NC Woman seeks to end child marriage

Cites her own experiences as teenage mother in 1970s

RALEIGH, N.C. — At age 13, Judy Wiegand says community leaders gave her “suggested guidance” to marry the 16-year-old father of her unborn child. It was the 1970s. She remembers violence, difficulty raising her child, and her own childhood being taken from her, she testified to a North Carolina House judiciary committee on Tuesday.

Now 57, Wiegand hoped those memories would stay in her past.

“It was done. I dealt with it. I had moved on,” Wiegand said. “I had no intention of dealing with it again until I found out that this was still occurring.”

North Carolina is one of two states that still allow children as young as 14 to marry.

Opponents of North Carolina’s child marriage law say that because of this the state has become a destination spot for child trafficking.

The law is also used as a get-out-ofjail-free card for adults who had sex with children and impregnated them, some lawmakers say.

Wiegand is opposed to North Carolina, or any other state, allowing child marriage.

Now, with no connection to North Carolina, Wiegand traveled from Kentucky to Raleigh to urge the state’s representatives to rethink child marriage.

“If no one is complaining about it then everything just goes along as it is,” Wiegand said. Wiegand grew up in rural Kentucky. She keeps many of the details vague about the father of her child, but what she did say in testimony to a House committee Tuesday and in an interview with The News & Observer gives a window into how child marriage affects teens.

Many of the details she leaves out, she said, in an attempt to protect her child from being connected to her story.

She said she and the father met at a place in the community for teenagers. They weren’t in a relationship at the time she became pregnant. She describes him as her crush.

“He was somebody that was a little bit older and was giving me attention,” Wiegand said.

“When you go into a rural community, the population looks for guidance not from the police, not from elected officials,” Wiegand said. “They look for guidance from the local community leaders, and a large majority of the local community leaders are local community church leaders.”

She said the two families sought guidance from those leaders to determine how to handle her pregnancy.

“It’s sort of woven into everyday life in the community that to not be ostracized from the community, you have to follow these sort of unspoken rules of the community,” Wiegand said. And in her case that meant marriage. Wiegand said she doesn’t remember how she felt about marrying her crush.

She said on one hand she knew that it was a resolution her community would accept, but on the other hand “a problem born out of poor judgment” was met with a solution also born out of “poor judgment.”

To legally marry, the teens had to cross the border into Virginia.

Prior to 2016, Virginia lawmakers allowed children to get married as young as 12 if they were pregnant and had parental consent. That law changed five years ago banning all child marriages unless someone 16 or older had been emancipated from their parents.

At first the couple lived with the boy’s parents, but as he went through normal teenage rebellion they moved out on their own, she said.

“There were a lot of hardships,” Wiegand said. “I had a baby at 14, and I tried to go back to school after the baby was born.”

Wiegand said she was too young to get a driver’s license and didn’t have transportation to go to school.

She tried to get her GED so she could get a job and support her family, but said that the state wouldn’t allow her to take the test until what would have been her senior year of high school.

Her baby’s father had odd jobs on and off during their marriage but never substantial ones, she said.

She spent her teenage years cleaning houses and made an average $20 a day.

Wiegand said her parents would have supported her but access to them was controlled and they often didn’t know when their daughter ran out of food or money.

Wiegand testified before the House committee that her husband was violent.

She told the committee members that when he turned his violence from her to their child she knew she had to leave.

“I wanted more for my child,” Wiegand told The News & Observer.