Primitive is, primitive does unfortunately

[theking]

Pregnant and married at 13, former ‘child bride’ fights the practice still legal in 43 states

Dawn Tyree, 51, didn't have much of a childhood.

At 11, she says she was encouraged by her father and step-mother to spend time with a man 19 years her senior.

The man started to "groom" her, she says, giving her adult responsibiliti es, like driving a car, to make her feel older.

The man impregnated her with her first child at 13. He was 32.

"The solution was marriage," Tyree tells TODAY.com. "Marriage covers up the rape, the sex abuse and the child endangerment."

"The marriage saved him from a prison sentence," she adds, "and essentially put me in a prison."

In 1985, Tyree finished sixth grade. That summer, she was married.

"As minors, we can't do anything about it," Tyree explains. "It was a confusing time. It is brainwashing — call it what it is."

As recently as 2017, child marriage — what Child USA and UNICEF define as “any formal marriage or informal union between a child under the age of 18 and an adult or another child”— was legal in all 50 states, according to Unchained At Last, an organization dedicated to ending forced and child marriage.

Currently, only seven states ban the practice with no exceptions. One 2021 study found that 300,000 minors under the age of 18 were legally married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018.

"It would've been really nice, if one adult out of the 30 adults in my life might have had the courage to stand up and say something," Tyree says. "The generation of minding your own business is a thing of the past — we want more for our children."

'I was genuinely terrified of giving birth'
At 13 years old, Tyree says she was "afraid of dying during childbirth."

"Not because anyone had told me it was a possibility," she adds."It was because I was genuinely terrified of giving birth."

Children giving birth face higher risks of eclampsia, puerperal endometritis and systemic infections, according to the World Health Organization. The American Academy of Pediatrics has condemned child marriage, citing increased risk of sexually transmitted infections, early pregnancies and intimate partner violence.