I wonder where this 15% figure comes from. All the research I can find estimates the probability for these disorders at around 2-4% for first degree cousins. This is about the same as becoming a mother at 40 with a non-related man.
The article only talks about some NHS training documents and is very opinionated in style. Smells like a snappy headline about a controversial topic was more important than proper research.
Plus in the absence of any power dynamic* why shouldn't absolutely anyone be allowed to choose to be in a relationship with literally anyone else? Especially as people are increasingly choosing to not reproduce.
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.
That's because like NHS in this case, X-COM *lies *.
It lies in your favor, though. On difficulties below the highest, the modern games have hidden modifiers that affect the hit chance that you can't see, but all of them are cheating for you. IIRC your hit chance secretly increases when you have missed shots recently, when you have dead soldiers, when you are outnumbered, and maybe some other things.
Now tell them vaccinees have less than 15% chance of causing autism.
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.
But it's not a 15% risk. Unrelated couples have a 3% chance of having a child with a birth defect while cousins have a 5% chance of having a child with a birth defect.
Isn't the problem being that the probability increases with each subsequent generations? That's why having a child with a cousin should be discouraged, to prevent the accumulation of bad recessive genes.
If you have one person with recessive genes and one person with dominant genes, then the baby will have the dominant gene. So if the grandparents were cousins both with recessive genes it wouldn't matter, as far as I know.
The thing is, with subsequent incestual generations, the likelihood of the recessive gene manifesting increases a lot. So, the problem is not a single generation of incest, it's the normalisation of incest that might lead to multiple generations doing it.
Oh I see what you're saying. I did some reading earlier that said that in a lot of places 20% - 40% of all marriages are to first cousins.
US yanks in red states too.
"Brits are like US Southerners" is, arguably, a worse insult then calling them incestuous.
For who? The Brits or the southerners? Lol
Whichever has more teeth
It's a fun stereotype, but you may find this map interesting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage_law_in_the_United_States
They must make the best tory voters?
Badoom chicka wow wow.
Alabamba hootin’ and hollerin’ intensifies
Lots of things lead to increased risk of birth defects, like having children after the age of 30. I thought it was pretty well known that the risks associated with inbreeding drops off pretty sharply at the cousin level? At that point I think the appropriate reaction is social stigma, but not legal ramifications.
It also compounds over generations; if you're the child of first cousins, you really should seek someone who it would take genealogy research to find a common ancestor with. If you're not, it's still a serious risk to have kids with anyone too closely related, but level ramifications seem really harsh, especially thinking of situations like adoption where someone could end up there accidentally. And to your point, it isn't the only way to end up with that kind of risk profile.
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
Only?
Not defending cousin incest, but it sounds like the NHS is at least backing up its viewpoint with evidence.
Now as to unstigmatising cousin marriages, that's a no from me. There are 60 million other people in the UK, there's gotta be at least one that's right for you that's not also your cousin.
P.s. Trump should really have left the US out of this conversation given how infamous some of the Southern States are for this sort of "matrimony"
“85 to 90 per cent of cousin couples do not have affected children”
So imagine 10 couples: 1 couple has an affected child, the other 9 couples do not have any children. In this case, 90 percent of couples do not have affected children but 100 percent of children are affected. I wonder why they presented the statistics using that particular, odd means of phrasing.
Midwives have been told about the benefits of “close relative marriage”
Nice spin. They do not list benefits but advocate that the risk have been exaggerated.
Les cousins dangereux
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.
Er, we do. It’s called the NHS.
Of those 15% I bet 100% vote for Deform UK.
British teeth explained.
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.
Should disabled people be blanket banned from having sex or children? No obviously not. Not really workable anyways and quite morally hazardous to put into law, as you point out.
Should people with disabilities ought to (in a moral sense) have children that are at high risk of sharing their disability? Also no. To be frank, there's a reason we call it disability. Even though they can have good, rich, valuable lives, they much more often don't.
This is definitely a question of degrees. Society and medical support can change this line. Like where diabetes used to be a death sentence now it's serious but treatable. So less problematic to pass on diabetes today vs 200y ago, but why would you want to?
Finally let's get to cousins. Beyond the additional risk that they have children with health problems, there's a question of consent. Even between cousins (like siblings) there's often a power dynamic that makes consent hazardous. So IMO, obviously immoral. Making this illegal is not very restrictive (it affects you banging like 0-100 specific people out of literally billions) and codifies what was a taboo anyways (which is like, a pretty significant amount of law). 24 US states agree with me.
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.
What law makes it illegal?
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.
"I don't believe the state should have a say in what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home."
So that's why it's a marriage ban?
Why did you bring birth defects up if marriage is the concern? You don't get birth defects from a wedding.
Also in basically every state where it's illegal to marry your cousin it's illegal to have sex with them, too.
(When I say basically I mean I'm too tired to check half of the US's laws on this, and the source I'm using says sexual contact is generally not permitted)
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