Child Marriage and Adolescent Fertility as Global Concerns

Combating child marriage has become a core strategy for reducing teen births worldwide (UNICEF 2001; WHO 2008). Until the 1960s, international laws concerning marriage only loosely aimed to address adolescent fertility. Since then, the rise of global mobilization around human rights has called attention to both the negative consequences of adolescent fertility on girls and the roots of the problem. Not only do an overwhelming majority of births among adolescents in developing countries occur within marriage, contraceptive use is also less common for young wives, and early pregnancies are more likely when girls marry younger (Reference Mensch, Bruce and GreeneMensch, Bruce, & Greene 1998; UNICEF 2001).Footnote ¹ Thus, organizations like UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) continually place minimum-age-of-marriage laws front and center in their efforts to curb teenage childbearing.

International actors first identified child marriage as a problem in the Hague Conference in 1904 and first addressed it in international law in the 1962 Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage, and Registration of Marriages (the Marriage Convention). The Marriage Convention, which called on states to set a minimum age of marriage at 15 years or older, was motivated by concern for basic human rights, opposition to slavery, and a desire to spread “one of the basic institutions of Occidental civilization” to the rest of the world (Reference SchwelbSchwelb 1963: 340). It was not tightly connected to the health concerns of early marriage, including pregnancy, that frame much of the debate today. The Marriage Convention was also not widely ratified. Even among countries that did ratify the Convention, very few set the minimum age at 18 years—the current international standard.

Whereas the Marriage Convention always had some link to human rights (it was opened for signature on Human Rights Day), the inclusion of a marriage provision in the 1979 Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) more clearly cast child marriage as a rights issue. According to CEDAW, the “betrothal and the marriage of a child shall have no legal effect, and all necessary action, including legislation, shall be taken to specify a minimum age for marriage and to make the registration of marriages in an official registry compulsory” (Article 16, Para. 2). In addition, CEDAW General Recommendation 21 called on countries to legislate 18 years as the minimum marriage age. CEDAW was adopted to recognize and promote women's rights, and it explicitly connected those goals to the requirements first set out in the Marriage Convention.

More recently, child marriage has become a child rights as well as a women's rights issue. For example, the 1990 African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child urged states to prohibit child marriages through legislation establishing the minimum age of marriage at 18. Similarly, the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)Footnote ² has been viewed as obligating states to adopt minimum-age-of-marriage laws (Reference AskariAskari 1998; see also Reference BuntingBunting 2005). For example, by requiring states to register all births, the CRC provides a tool for states to identify under-age marriages even when there is no formal state record of the marriage (UNICEF 2001). Furthermore, while marriage is not specifically mentioned in the CRC, the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC Committee) routinely refers in its reports to the necessity of setting 18 years as the minimum age of marriage. At the international level, the rights framework of CEDAW and the CRC has received broader support than the moral framework of the earlier Marriage Convention. Unlike the Marriage Convention, the CRC has been widely ratified. Currently, only three countries have failed to ratify the CRC; in contrast, less than one-third of the countries that ratified the CRC also ratified the Marriage Convention.

As this history indicates, in terms of reducing teenage births and thus mitigating their associated health and social consequences, preventing early marriage is thought to be a crucial starting point. However, it is an empirical question if and how global mobilization impacts behavior. International laws can bring changes at two levels. They can lead countries to adopt national laws adhering to international treaties. They can also lead to changes on the ground regardless of national laws. Our question is whether national laws are a mere reflection of global mobilization or a meaningful mediator of change.

There is no question that global mobilization around women and children's rights in the world polity has corresponded with a recent diffusion of marriage policies. Figure 1 reveals the increasing significance accorded to child marriage in the global system. While less than 10 percent of countries had laws setting the minimum age of marriage at 18 years in the period prior to the 1979 CEDAW Convention, by 2007, nearly 50 percent of countries had adopted them (see Data section for sources).

Figure 1. Minimum-Age-of-Marriage Policies in Non-OECD Countries, 1973–2009.

It is important to note, however, that not all laws strictly comply with the international standard. Even among countries with laws that set the minimum age of marriage at 18 as recommended by CEDAW, many allow exceptions to this general rule. Some countries allow children to get married at younger ages with parental consent. In other countries, minimum-age-of-marriage laws do not apply to groups governed by customary law. For example, in Malaysia, although the official minimum age of marriage is set at 18 for both boys and girls, Islamic law permits girls to be married as early as age 16. Some countries allow marriage under 18 in the case of pregnancy (e.g., Belarus), under “exceptional circumstances” as identified by a court (e.g., Bulgaria), or if a court determines the girl is capable of assuming the responsibilities related to marriage (e.g., Bosnia).

