To be disturbed by wilfull ignorance around genetic inbreeding?

[M9009]

I've come from a country were cousin marriage and indeed marriage to any close relative if illegal.
I've recently started working in a dialysis unit and I'm so disturbed by how many parents are young children born of first cousin marriage. Usually from South Asian backgrounds.
Today I was speaking to one parents who has 9 children, all in need of kidney transplants. The eldest 2 have already had theirs. Parents are first degree cousins and each have various medical problems of their own.
Why, as a society, do we allow these marriages? It seems so cruel to the children who are born with medical and genetic problems.
Maybe I'm easily shocked, I don't know.

I don’t care what ‘positives’ people see in marrying their cousin.

It hasn’t been the norm here for hundreds of years and is seen as societally unacceptable.

It also carries extra risk even if it’s not 100% of the time. It’s also costing us a small fortune in medical care and SEN.

We are under no obligation to enable something we see as appalling to cater to other ‘cultural norms’.

I remember a family who had 4 children. One was healthy. The other three all died, they were born and died one after the other. So wasn’t like they had been born before they had a diagnosis. It was so sad.

Thoroughly agree with pp observing it’s vote chasing by Labour, but that they are thoroughly f**d in those communities now. Certain MPs scraped in with a handful of votes. Next time predictions are around 30 Muslim Vote MPs.

If cousin marriage was naturally dying out, as it did in rural Britain (when the choice was limited!), that would perhaps be a reason to hold off legislation. But it is not. It seems increasingly entrenched to double down on cultural practices which are not beneficial to individuals or the state.

@SpanThatWorld Genetics can be incredibly cruel. But there are a vanishingly tiny proportion of families who have children as you describe and this thread is vastly overstating the prevalence of these families.

It is NOT vanishingly tiny uless you consider one child in every 10 Phakistani child of consanguinous marriage (1 in every 7 in some communities in the North) to be "vanishingly tiny".

I don't.

This a "we can't lose the votes" public health disaster in some communities.

The reason it’s not illegal isn’t because ‘it was white people before’, it’s because it was unnecessary as white people (through choice and logic) were no longer marrying cousins in any kind of statistically significant numbers. It was no longer neccessary to legislate - until it was.

I don’t care who is marrying their cousin - they should not be marrying their cousin and having children when they have much higher risk of disabilities and society has deemed marrying a close relative is unacceptable.

I can’t believe I’m having to make the case for this in 2026.

Child marriage is commonplace in Pakistan and Afghanistan and I'm sure that there are instances where it works out for the couples involved as well as plenty of instances where it doesn't.

But it is rightly against the law in the UK and just because it's common place in other countries it doesn't mean that it should be allowed in the UK for fear of pushing these unacceptable practices underground or for fear of being called racist.

Two generations above mine in a relatively small country area, in a country not too far from the UK, first cousins marrying was the usual thing. It was a really isolated area but life was hard back then and not much external socialising. My grandmother grew up there but luckily for me she met and married someone from quite far away and not related. There were 2 first cousins married and moved to New York and had 9 children I am not sure what happened to them. Of the rest that stayed in the local area there were many instances of fused fingers some learning difficulties and some had inability to digest certain essential proteins etc presumably all genetic issues. I don’t think the practice is still continuing.

But he's wrong, stupidly and cruelly wrong.

We've tried education and offering genetic testing with these communities and it all failed. They don't work, the communities won't change. They think the disability is God's will, or tell themselves that the NHS is lying to cover up its own mistakes.

So thousands of children with terrible disabilities are still being born every year in the UK, because their parents are genetically as similar as a brother and sister.

It's incestuous. It causes great suffering for the disabled child, the child's parents, and for any healthy siblings seeing their family suffer horribly. It places huge financial burdens on the NHS and council services. So it has large negative impacts for everyone in the UK. We don't have the money for this.

We can and should urgently ban cousin marriages, and at the same time require all religious marriages to be legal ones. The communities where cousin marriages are common are also the ones where having children outside of marriage is rare and strongly disapproved of. It would be very effective.

It just needs political courage and an iron will. I very much hope Starmer finds and inserts a backbone and gets on with it. It could be the one action he is most proud of from his premiership. Imagine - thousands of children born free of terrible disabilities because of your leadership.

Saying something shouldn’t be made illegal and arguing it has ‘positives’ is arguing in favour of it. He’s arguing in favour of it because he’s a traditional Muslim and his desire to maintain religious norms is greater than his desire to do the right thing or assimilate to British society.

You say it wasn't necessary to legislate because people weren't marrying their cousins, but we have laws against uncles and nieces, ex step parents etc, and those weren't common either. I've just searched and the laws around prohibited relations were updated as recently at 1986, so why didn't they include cousins then if it was so unacceptable to white British culture?

I'm not saying it shouldn't be illegal, I'm just saying you can't say it only isn't illegal because no one white British has done it for 100s of years. At some point a decision has been made to out law other potentially incestuous relationships which also weren't common practice.

How would you make all religious marriages legal ones?

No one official knows my religious/cultural wedding existed. Plenty of people get "married" with celebrants, family friends in gardens etc. Mine was in a sports hall with a local community leader. In the same way its impossible to find out who has renewed vows, commitment ceremonies because what is a wedding without the legal part? It's a promise and celebration with no distinct form that's impossible to police.

