Midwives have been told about the benefits of “close relative marriage” in training documents that minimise the risks to couples’ children.
The documents claim “85 to 90 per cent of cousin couples do not have affected children” and warn staff that “close relative marriage is often stigmatised in England”, adding claims that “the associated genetic risks have been exaggerated”.
Only?
Yeah no shit. 15% is fucking huge
They have to justify the inbreeding of the monarchy somehow.
If we ever get Medicare for All, I hope our national insurance agency doesn’t put out a paper extolling the virtues of fucking and impregnanting your cousins.
Am I the only one that thinks 15% is way too high of a chance to be rolling the dice like that? I’ve played enough XCOM to know that even a 99% success rate will still bite you in the ass.
Now tell them vaccinees have less than 15% chance of causing autism.
An unfortunate aspect of Pakistani culture that has carried over to the UK.
Families would marry within the family to keep their wealth within the family.
Unfortunately after successive generations, this can cause serious problems.
Thank god no European family of significance has ever done anything like this.
spoiler
Obviously they have, it’s just very few and far between.
It’s a bit silly to bring up royal families and pretend their lifestyles are similar to that of the common man.
Look at this map and tell me the issue is European culture.
Excuse me! Loads of Western European countries allow full incest (e.g. Belgium, France, Spain, etc.) so let’s not pick on us Brits for allowing cousins to fuck.
not making illegal and support from the national health service are vastly different things. 15% is a disastrous rate for public health.
I think this might be relevant
Wow 10 of them are almost half (or more). That surprises me. I knew it happens in arranged marriages, but I didn’t think it was this frequent.
Devils advocate: I have a genetic defect that has 50% chance of being passed to my children. It causes bone tumors that range from stetic to life changing.
We only managed to ensure it wasn’t with expensive DNA tests pre - implantation.
Should I be barred from marriage if I can’t pay for that?
It’s not a hypothetical
Not sure what marriage has to do with it in either case tbh. The cousinfuckers can have babies without getting married and so can you lol
But I do understand your point. It’s an ethical dilemma and not a simple one. I mean on a policy level. I imagine on a personal level it’s easier to say “the risk is too great, I won’t do it” as opposed to policymakers saying “the risk is too great, you shouldn’t be allowed to have children”
Do you think it’s (morally) right for you to have kids that you know would have a 50% chance to have bone tumors?
Sex bans are generally not workable. A marriage ban for you would be restrictive. This is very different for cousins, because there’s plenty of non-cousin alternatives for everyone.
On the scale of things, I think this rate’s a “who the fuck cares?”.
I don’t really care if cousins get married. I don’t really care if they have kids together. I do care if they have birth defects and we should do things medically responsible to reduce or eliminate birth defects, but the whole cousin thing doesn’t really bother me as long as there’s no external pressure (like British royalty or stereotypical Southern Hicks).
Who is really that bent out of shape on this and why should we care?
As you stated, the worst thing of such marriage is having kids with health problems that can accumulate very fast with each new generation(silent mutations that get only worse and someday pop out with loud bang). This is mostly the only thing that stops such relationships.
I think it’s just another dog whistle tbh, like caring about animal welfare when it’s Halal, or worrying about parking when a HMO is opened.
Cousin marriage is a brown person activity, so suddenly pearls are clutched.
ITT: Blatant ableism disguised as concerns.
Should you be allowed to have children if you are a known carrier of some bad but not inmediatly deadly risk gene like fragile x, chorea huntington, mucoviszidosis, diabetes 1 (let’s ignore the worsening of fragile x and chorea huntingtion across generations for a moment)? Should you be allowed to have children if you have trisomie 21, or some other mental disability? If you say no i think you are ableist and can’t comprehend that people with special needs are still people that can be happy and can have desires. If you say yes why can’t two cousins have a child? What if they have two forms of birth control and just want to fuck? What if they are the same sex? I my experience most people who are against two cousins having sex do not give a flying fuck about some theoretical chile but just think it’s icky. Which is a fair feeling you are allowed to have but should not be basis for a law.
Having children with disabilities via voluntary incest is a choice. Same with having kids with a terrible genetic disease. It’s also questionable how good a parent, if not person, you are for willingly wanting to bring in someone who will suffer into the world. Especially when there’s adoption available. If you can use technology to prevent a literal disease, that’s different.
People who get kidney failure or lost an arm definetly didn’t make that damn choice.
If anything is ableist it’s your opinion; people with disease or injury don’t want to have it, or made the choice to have it - let alone have they’re loved ones get the same thing. It’s about not judging the person’s potential abilities in specific areas or mistreating them despite the disease.
But advocating for the spread of the disease is fucked up. Your logic is no different than advocating a blind parent should have the right to blind their child intentionally.
The issue I have with your argument is you can use the exact same argument for sibling incest. If two cousins can have a child, and we’re dismissing the birth defect risk argument, then why can’t a brother and sister have a child? What if they just want to fuck? What if the entire family is into the aristocrats style gang bang?
Your argument doesn’t draw a line between cousin incest and parent-child or sibling incest. If one is okay then the other should also be okay and I don’t know about you but I’m definitely not okay with the latter. I’m not saying you’re in the wrong but I do disagree with the argument you made for it.
Parent-child incest has the power dynamic issue. It’s basically impossible to consent in that relationship. As to siblings, I’d argue that the logical conclusion is that it is probably okay, unless there’s a limit to how much birth defect risk is allowable, which as noted above, comes with other issues.
Siblings definitely have power dynamics that make consent very hazardous. I’d argue first cousins also have such dynamics. Perhaps to a lesser degree, but there’s no real benefit from having cousins marry and there is an increased risk of birth defects, so better to disallow it.
This. I haven’t seen an argument about incest that doesn’t immediately devolve into eugenics, or talking about power imbalances that aren’t present with adult cousins
Children of first-cousin marriages have a 4–6% risk of autosomal recessive genetic disorders compared to the 3% of the children of totally unrelated parents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage
Is it eugenics now to say people should avoid conceiving children that are likely to have birth defects?
I don’t know, but do you also think it should be illegal to have a child if you’re over 40?
Do you also think that it should be illegal for people with heritable disabilities to have children?
Because your argument isn’t anti-cousin-marriage, it’s anti-birth-defects, and there are a whole lot more sources of them than incest, and ones that are way more common.
Also, yes, preventing people from having children who would have birth defects dates back to the original eugenics movement, it is literally a core belief of the eugenics movement.
24 US states ban cousin marriages. No states ban people over 40 from having children. You want to equate the two but there is a line between that that you can draw, as evidenced by half of the USA doing so.
I’ve expanded on my views elsewhere in thread.
25 US stated by my count, but also I let my ethics develop separately from the law. There’s been a lot of very questionable things in the law in the past, and as such it’s not exactly a trustable guide for ethics imo.
That’s not the point you presented here, though. The point you presented here was birth defects.
The point you brought up there I still object to, though. While there can be power dynamics between cousins, it’s fairly rare for those to continue into adulthood, and I have long taken the stance “I don’t believe the state should have a say in what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home.”
The line that’s been drawn is people allowing their disgust to inform policy at best. If it were based in anything else the policies would be different.