Laws that set the age at 18 but allow exceptions have always outnumbered strict policies, but the number of strict policies has increased at a faster rate over time, suggesting an ongoing norm cascade (Reference Finnemore and SikkinkFinnemore & Sikkink 1998). The next question is whether laws—either strict or with exceptions—have actually had the intended impact of reducing adolescent fertility.

Theoretical Considerations

Do national laws matter in the implementation of global norms? Prior cross-national studies have primarily focused on two distinct but related issues: the link between global norms (and international law) and national policy adoption, and the impact of global norms on the ground. Due to data limitations, there has been little attention to whether and when national laws affect outcomes net of global factors (exceptions include Hironaka & Reference Hironaka, Schofer, Hoffman and VentrescaSchofer 2002; Meyer, Ramirez, & Reference Meyer, Ramirez and SoysalSoysal 1992).Footnote ³ In this section, we consider how previous scholars have approached the issue of national laws' impact in a global context. We then turn to the analysis of a second, related question: do national laws that strictly conform to global norms have a greater impact on outcomes than laws that follow the norm generally but allow exceptions in some circumstances?

Data and Methods

To evaluate our hypotheses, we utilize cross-national data at yearly intervals for developing countries between 1989 and 2007, capturing active years of international mobilization on adolescent fertility issues. We limit our study to countries that do not belong to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) because fertility issues in these poorer countries over the last several decades have been treated very differently from those in wealthier countries (Barrett, Kurzman, & Reference Barrett, Kurzman and ShanahanShanahan 2010). Our final data set includes information for 115 poor- and middle-income countries, resulting in a sample of 1757 observations after listwise deletion. Operationalization of variables and descriptive statistics based on the adolescent fertility models can be found in Appendix 1.

Analytical Strategy

We employ pooled panel regression models to predict adolescent fertility rates in developing countries from 1989 to 2007, which captures the period during which most minimum-age-of-marriage laws were passed. Pooling data over time allows us to draw upon temporal changes in the data as well as address case-specific heterogeneity. However, pooling data also means that errors for each country will be correlated over time, thus violating a central assumption of ordinary least squares regression. Thus, we use a fixed effects model to capture how particular interventions in countries at particular times affected adolescent fertility within those countries. Such a model focuses on over time change within a country while controlling for variations across countries. In other words, our approach implicitly takes into account those characteristics of countries that are totally or relatively unchanging (colonial history, dominant religion, mechanisms of informal social control) or for which the rank order of the country varies little relative to other countries (population, level of democracy).Footnote ¹³

In addition to country-specific unobserved characteristics, we control for year-specific characteristics.Footnote ¹⁴ As adolescent fertility rates are decreasing over time for the most of the countries, there might be trends over time that influence adolescent fertility rates that our time-varying independent variables cannot exhaustively capture. Therefore, we include year fixed effects, in which each year is included as a dummy variable, in order to account for unobserved trends over time that might have simultaneously influenced reductions in adolescent fertility and our explanatory variables.Footnote ¹⁵ Thus, any effects of our time-varying independent variables on adolescent fertility are net of unobserved trends over time in adolescent fertility.

Using this general structure, we specify our model as follows:

$\begin{array}{cc}& {AdolescentFertility}_{it}={\alpha }_i+\delta t+{\beta }_1{Strictmarriagepolicy}_{it-3}\\ & +{\beta }_2{Marriagepolicywithexceptions}_{it-3}\\ & +{\beta }_3{Treatyratifications}_{it-3}+{\beta }_4{INGOs}_{it-3}\\ & +B_5{Yearssincestrictmarriagepolicyhasbeeninplace}_{it-3}\\ & +B_6{Treatyratifications\ast marriagepolicy}_{it-3}+\sum {\left({\beta }_k\text{controls}\right)}_{it-3}+{\epsilon }_{it}\end{array}$

“Adolescent Fertility_it” represents our dependent variable in country i in year t. The two national marriage-age law variables represent countries, in year t, that strictly adhere to the international standard and countries that have laws with exceptions (the reference category is countries that do not have minimum-age-of-marriage laws that comply with international standards). “Treaty ratifications” represents the number of international treaties ratified, while “INGOs” represents each country's ties to international nongovernmental organizations. Controls include population reduction policies, GDP per capita, and female secondary enrollment. In order to account for constant differences between countries and overall world-level trends in adolescent fertility, we include fixed country effects (α_i) and year effects (δt) as separate dummy variables for each country and each year. We also include a duration variable for strict marriage policies and tested two interaction effects: strict policies by treaty ratifications and policies with exceptions by treaty ratifications.

