Ohio will continue to allow child marriage after lawmakers almost passed a law that would’ve ended the practice in the state, but failed to advance it before legislators went on their summer break, outraging reform advocates.
Senate Bill 341 would have ended a loophole letting 17-year-olds marry legal adults up to four years older than them with court approval and seemed bound for passage. No one testified against it during its five public readings, and it had the support of youth advocates and the Catholic church.
The legislation had a pair of bipartisan sponsors, and it passed the state Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously on Wednesday, the last full day before the summer recess began. Despite the initial momentum in the Senate, the bill never passed there in a full floor vote, and it had yet to be introduced in the House.
Still, campaigners and lawmakers said it was “mind-boggling” that the bill has not progressed. “It’s just unbelievable that a bipartisan common sense bill that has no opposition from the public, that costs nothing, it has a $0 price tag…it harms no one except creepy men who prey on teenage girls,” Fraidy Reiss, founder of the non-profit Unchained At Last, which campaigns against child marriage, told the Ohio Capital Journal.
“It’s unfair to have young women be the wards of their husbands,” Democratic Sen. Bill DeMora, one of the bill’s sponsors, told the Columbus Dispatch. “It’s ludicrous. If you’re not 18, you have no rights. You can’t go to a shelter, you can’t have an attorney. I mean, you’re basically the property, most of the time, of your husband – who’s over 18 – and it just leads to such bad, bad outcomes.”
Republican Sen. Sandra O’Brien said part of the concern over passing the bill came on behalf of the state’s Amish communities.
“I have a lot of Amish, over 40,000 Amish in my three counties,” she told WCMH last week. “I mean, they have a whole different religious setup.”
Amish advocate Jasper Hoffman testified on Tuesday that the state’s Amish and Mennonite communities, which do not promote child marriage, were being used as a “prop” to distract from legislators’ own slow progress on the bill.
“This is not a reason to let children go unprotected,” he said. “That is a political strategy dressed up as cultural sensitivity.”
Others chalked up the slow uptake of the bill to quiet reservations inside the Republican conference.
GOP Sen. Bill Blessing, another sponsor of the bill, told Statehouse News these concerns included the “typical conservative argument where there can be some situation where this is ok, is this government overreach, potential issues that this would increase abortion.”
Senate President Rob McColley has said he expects further action on the bill once lawmakers return later this year.
Since 2,000, more than 5,000 children in Ohio have been married as minors, according to Unchained At Last. Between 2000 and 2015, 4,443 girls age 17 or younger were married in Ohio, an investigation by the Dayton Daily News found, and 59 of these girls were 15 or younger.
Stephanie Lowry, who got married at age 16 to a 19-year-old, joined a group of activists and child marriage victims earlier this month at a protest at the Ohio Statehouse.
“So, a month after my 16th birthday, I stood in an Ohio courtroom, four months pregnant, and got married to this 19-year-old man,” she told Statehouse News. “I didn’t know the dangers in it. I’m not sure if my mother did either. She thought it was the best option. But he turned abusive and I had no legal rights.”
Seventeen states have anti-child marriage laws, per Unchained At Last.
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