1st cousin marriage

Yes, this MP's solution is that the British taxpayer should continue to foot the bill of supporting these children.

What if the taxpayer gets fed up of shelling out for the inevitable consequences of this harmful practice?

An MP has spoken against calls to ban first cousin marriage in the UK, suggesting instead that advanced genetic screening is made available to prospective married couples.

Independent MP Iqbal Mohamed said while "freedom of women must be protected at all times", he did not believe outlawing the practice would be "effective or enforceable".

He argued that rather than "stigmatising" cousin marriages, a "much more positive approach" should be adopted to respond to health concerns linked to the children of those relationships

https://news.sky.com/story/mp-speaks-out-against-proposal-to-ban-first-cousin-marriages-13271018

I find this approach absurd.

Frankly whether is banned or not cousin marriage should certainly be stigmatized as it stupid and dangerous

@AmnesiacsDream - well this would be good, BUT it was exposed that the NHS were advising of the pros of cousin marriage and advocating for not interfering in a commmnity’s cultural choices. Never mind the poor children resulting from this or the burden on the state.

I agree with pp that in Pakistan having a disabled child would be the family’s responsibility (as if was here some decades ago). In Britain there is huge medical input and benefits, so yes, if the womenfolk are staying ant home anyway then there are financial pluses to having one or more disabled children.

Re: genetic testing - the issue is that first cousin marriage increases likelihood of people with random mutations get married - and these aren’t things that show up with pregnancy genetic testing. It should be banned.

From what I know of it - The message about the impact of consanguinity is discussed with pregnant women and their husbands from Pakistani communities. They get genetic counseling and discussions with by GPs, HVs and midwives in places. Obviously, they aren’t the target in terms of preventing cousin marriages for themselves as they’ve already married. For them it’s about deciding on the risks of a particular pregnancy. But it’s a way to get the information into the communities in a way that gets heard and trusted, it gets passed on to siblings and DC, makes young people less keen on the practice and less likely to consider trying to arrange it for their own children.

Plenty of other factors also decrease cousin marriages. I don’t think education like this is the most effective of the levers. General educational attainment seems to be one of the biggest. Also the increase in the difficulty of getting a visa, especially as a young adult has made the practice of using marriage as a way to get family into the UK much less attractive.

They are not marrying outside their community though or very very rarely

so putting laws against one option is a start

it the education was working we would be talking about a handful of cases but we are not and people often do not want to be educated they want to continue to keep to norms of a culture they are from/parents are from that holds more value to them

progressive societies should not be supporting traditional cultural norms that are so damaging because it might make people feel uncomfortable or victimised there is a bigger issue to deal with

A community intermarrying in a small gene pool is the issue. 1st cousin marriages are obviously a part of that, but if you stop that and everyone just marries 2nd cousins instead, you don’t really improve the situation. And if by focusing on criminalizing the practice you drive the community to become more insular and decrease the number of people who marry outside the community you make it worse.

No, but they show that the work being done in places like Bradford is effective.

The Born in Bradford study showed that rates of 1st cousin marriage where one partner is not British born have also fallen, though only by about a quarter over the 12 or so years of the study (previous figures were over the course of 30 years, 1st cousin marriages in the Pakistani community apparently peaked in the 1990s).

Yup. Our entire Royal Family going back decades. God knows what physiological and psychological mishaps happened along there…

but marrying first cousins does contribute to high numbers of children being born with disabilities

that communities may feel persecuted is not a reason to not put laws in place.

some communities will not view girls getting married at 15 an issue, accept men have more than one wife, support FGM

all against laws in a progressive society we can’t hold back for fear of stepping on people’s feelings too many people get hurt while we tiptoe around feelings and being understanding

Stats about women born here obviously don’t include all the ones brought from Pakistan to marry a cousin!

Rates of first cousin marriage by Pakistani women born in the UK have halved and continue to drop.

But the other problem with banning 1st cousin marriages is that it’s not the real issue, just a media friendly aspect. Endogamy is the real issue and avoiding 1st cousin marriages won’t do a huge amount to change the health situation if that doesn’t change (as we see in Orthodox Jewish communities in the UK). And that is less likely to change if the community feels persecuted (as the current focus on trying to ban 1st cousin marriages makes them feel).

Yes, and this is terrible for those unlucky enough to have unavoidable disabilities who we could actually support far more generously were it not for the money being spent on children born with birth defects that were completely avoidable by simply not having children with your relatives.

The Hapsburgs, Charles Darwin, and our own Royal Family have been trotted out on this thread, every couple of hours.

They are irrelevant to the discussion we’re having about children born from first cousin marriages here and now, in the UK.

We know about the birth defects caused by such dreadful inbreeding.
You don’t have to convince any of us.
And you simply saying ‘Google the Hapsburgs’ isn’t a sparkling contribution to the thread, is it??

It's a lesson in what happens when close family marry.

Your comment is quite ignorant.

Agree

This happened hundreds of years ago.

No one cares about the Hapsburgs.

I know a white British woman. who did exactly this, same situation. Beautiful daughter and as far as im.aware still married 30+yrs.

Ban it. Lots of laws are difficult to enforce, and this may be one of them, but it sends a message. Once banned it should be added to the PHSE curriculum so that youngsters are aware.

I actually checked and Sweden only bans the marriage between cousins and not the act of intimacy

Google the Hapsburgs.

Yes, in fact the British state is enabling and facilitating this behaviour. We supply thousands of pounds of disability benefits to families with disabled offspring. With numerous female relatives available as carers, there are actually incentives provided by Western societies to carry on with this practice.

It isn’t. Education has been in place for decades. Look at the numbers of cases where this is still happening.

Why would we accept this completely avoidable harm continuing when we can cut it to a tiny fraction of current levels instantly by putting appropriate legislation in place?

Why would we accept thousands more children suffering painful and debilitating conditions and dying in childhood/ early adulthood unnecessarily for decades to come in the hope that these people inflicting this on them deliberately despite all of the scientific evidence will eventually see the light when - like in every other case where people are deliberately inflicting unacceptable and avoidable, predictable harms on others - we can reduce the rate to near zero by making it illegal and enforcing our laws, just like we do with other forms of deliberate harm to children/ child abuse, physical harm to other adults, rape, murder, etc?

Why is this particular harm acceptable and allegedly we should hope people decide not to do it? Should we decriminalise rape and murder as well and just hope people’s consciences and education about why it’s bad will be enough to stop them doing it?

I'd be interested in hearing more about this "education"?

Education and “changing hearts and minds” has not been effective. The evidence proves that it has not because decades on, since the effect of this was proved by science and despite numerous public health campaigns and “genetic counselling” being available to explain it very slowly to those who weren’t listening during biology at secondary school, it still continues.

Incest is a criminal offence that is prosecutable with a maximum sentence of 7 years. A lack of effective enforcement is not an argument against making appropriate laws, it is an argument to enforce them more robustly.

Laws exist for a reason: to protect wider society and victims from avoidable harm, where the restriction of one person’s actions is far outweighed by the damage that giving them the freedom to do what they want will cause to others. In this case, the balance of rights/ freedoms could not be clearer that this needs to be criminalised.

Your argument seems to be only an argument for stronger enforcement, not for refusing to criminalise unnecessary behaviour which causes extreme harm to its victims and wider society, and the curtailing of which would cause zero harm to anybody.