Can a 15-Year-Old Girl Be Legally Married?

When it comes to child-marriage laws, the United States and Canada have more in common with Niger and Bolivia than with other Western, industrialized nations.

Yesterday was International Women's Day, and today the Clinton Foundation released an extensive report and data-visualization website devoted to exploring women's progress across a variety of metrics. It's all worth perusing, but the above map in particular jumps out as not matching up with typical stereotypes of rich and poor countries. Places like Russia, China, and Ethiopia prohibit marriage before the age of 18, but many countries in the Americas allow it with "parental consent and/or under customary law."

Here's a more detailed map of minimum marriage ages by country, from the World Policy Forum:

Minimum Age of Marriage For Girls With Parental Consent

The Clinton Foundation notes that child marriage "limits the full potential of girls" and "undermines health, education, economic opportunity, and security." Early wedlock is most common among the world's poorest children.

One study found that teen marriage in the U.S. increased by nearly 50 percent in the 1990s thanks to "the spread of abstinence-only-until-marriage sex education at American schools, a shift toward cultural conservatism among some teens and a growing fear among youngsters of contracting AIDS through promiscuity," as the Chicago Tribune wrote in 2004.