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Members of the House Children and Families Committee voted unanimously to advance legislation barring anyone under age 18 from getting married.

Currently, 16- and 17-year-olds can get married with parental approval. Minors cannot get married to someone over 21.

Sen. Tracy McCreery, the bill鈥檚 sponsor, has pushed for the policy change, saying it is important to prevent parents from allowing their children to be married to noncitizens to create a pathway to citizenship.

During earlier Senate debate, McCreery, D-Olivette, called ending child marriage a 鈥渕oral鈥� imperative, citing the poor track record underage marriages have.

Efforts to end child marriage have sputtered in prior years amid conservative pushback. Last year, after the Senate approved a nearly identical bill, it did not receive a vote in the House.

This time around, the legislation includes other provisions that could convince doubters to back the measure.

During the House committee hearing, chairwoman Holly Jones, R-Eureka, added a handful of amendments, including a plan to fund newborn safety incubators that provide a protected space for a parent to relinquish their infant.

The revamped child marriage bill also now includes language clarifying that a judge cannot prevent a divorce from being finalized just because a woman is pregnant.

Currently, divorce cases can be initiated when a woman is pregnant, but if the woman is pregnant as the divorce is finalized, a judge may not conclude the case until a custody agreement is in place.

An additional amendment takes aim at child sexual abuse. It also creates a 20-year statute of limitation for prosecution of certain sex and labor trafficking offenses.

Those additions could be enough to entice opponents of the marriage age measure to back the proposal.

Rep. Dean VanSchoiack, R-Savannah, last year told the Kansas City Star that he knows people who got married as minors, including a woman at roughly age 17.

The couple, he said at the time, is 鈥渟till madly in love with each other.鈥�

Another marriage age opponent, Rep. Hardy Billington, R-Poplar Bluff, said the change could cause pregnant teenagers to have abortions when they can鈥檛 get married.

, a nonprofit dedicated to ending child marriage, ranked Missouri 16th out of all 50 states in the amount of child marriages per capita. The organization also found that nearly 9,000 marriages between a child and a noncitizen were approved in the U.S. from 2007 to 2017. In 95% of those cases, the minor was a girl. From 2011 to 2018, 78% of child marriages were between a minor girl and an adult man.

The legislation is .