As an additional check, we also ran our model for subsets of countries based on religionFootnote ¹⁶ and geographic region. We control for these nontime-varying variables by including fixed effects in our full sample model. We ran these additional analyses, however, to determine if our full-sample results masked any path dependencies created by the nontime-varying variables. Results did not suggest any such path dependencies and thus are not reported here.

Results

Adolescent fertility rates, which were remarkably high throughout poorer countries in the 1980s, began to decline over the past two decades (see Figure 2). Eighty-eight percent of non-OECD countries saw some decrease in rates over this period. Ultimately, middle- and low-income countries reached an average of about 40 births per 1,000 adolescent girls by 2006. It is notable that the final average for all poor- and middle-income countries is substantially higher than the average in wealthier countries. This suggests that floor effects (that is, adolescent fertility rates having reached the lowest levels possible) are not a major concern for our analysis.

Figure 2. Adolescent Fertility Rates by Minimum-Age-of-Marriage Policy in Non-OECD Countries, 1989–2007.

Figure 2 shows the trends regarding rates of adolescent fertility over time by different categories of countries. It also shows that countries with laws that set the minimum age of marriage at 18 years old—the global norm—begin the survey period with slightly higher teenage fertility rates. This suggests that adolescent fertility issues were more endemic in these countries, and perhaps there was more of a perceived need or more pressure to take a strong policy action to curb the rates. However, higher adolescent fertility rates at the beginning of the survey period also mean more challenges to address adolescent fertility issues and social contexts that enable higher fertility rates. One way to assess the policy effect is to compare changes over time (i.e., the slopes of the lines). Over time, we see greater decreases in adolescent fertility in countries with a strict minimum-age-of-marriage policy than in countries that have not adopted such laws or in those that have adopted laws with exceptions. We now turn to our multivariable analysis to see if this relationship holds when other factors are controlled.

Table 1 presents pooled panel regression models predicting adolescent fertility rates in poor- and middle-income countries. As explained in the methods section, all models presented here report changes in adolescent fertility rates after controlling for the general trend over time. Model 1 contains the control variables and the marriage policy variables. Higher GDP per capita is negatively associated with rates of adolescent fertility over time, but this association is not statistically significant. This may mean that the years of our analysis did not capture the period of demographic transition in most countries or that other factors associated with the demographic transition (such as increased schooling) are capturing some of the effect. Consistent with prior work (Reference BearingerBearinger et al. 2007), female secondary enrollment rates have a strong and consistent negative effect on adolescent fertility. This likely reflects a combination of mechanisms—greater knowledge of contraception among girls, reduced marriage rates due to school attendance, and a country's greater commitment to gender equality.Footnote ¹⁷ We also consider national population reduction policies as a control variable. The presence of such policies reduces births by adolescents throughout all models. Considering that since the 1990s fertility policies increasingly have focused on safe, planned childbirth and the autonomy of women in every phase of decisionmaking, our findings suggest that this more general empowerment of mothers has a spillover effect on teen childbearing.

Table 1. Country and Year Fixed Effects Models Predicting Adolescent Fertility Rates in Non-OECD Countries, 1989–2007

Note: Country fixed effects and year fixed effects are included in the analysis but not reported here.

^* p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001 (two-tailed tests); standard errors in parentheses.

Turning next to marriage policies, countries with strict laws see greater reductions in adolescent fertility than countries without laws setting the marriage age at 18. Reductions range for 8.1 to 12 fewer births per thousand for countries with strict policies relative to countries without such policies. Considering that the average births per thousand girls across all countries was down to about 40 by 2006, this is a notable effect. The effect holds after controlling for national treaty ratifications (Model 2) and the presence of INGOs (Model 3), thus supporting our hypothesis that national laws have an effect beyond global forces. Delving into this difference further, our findings suggest that national laws that formally comply with international standards but have exceptions fare no better than countries without laws in reducing rates of adolescent fertility. This may indicate that laws allowing exceptions are more likely to be window dressing or they may reflect unique local circumstances. We address the possibilities in more detail in the next section.

