To think that 1st Cousin Marriage should be illegal

[stucknoue]

Background: as part of my job I rent out halls, they are very popular for Asian parties and weddings and my clients are lovely, often bringing me food and inviting me to their celebrations.

Over the past couple of months I've unfortunately had to rent the hall for child funeral meals twice to the same family, the kids were cousins and had the same rare genetic condition. In talking to their grandad he revealed that he and his wife were cousins, then going on to tell me that the parents of the sadly deceased children were also cousins. I looked up that cousin marriage increases genetic conditions 3 fold, the more generations that have practiced it then the higher the probability. With our knowledge of science surely this practice should be outlawed?

I know this is a bit but what is the kennel clubs view on related dogs being bred together?

It wouldn't make any difference to cousins bearing children from cousin though.
They'd just jump over the broom like in old times and that would be considered as being married in some cultures.
Not that there's anything wrong with marrying a first cousin.

I am second generation Asian (Muslim) and I haven't RTFT so don't know if i'm repeating things, but there has been a lot of efforts in the mosques and Muslim ummah (community) to stop this practice. Cousin marriage is permissable in Islam but not recommended. Very very few second gens will agree to cousin marriages now (or anyone of their parents choice for that matter) It happens mostly in the poorest families who have little to no education and want to bring a family member from Pakistan. Some families in the UK will try to hide any genetic issues from those in Pakistan, and for those who do know the incentive of the perceived life in Britain will be enough.

I am not married to a cousin (and neither are my parents) and one of my dc has a genetic syndrome. I agree with a poster who said that perceptions affect the quality of care received; it is always assumed that my son's condition was caused by an inter familial marriage and I had a doctor once who insisted that we must be cousins but didn't know

With our knowledge of science surely this practice should be outlawed

The crux of the OP's argument is that we should reduce the amount of babies being born with disabilities. That would mean "outlawing" couples who already have a child with a disability from having more, or people with disabilities from having a child. Would you go one step further and say there should be mandatory termination for antenally diagnosed issues? Where would the line be drawn? These are huge ethical v human rights issues.

With our knowledge of science surely this practice should be outlawed

We know about the increased risk to health of being overweight should we make fatties illegal force them to diet and if they don't lose the weight prosecute them?
Should they be made to pay for their treatment as suggested about those who marry cousins and have a baby needing care.

Royals has married their cousins for hundreds of years. Shall we outlaw them doing it, too?
This has not been the norm in European royal families for a few generations now. Even when intermarriage among Europeans royalty was common, only a fairly low % of marriages actually involved first cousins. The Habsburgs were a bit of an exception.

The British royal family suffered terribly and royal houses of Europe because they could only marry people of royal blood. I remember Princess Diana being such a break with the past. Prince Philip a generation before was for the Greek royal house but Prince Charles did not marry a princess - a huge break but genetically a good thing. The Russian royal family intermarried with the British and others and had that poor little boy with hemophilia.

There is some strange history going on here. The hemophilia which radiated out among European royalty had nothing to do with consanguinity--it was caused by a single mutation which came from Queen Victoria, carried on one of her X chromosomes. (Consanguinity-related genetic disorders are to do with recessive genes, by contrast.) Queen Victoria's father was in his 50s when he conceived her, which may have been a factor behind his sperm containing said mutation. So if you wanted to use the law to reduce the risk of hemophilia, should we ban older men from fathering children?

I think cousin marriage is a grim tradition, but would be very leary of banning it on genetic health grounds as this could be a bit of a slippery slope (older fathers, older mothers, people with known genetic conditions etc.).

You could get away with banning it on the grounds that history suggests that widespread cousin marriage is incompatible with modern liberal democracy. Wherever cousin marriage is common, it is very hard to have functioning democratic government or a strong civil society (think of the state of countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan and much of the Middle East, and you will see what I mean).

All in all, though, I think it's better to educate people about the risks involved and wait for the custom to die out.

We prosecute sexual intercourse between a father and his 6 year old though don't we? We don't say it's hard to find out and just drop it. So we could equally do the same with incest which is already illegal and new incest if we widen the offence.

I just found one prosecution a.though there the siblings only met in adult life which never quite feels the same although genetically there is no difference - brother and sister here - www.independent.co.uk/life-style/woman-parents-incest-report-police-siblings-donna-price-a7824296.html

"Sex with an adult who is related as parent, adoptive parent, grandparent, child, adopted child, grandchild, brother, sister, half-brother, half-sister, uncle, aunt, nephew or niece, is illegal. " en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_incest#United_Kingdom

But in the case of a father and 6 year old daughter Xenia you have a situation with an abuser and a victim. That's not quite the same as prosecuting 2 consenting adults. And what would you be prosecuting for? Getting married? Having sex? Having children?

