More than 700 million women worldwide today were married as children, and most of them are in developing countries. But there is a growing recognition that many young teens are marrying in the United States as well — and several states are now taking action to stop it.Advocates say the young marriages run the gamut: They include teens of every ethnicity and religion, teens who are American-born and teens who are not being forced into arranged marriages."To be honest with you, I begged my parents to let me get married," says Rachel Holbrook, who was 15 when she decided she wanted to marry her 21-year-old boyfriend.Partly, she says, it was because of her fundamentalist Christian upbringing."I thought that was God's will for my life," she says. "I had been pretty much taught from birth that the highest calling of a woman was to be a wife and mother and that I needed to do that to be in God's will."Holbrook says her other motivation was her belief that sex before marriage was a sin."You
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