World polity effects are reported in Models 2–3. Ratification of relevant treaties is associated with greater decreases in rates of adolescent fertility, providing evidence that international treaties are more than symbolic. For every additional treaty ratified, rates of adolescent fertility within a country decrease by 2.3 (Model 2). However, membership in INGOs does not have clear effects on adolescent fertility (Model 3). In separate analyses, we considered the effects of more precisely identified women's rights INGOs and child rights INGOs and similarly found no significant positive effects for those INGO links. These findings contrast with the significance of global relationships found in previous research. For example, Reference Boyle and KimBoyle and Kim (2009) found no effect for international laws but a strong effect for the presence of INGOs in their analysis of children's health and well-being. The difference may be attributable to the fact that our models control for general time trends while theirs did not. In combination, the international law and INGO findings indicate that the mechanisms that create change at the global level are complex. Future research is necessary to identify under what circumstances international law and/or organizations are more critical. For purposes of the current analysis, the important point is that national laws continued to have an effect even when global factors were controlled.

In addition to the strict minimum-age-of-marriage law main effects, we added an indicator to capture the variable effects of a marriage policy over time (Models 4 through 7). In Models 4–5, we estimated an interaction between the adoption of a marriage policy and the years passed since its adoption. We find that the reduction in adolescent fertility in countries with a strict marriage policy becomes greater the longer the policy has been in place (Model 4). However, laws that formally comply with international standards but have exceptions are ineffective regardless of the number of years they have been in place (Model 5).

Law and globalization scholarship notes that global, national, and local spheres are highly interpenetrated (see, e.g., Reference Halliday and CarruthersHalliday & Carruthers 2009; Reference MerryMerry 2006; Reference SantosSantos 1987). Thus, while our analysis demonstrates that national effects matter net of global forces, it is still important to consider how the national and the global interact. In other words, do national laws' effects vary depending on global connections? To test this, we include an interaction term to determine how countries' acquiescence to international law (in the form of child-marriage treaty ratifications) affects the impact of strict laws and laws with exceptions.

Model 6 shows that the effect of strict laws does not change based on how many treaties a country has ratified. Once adopted, the strict marriage policy effects are not influenced by global legal circumstances surrounding policy adoption or enforcement. However, Model 7 reveals a significant interaction effect between countries that have laws with exceptions and countries that have ratified more child-marriage related treaties. Countries with a weak child marriage law that had not signed any child-marriage related treaties were doing significantly worse than countries without laws in reducing rates of adolescent fertility (as shown by the main effect for the law with exceptions category; b = 7.78; p < 0.01). Likewise, among the countries with exceptions in their laws, those that had ratified more international treaties related to child marriage did significantly better at reducing adolescent fertility than those that had ratified fewer treaties. For each treaty ratified, countries passing laws with exceptions reduce their rates of adolescent fertility by 2.87 births per thousand girls (p < 0.05).

The significant interaction effect between laws with exceptions and treaty ratification confirms previous research that there is a complex interplay of global and local factors when it comes to the impact of national laws. It could be that countries with marriage policies with exceptions are more influenced by global pressure to adopt a marriage policy as window-dressing; but, at the same time, global pressure also helps with implementation. Perhaps the progress of countries that have ratified child-marriage related treaties is more likely to be monitored than the progress of other countries. This would provide more motivation for countries to implement social change (Reference ColeCole 2005). It is also possible that ratifying treaties leads to greater levels of international support and that this enables more social change.

In addition to our full-sample analyses, we ran the same models for subsets of countries based on dominant religion and region (not reported here). The effects of strict laws, laws with exceptions, and their interactions with treaty ratifications were the same for the different religious subsets (although the results were not always statistically significant due to some very small sample sizes). For region subsets, the finding that strict laws are more effective than laws with exceptions also held across all models.Footnote ¹⁸

Overall, the results provide support for our hypothesis that minimum-age-of-marriage laws are associated with decreases in adolescent fertility, and that this effect goes above and beyond the effect of international laws and embeddedness in the world polity (as indicated by the presence of INGOs). However, this is only true with respect to minimum-age-of-marriage laws that strictly comply with international standards. Countries in which these laws allow exceptions are not significantly different from countries that lack laws setting the minimum age of marriage at 18. This supports our hypothesis that countries with strict laws are the most effective at reducing adolescent fertility. Our hypotheses regarding the lasting effect of strict policies over time, as well as the effect of treaty ratifications, are also supported.

