We Are Not Down with the Sickness

Icannot tell you how disturbing it is to hear of children being forced into marriages against their will. Elizabeth Vargas has a documentary on Hulu, <a href="https://www.hulu.com/series/i-was-a-child-bride-the-untold-story-d4843691-a4a6-492a-84fc-2ef59d5a788f" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">I Was a Child Bride</a>. One word: Ghastly. The United States has a perversion that runs deep and has gone on long enough. In 2023, we even have <a href="https://www.actionnews5.com/2022/04/06/proposed-legislation-could-legalize-child-marriage-tennessee/?outputType=amp" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">politicians in office</a> who want to legalize grown men marrying underage girls. These marriages come with the stipulation that parents must sign consent forms. What parent could possibly be okay with the idea of their adolescent child being married off to an older man? In case anyone has forgotten, it’s 2023, not 1023. The very idea that people are in favor of 10, 12, 14, or 15 year olds marrying anyone is beyond disgusting. We should have rid ourselves of this practice by now. Let’s go to the scientific literature to establish what exactly we are talking about. <h2>MRI studies of Brain Development</h2> Teenagers are not adults, even if they sometimes look like them. According to “<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3621648/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Maturation of the Adolescent Brain</a>,” longitudinal MRI studies show the adolescent brain goes through a rewriting process after puberty that varies between boys and girls, but extends to age twenty-five for both genders. (For the sake of argument, we’ll look at gender as a binary in this piece.) <a href="https://medium.com/fourth-wave/we-are-not-down-with-the-sickness-9e3086e11307">Learn More</a>