Assemblymember Lorena González, a labor-aligned Democrat who chaired the Assembly Appropriations Committee at the time, told Hill she would block the bill unless it were amended to lower the marriage age to 16 or 17 rather than banning marriage for minors outright. The legislation was eventually watered down into the law still in effect today, which allows minors to marry with parental and judicial consent but sets no minimum age.
Hill blames special interest groups for repeatedly derailing reform efforts. “These interest groups in Sacramento are very powerful. They have a lot of influence over what passes in the Legislature,” he said. “Politics trumps policy about 80% of the time.”
González remembers it differently. While she acknowledges blocking an outright ban, she said she doesn’t recall Planned Parenthood weighing in or factoring into her decision. Instead, she said her hesitation stemmed from experiences in her own district, where some Latino families encouraged pregnant teenage girls to marry the child’s father if he was close to their age. “I had girls tell me this was the best option for them,” González said, adding that the age gap between spouses seemed to matter more than the marriage itself. At the time, she said, an outright ban felt “classist.”
For survivors like Sara Tasneem, the state’s decades of inaction carried lasting consequences. Tasneem said she was forced into marriage at 15 with a 28-year-old man as part of arrangements made within a Northern California Sufi group her father belonged to. After her father learned she was dating a classmate, he arranged the marriage instead. “I was handed off to a complete stranger I had just met,” she said. She left school, was repeatedly raped, and said she felt trapped because, as a minor, she could not hire a divorce attorney. Tasneem said she had two children with her abuser before leaving him in 2003 at age 23, taking her children with her. She later became an advocate for ending child marriage nationwide.
Momentum for reform grew last November after a New York Times opinion piece singled out the ACLU and Planned Parenthood for helping block anti-child-marriage legislation in California, even as Republican-led states such as Arkansas and Louisiana enacted stricter age requirements.
Fraidy Reiss, executive director of Unchained at Last, was herself forced into marriage at 19 within an Orthodox Jewish community in New York. She said California’s long delay in addressing the issue is frustrating, but progress is still progress.
“Should this have happened a decade ago? Yes, it should have,” Reiss said. “But at least we’re here now.”
Original source: CalMatters