These findings can be illustrated by examining specific countries. For example, Rwanda established a strict law in 1988. It was already on a trajectory to decrease its rate of adolescent fertility, and this decline continued after the law was adopted. While over 100 of every 1,000 Rwandan teenage girls were giving birth in the 1960s, this rate was under 40 by 2009. By contrast, Tanzania passed a minimum-age-of-marriage law in 1971, but the law has never applied to groups governed by customary laws. Tanzania thus represents a country that has a law allowing exceptions. Although Tanzania saw a drop in adolescent fertility between 1970 and 1988, the rate spiked in the early 1990s. Currently, the country's rate of teenage fertility is about 130 births per 1,000 girls. As a final example, Benin is a country that has no minimum-age-of-marriage law. In the early 1980s, when data became available, the rate of adolescent fertility in Benin was about 150 per 1,000 births. The rate has dropped over time, but is still over 100 births per 1,000 teenagers. These three cases illustrate what our analysis shows is a broader trend: strict laws have an impact, while laws that allow exceptions tend to be similar to countries with no laws or laws that set the minimum age of marriage lower than 18.

Discussion and Conclusion

This article was motivated by the fundamental question: When and to what extent do national laws lead to their desired outcomes above and beyond international laws and global organizing? Drawing on the case of adolescent fertility, we find clear evidence that policies matter. Laws that strictly established 18 as the minimum age of marriage were associated with dramatic reductions in adolescent fertility. We find that strict laws matter above and beyond conventional demographic factors and world polity indicators.

Our country and time fixed effects models control for different starting points across countries as well as general trends over time. In this way, our analysis adds much needed empirical rigor to a literature that has drawn different conclusions about the effect of law. Significant national policy effects after controlling for unobserved trends provide strong support for our argument that national minimum-age-of-marriage laws have an independent effect in reducing adolescent fertility.

What does it mean for law and globalization scholarship that strict laws are associated with fundamental changes in human behavior over time? This finding undercuts arguments that law is either epiphenomenal of other processes or altogether irrelevant. While Reference Frank, Hardinge and Wosick-CorreaFrank, Hardinge, and Wosick-Correa (2009) found states engaging in ceremony without substance and substance without ceremony, we find that in the case of adolescent fertility, ceremony (the passage of a law) and substance (a reduction in adolescent fertility) coincide with one another. However, we also find evidence that most countries experienced reductions in adolescent fertility in the recent period, even if they did not adopt any laws. Reductions in these countries, some of which is directly linked to international law ratification, lend support to Frank et al.'s contention that global institutions generate both policy reforms and local outcomes. In the case of adolescent fertility, having ceremony is not merely ceremonial but also substantive. We also find that strict marriage laws have stronger effects over time, suggesting increased impact as laws become institutionalized.

Our research also reveals that the form of law matters. “Weak” laws—those that allow exceptions to the minimum age of marriage—appear to be less effective than laws that strictly adhere to international standards.Footnote ¹⁹ In contrast to countries with strict laws, countries with laws that allowed exceptions to the minimum age of marriage were statistically indistinguishable from countries that lacked laws setting 18 as the minimum age of marriage. Previous research points to several possible reasons for this.

First, laws with exceptions may signal the lack of a serious commitment to reducing child marriage by states. It is possible that the type of law signals whether states are serious about reform or, rather, intend to use laws as window-dressing. Committed states may adopt strict laws; hypocritical states may adopt laws with exceptions. Second, laws with exceptions may signal cultural distance from the global system, slowing reform efforts (Reference Halliday and CarruthersHalliday & Carruthers 2009). When local understandings of marriage are very different from the definitions provided by global actors, gaps between formal law and enforcement are more likely to emerge. Third, laws with exceptions may create more ambiguity than strict laws, and ambiguity is also associated with slower societal change (Reference Halliday and CarruthersHalliday & Carruthers 2009). Even if states passing laws with exceptions do care about reducing child marriage, this type of law may send the opposite message to people within the country. Exceptions may make individuals question whether the targeted behavior is truly a serious societal concern. If some individuals are allowed to engage in the behavior, it may appear that the state is not making child marriage a priority. More pragmatically, exceptions may raise questions about precisely when the law applies. Ambiguity is thus another potential explanation for the differences we find in the impact of laws.

