Should it be illegal for 1st cousins to marry?

[brasty]

My DP's parents are 1st cousins, and DP has a genetic illness. Marrying your 1st cousin increases the chances of genetic illness. So I wonder if we should simply make it illegal for 1st cousins to marry? Obviously anyone married would stay so, it would only apply to new marriages.
AIBU?

The problem seems to be, as MaidOfStairs' post makes clear, that the severe issues around cousin marriage are specifically related to one distinct ethnic community: British Pakistanis
For clarity:

In the U.K., British Pakistanis are the largest ethnic group that practice first cousin marriage/children. Hence, they form a majority of the families seen in genetics clinics.

Otoh other ethnic groups could probably go on marrying their cousins with no harm done
I did not mean to convey this. We, of course, see families of other ethnicities in genetics clinics (other Muslim populations, Irish travelling community, etc).

I'm pleased to see the number of people coming on with anecdotal evidence of the damage this causes, children being born with disabilities. Although I am sure everyone accepts the medical evidence as well. What a massive impact on families and society.

But if their children marry THEIR first cousins, then problems are likely to start, and when it carries on generation after generation, those issues become increasingly likely.

But you can hardly tell your child not to marry his/her cousin when his/her dad is your cousin! There's no real moral high ground to take, is there?

YY I agree @waltermittythesequel but I also don't see how banning the practise in the 1st place will make a difference when you can still have sex/children outside of marriage.

No, I don't either.

Just education and hoping that people will chose from the other 7 billion people in the world instead of their cousins!

Another anecdote: I once took a taxi ride with a British Pakistani driver who was very engaged with a community programme to educate people about the risks of first cousin marriage. I subsequently emailed him some resources.

So the message is getting out there. We run public sessions to help with this.

How would I strategise? Non-judgemental family support and genetic testing of potential matches. If first cousin marriage is going to continue regardless of any hypothetical law, maybe we can generate the right information to inform selection of the 'most suitable' first cousin? (That sounds like it has the potential to be offensive. If so, it's unintentional and I'm just musing here, from a platform of little cultural experience of how first cousins are matched).

*choose! Bloody autocorrect!

Someone mentioned Darwin. He did indeed marry his first cousin. They had 10 dc and he was worried that their relationship was the reason 3 of his dc died at young ages.
Einstein also married his cousin, they where first cousins on his dm side and second cousins on df side.

Caffe - the communities in which these marriages more commonly take place are also more likely to insist on marriage before sex/babies.

And in the Pakistani community the marriages are not always "legal" in the law of the land sense. Some marriages are polygamous so the women are wives under their own law but not under British law.

In the countryside there was always the cliche of the inbred villager - which was to an extent true as people travelled little and had to keep choosing a spouse out of a limited pool. In the village where my father grew up there were quite a few adults and children who had various problems - from serious to minor. My grandfather's pig man married his cousin - who we would now say has learning difficulties but back then was called "daft" and they had three deaf children who all had learning difficulties too.

So it's not a racist thing to observe that this happens, because anywhere where logistics or indeed money makes inter-cousin marriage (or rather, breeding) favourable it happens.

Mother of one of ds's friends is mental health nurse and she told me that about one in three of the patients in the home she was working in (ie very severe, unable to live unaided) were the result of traveller inter-marriage, or having children with even closer relatives.

You can't make it illegal. It's culture.
The only community I have any knowledge of where this happens is the Irish Travellers
and a lot of community development is ongoing. Adult education and early years development etc but as far as I know marriage within families is not tackled.
Traveller families have access to more health care than settled people because of life expectancy 15 years shorter than general population.

Caffe - the communities in which these marriages more commonly take place are also more likely to insist on marriage before sex/babies.

But what's to stop them marrying abroad?

My point is, banning it isn't going to stop it happening. People can marry abroad, or in their home countries, come here, set up home, and send their kids abroad to get married if it's so important to them.

It's a big cultural thing in some communities, which is why they'll probably go to any extent possible to keep those traditions going. Banning consanguineous marriage in the UK won't really change that.

Yes I dont think banning would work either but it would draw attention to the problem.

Maidofstars you wrote near impossible to identify a child delayed from brilliant to average. I can see that, but have there been any (reliable) studies done of this on a population level? Or is that too problematic to be done reliably?

It's not even a case of marrying abroad to get around the issue. It's not that unusual for some Muslim couples to have an Islamic wedding ceremony and never have a civil ceremony to ensure they're married under UK law, because it's irrelevant to them.

That's true about the limited gene pool in rural villages in the past Lady, that the invention of the bicycle helped to cure..

Sadly, I know of a rural English family where a girl had a baby with her half brother who is also her first cousin - what an absolute disgrace in this day and age.

Inbred

Gross.

Mulledwine - just because you don't meet someone until you're an adult doesn't mean you're too closely related to be having sex.

Well my cousins look like my siblings. Yours don't ok but you and your cousins will still be cousins and it's still incest.

Charles Darwin married his first cousin. He was educated, well travelled, and good at genetics.

He also knew it was inbreeding and not a very good idea.

And even if people aren't cousins the idea of arranging a marriage in 20 years when they're kids is horrible. If Pakistani or white British royalty.

Lots of interesting replies. Just to clarify, my DP is not from a Pakistani background, just a rural isolated one with lots of in breeding. The difference of course is that now as people move around, the issue no longer exists in that particular small community.
It used to be fairly common in rural isolated communities in the UK in the past. There was a village about 8 miles from where I grew up where amongst the older people, there were a lot of people who had 6 fingers. Presumably a genetic defect that had been passed along by lots of inter marrying.

But yes I can see that what is needed is lots of education and awareness raising. For those talking about disabled people who have a genetic possibility of passing it on to children, I would hope that any parent in this situation would carefully consider it before having children. But it is worth noting that with very severe disabilities which many have talked about on this thread, the children born are extremely unlikely to be able physically to have children any way. That is why the key issue is of recessive genes.

You can't make it illegal. It's culture.

So we should allow honour killing, forced marriage and FGM? Those are cultural too y'know.

AHedgehogCanNeverBeBuggered no we should not and that's not what I was saying. I have very very little understanding of communities where this is cultural.
My knowledge on this issue only stretches as far as Irish Travellers and those practices are not common.
I agree with you that such things are abhorrent and should be stopped.

TheFirstMrsDV:
Its not bollocks. The stats include all consanguineous unions so do not differentiate between one offs and multi generationals.
a) What is bollocks is stating that 12.5% of shared genetic material is what would be expected in two unrelated individuals. That was what I was calling bollocks.
b) And first cousin marriage DOES cause an increase in birth defects:
However, Professors Paul and Spencer said that the risk of congenital defects is about 2 per cent higher than average for babies born to first-cousin marriages – with the infant mortality about 4.4 per cent higher
From the out-of-date Independent article cited by a PP.
Or how about [[https://www.cousincouples.com/?page=overview from here] :
First cousins have a 1.5 to 3% increased risk of having a child with birth defects that are inherited.
Fair enough, the background risk is around 3%, so first cousin marriage doesn't quite double it. It will probably increase the risk of immune problems, though. And the chance of infant mortality is noticeably higher.