A proposed bill in Iraq's parliament has sparked widespread outrage and concern, as it seeks to reduce the legal age of marriage for girls to just 9 years old. The controversial legislation, introduced by the Iraq Justice Ministry, aims to amend the country's Personal Status Law, which currently sets the minimum age for marriage at 18.
The bill would allow citizens to choose between religious authorities or the civil judiciary to decide on family affairs. Critics fear this will lead to a slashing of rights in matters of inheritance, divorce, and child custody.
If passed, the bill would allow girls as young as 9 and boys as young as 15 to wed, sparking fears of increased child marriage and exploitation. Critics argue that this regressive move would undermine decades of progress in promoting women's rights and gender equality.
Human rights organizations, women's groups, and civil society activists have vehemently opposed the bill, warning of serious consequences for young girls' education, health, and well-being. They argue that child marriage leads to increased dropout rates, early pregnancies, and a heightened risk of domestic violence.
According to the United Nations children's agency, UNICEF, 28 percent of girls in Iraq are already married before the age of 18.
"Passing this law would show a country moving backward, not forwards," Human Rights Watch (HRW) researcher Sarah Sanbar said.
"Six states (Washington, California, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Michigan, and Mississippi) have no minimum age for marriage."
That's contradicted by the link content.
The others you listed do set minimum ages, usually as age of consent, but those can be overridden with a court order.
~~Also, you put that text in quotes, but I don't see it anywhere in that page, which is very misleading to do.~~
Edit: I was mistaken, this line was at the end of the article.
The major, glaring issue of an instance not allowing downvotes is that bad/misleading information is free to be posted unchallenged. Be better, Beehaw.
Instances that don't allow downvotes do it so that they don't get totally ratioed for their whack political views.
Dude, read my reply to that comment. You're feeding into the echo chamber.
Why are y'all making me do your research for you?
It's literally stated within the summary of the page; third paragraph from the bottom.
Try clicking the links within the content to see if maybe you're missing some context.
Michigan
The name of the state is hyperlinked, click on it and you'll find section of the Michigan Legislature contains statutory age limits on marriage. The site linked from my quote is out of date because the minimum age is now 18. This is an absolute win and something to be celebrated, it just sucks that it took until 2023 to bump the age up and remove a judge's ability to enter a child into marriage. I considered editing my quote to cross out Michigan, but that seemed dishonest. Can't really win either way, apparently.
Mississippi
Let's click the name of this state and we end up at a summary page with a specific comment:
But since we're "doing our own research" (you're welcome), let's not trust the content on a third party site and instead look up the listed section of the Mississippi code dealing with conditions of issuing a marriage license in which we find that
Same info! They're not lying! Wait... That's bad news. Damnit!
There appears to be an amendment that I can't tell if it's passed or not, but it only raises the minimum age of girls (15) to that of boys (17). I refuse to say "men" and "women" because 17 is still a child.
Washington
Great news! Two months ago, Washington passed a law eliminating marriage of minors! I genuinely had no clue about this one. Obviously, the site wouldn't have this update, but there you have it.
Anyway, there you have it. The info you could've read for yourself, but chose not to before declaring yourself a victim of misinformation.
HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!
It is at the bottom of the page though