Organizations will sometimes regulate themselves to avoid or preempt potentially harsher regulation from the state, such as the case of corporations and voluntary social responsibility reporting (see Reference ShamirShamir 2011). In a similar way, states may adopt weaker legislation to forestall more onerous policy changes. The weaker legislation is easier to implement because it means less change (which also explains why it is less effective). This explanation is worth exploring in future research, but we would be cautious about drawing too many inferences from this organizational literature. The social contexts of states versus corporations are very different. States can legislate the activities of corporations, but the international system can only make suggestions regarding the activities of states. Whether weak laws are a strategic product of states to counteract global pressure needs further exploration.

Our analysis provides a first step in differentiating the impact of national laws from the impact of world polity factors, such as INGO links and treaty ratifications. We find that strict laws are associated with reductions in adolescent fertility even when world polity factors are controlled. Thus, national reforms appear to have an effect above and beyond global efforts.

World polity indicators themselves had mixed effects on levels of adolescent fertility. Countries that had ratified more treaties tackling child marriage showed greater progress in reducing adolescent fertility than other countries. Somewhat surprisingly, however, INGO links did not have any impact on the dependent variable. This could be the result of using a more conservative statistical model that controls for general trends over time. It may also suggest that a particular kind of participation in the world polity—treaty ratification—is more important in this case.

In addition to finding that strict minimum-age-of-marriage laws are associated with reductions in adolescent fertility, our statistical analysis also revealed an interesting interaction between national laws and global connections. We found that among countries with laws with exceptions, those that had ratified more treaties were doing slightly (and statistically significantly) better at reducing teenage births than the others. International treaties may provide a counterbalance to weak laws at the national level by providing closer monitoring or greater support for countries that ratify treaties and pass laws. The same interaction effect did not hold for countries that passed strict laws, suggesting that, once adopted, strict national laws actively promote the ideas of international law regardless of monitoring or support from the international actors.

Our results also suggest that while national laws are important mediators in linking international legislation with concrete local outcomes, international laws' effect does not entirely depend on the existence of strong local (and often ceremonial) support. Most countries in the world experienced a reduction of adolescent fertility regardless of international law ratification or INGO links (as shown in Figure 2). Our analysis reveals a process of social change in which each country's commitment to international law and its own legislative reform efforts have independent effects.

Our article is not without some important caveats. First, while our analysis finds that the legal context shapes fertility patterns at the aggregate level, we cannot ascertain how these factors are shaping the individual decisionmaking that leads to teenage pregnancy. Further research is needed to unravel the precise mechanisms through which state policies and global structures affect individual decisions and behaviors. Second, our analysis does not tell us why some countries adopt strict laws while others allow exceptions. Ultimately, understanding the origins of laws will be important for understanding why they have varying impacts. It is possible that country differences not captured in our statistical models could explain both the adoption of policies and the reduction in rates of adolescent fertility.

National policymaking involves complex relationships between the state and society. As we explained in the Analytic Strategy section, we controlled for these other factors by using a fixed effects model for every country in the analysis. This approach allows us to consider how policies affect outcomes net of ongoing differences across countries. Uncovering the precise mechanisms through which the global and local circumstances interact in making and enforcing national policies is an important area for future research from both quantitative and qualitative scholars.

Finally, while many in international society define adolescent fertility as a social problem, there are others who see it differently (e.g., Reference BuntingBunting 2005; see also Reference FurstenbergFurstenberg 2003). Our research addresses the process through which social change occurs as a result of global mobilization. Global actors have identified a link between child marriage and teen births, and our analysis is consistent with the claim that the two phenomena are connected. Whether changing family dynamics is better than other interventions, such as reducing global poverty, is a critical consideration outside the scope of our analysis.

In sum, this study provides one of the first empirical cross-national analyses of law's impact in the context of global norms. It calls attention to the general effect of law on desired outcomes as well as the specific effects of laws that conform to global norms to varying degrees. Whether national law is an expression of a stronger commitment to global norms or a reflection of a cultural proximity between international laws and local circumstances, adopting and implementing national laws that adhere closely to global norms matters for creating change. Together, international laws and national policies create a loosely coupled and interpenetrated system in which national laws reflect and crystallize international legislation but maintain a clear level of autonomy. We hope our analysis will encourage further research on this interpenetration in other domains beyond adolescent fertility.