What about adult siblings then? Surely that's illegal.
That reminds me of when a very young ds told me he was going to marry his (male) best friend when he grew up. Dd said he couldn't as they were both boys and in fact the law had just changed so I took the opportunity to explain it. He then changed his mind anyway and announced he'd just marry his sister instead. :o

Or in fact adult father and daughter

It is illegal but rarely happens, except in situations of abuse or estrangement because nature generally programmes us not to want sex with children we are brought up with. And when it does happen, mostly no-one knows because both parties tend to keep it hidden. There was a case in Scotland a few years ago. Couple w 3 children turned out to be brother and sister. All children fine.

Would siblings be prosecuted, if hypothetically there was no evidence of abuse? I haven't heard of such a case, and I'm not sure if it would be in the public interest to prosecute..?

In the case I mentioned they weren't prosecuted because it was deemed not to be in the public interest. Relationship had been going on a long time, couple were past child bearing age but had 3 kids to bring up. You might think "ew" (I thought ew) but really what would be the answer by that point? Public shaming, fine, break up the family, imprisonment, how would any of it help?

Luckily, those sort of cases are rare.

First marriages between cousins aren't a problem if it is a one off though so it would be very unfair to make it illegal and basically accuse those cousins who are already married of incest. It would surely be far better to educate families in this country that if the grandparents are cousins the grandchildren should not marry and have children.

woodchuck I assume you have no background knowledge in genetics? Any two members of the public can have a child with genetic issues, it slightly increases between two cousins. If a family carry a particular syndrome then that can increase to 1 in four chance (or more)

Sorry wood don't mean to single you out, but lots saying a one off cousin marriage doesn't matter, which in theory should be correct but very much depends on the genetics. You could have a one off cousin marriage with a disabled child and a multi generational cousin marriage with no problems.

woodchuck I assume you have no background knowledge in genetics? Any two members of the public can have a child with genetic issues, it slightly increases between two cousins. If a family carry a particular syndrome then that can increase to 1 in four chance (or more)

I'm not a geneticist but are you? When I said "not a problem" I meant that the risk increase of genetic problems if it happens once isn't much in the general population. Obviously the risk isn't zero but neither is the risk of a millions other things that aren't illegal.

Women over 40 have a pretty high risk of birth defects too compared with younger women. Should it be illegal for them to have children too?

It is certanily worth debating eg should we on grounds of personal freedom allow brothers and sisters once they are 16 to have consensual sex or fathers and daughters once adult?

Is it right it is illegal to have sex with a corpse is another one (clearly the corpse couldn't care less as it's dead so why do we make that illegal)?

What about adopted people should they be screened to make sure they don't share any DNA with the person they wish to marry?

Genetic testing, with all its faults and inadequacies, would be a better way to go, than prohibiting particular marriages. Our understanding of genetics, our ability to discover more and more about how genes interact, and our developments in testing will all continue to improve the chances to finding potential problems.

I suppose it's cheaper jsut to ban brother/sister marriage, father/daughter etc than for someone (presumably we tax payers) to do expensive genetic tests however and we have decided which relationships and sex we don't allow - eg no sex wqith a corpse or animal other than a human, no sex between father and daughter. Not everyone shares that view. the Kingston Clan in the USA have a huge number of babies within the families.

I suppose it's cheaper jsut to ban brother/sister marriage, father/daughter etc than for someone (presumably we tax payers) to do expensive genetic tests however and we have decided which relationships and sex we don't allow

Look, the whole point of consanguinity risk is that two closely related parents often contain the same dangerous recessive gene which is very rare in the population as a whole. You would have to put people through thousands of tests in order to rule them all out, even if we HAD testing for these things, which we do not!

So I thikn we are in agreement - never mind cost it is also very hard to do so a lot simpler to say no sex between full or half blood siblings or between father and daughter or uncle and niece etc.

Interesting that brother and sister sex seems to be legal in quite a few places www.thesun.co.uk/news/5562872/incest-map-of-europe-where-sex-is-legal-between-family-members/

I'm not surprised it is illegal in a lot of countries if both siblings are consenting adults. It doesn't seem to be something which should be punishable with a prison sentence anyway. Obviously there could be a high risk of problems if they had children but surely in this day and age that could be prevented with effective contraception.