I did happen to get legally married because it was important to me and because my wife is English. As a same sex couple our marriage isn't legally recognised everywhere but id consider her my wife in all countries and we would proceed with family making regardless. I know several people in my community who are culturally married but not legally, most of them dont even know why aren't legally married in this country

Its why its important to be engaged with the communities because it needs to be frowned upon internally. It needs to be faith leaders and community leaders who are fully engaged. Its how child marriage, keep in girls in education etc all progressed.

Again we would also need to know who's cousins with who, which is actually a hard job! Especially with communities that sprawl countries etc and may not have consistent paperwork.
If people go to get married abroad would we be doing checks to annul it?
It would have to be dna checks because its the only accuracy

And what would happen next? Say a couple feel married and meet their cultures criteria of married, even if you refuse to legally recognise the marriage they are likely to have kids? Would you forcefully seperate them?

Abort any children outside of a "legal" marriage?

People aren't going to legally engage with a process when they will be punished for it.

The other incestuous relations you mentioned - uncles and step parents would actually be intrinsically abusive in most cases. I am not sure what your etc would refer to but fathers and brothers would be abusive and fathers and brothers far far too close genetically ( but apparently dna evidence shows there are many more offspring from these than we would like to think.)

you are assuming that they could pay the bill, if not what then?

Then they do the same as with any other bill they can’t afford. I hate this ‘then what’ like the state is responsible for every bad decision an adult makes and there should be zero personal responsibility

Don’t say South Asian it’s mainly the Pakistani community that does this. Indians don’t have cousin marriages 1st or 2nd as we consider it far too close.

Also the Royal family for years used to have cousin marriages too. It’s a way of keeping wealth in the family, not healthy though. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip were second cousins once removed and third cousins on Queen Victoria’s side (who also married her cousin Prince Albert).

with most other bill decisions there is not a living human being involved.

90% of what is done in thos country is done on a honour basis of assuming you tell the truth

I cant think of the last time I had to pull out my wedding certificate. When I attend hospital appointments and act as my wife's next of kin its so rarely checked.

Even if you consider birth certificates, you dont need to be married, and theres no form of paternity check, so say it did become illegal and there was some giant flashing alert that said cousins, they could just give another name.

Theres a massive stat for the poor accuracy of fathers on a birth certificate in the UK anyway

It also depends on what you need a birth certificate for. Lots of the cultures involved in this kind of thing are cultures that dont tend to go through the legal system which is the benefit of a birth certificate/marriage certificate to protect yourself.

People like travellers and intensly shielded communities aren't using say divorce courts to figure out paternity, visitation and childsupport. Its often sorted out internally

Getting married in, say, a nikkah offers no protection, usually for the woman concerned. She has no legal status. Oddly enough other religions are quite capable of understanding that, in the UK, a marriage has to be registered to be legal. Non conformist religions solve the issue by either having the registrar attend and perform the civil ceremony after the religious vows, or a member of the congregation becomes licensed to perform the task. It's a question of educating religious leaders and members of those religions. Records of marriage are held centrally, I don't see what the issue is with the system.
If people choose not to marry that's their business. If they choose to marry in a religious ceremony outside of the laws of the UK that's another thing. We don't have uncle /niece marriages for example, because that's incest. Laws change, it's about time cousin marriage was outlawed.

Quite easily. We make it illegal for an individual and/or organisation to provide or conduct a religious marriage without including the civil/legal element. The legislation will specify all the major religions - Muslim/Shia, Judaism, Protestant and Catholic etc. this applies to.

So any priest, vicar, rabbi or imam etc. and the local church/synagogue/mosque etc. who enable such a marriage is now committing a crime.

It would work and be very easy to draft and implement. The Muslim and traveller community rarely have children outside of wedlock.

If future children are still born with severe disabilities, due to consanguinity, the police can look at the legality of the parents' marriages. Then carry out some prosecutions as public examples for any religious non-legal 'marriages' happening after the Act is enforced. All this is very do-able.

Some people don't want this. Well tough. It's wholly the right thing to do and the main people benefiting will be the Traveller and Muslim communities. So much grief and heartbreak can be so easily avoided.

I appreciate your good intent here but they don’t want to be educated.

The entire point is that their community is built around patriarchal norms and that women have fewer individual freedoms than men.

Therefore any ‘education’ around women’s rights in marriage will not see men racing to register their marriages legally.

We have to be honest with ourselves that none of this is due to ‘a lack of education’, it’s down to tradition and culture coming before logic and progress.

@Playingvideogames i do agree with you, I also meant to say that as well as education re a nikkah not being legal, it also needs to be illegal for anyone to celebrate such a marriage without the civil ceremony. I think I'm right in saying that in France a civil ceremony has to take place prior to the religious ceremony? The religious ceremony isn't required but the civil ceremony is.

If its a reply to me

Absolutely. The people i know where I said they dont realise they aren't legally married, is that i couldn't tell you in my community who's bothered to convert it in the uk. They are all classed as married within the community (to the extent that having a baby wouldnt be seen as out of wedlock)

My issue was the posters idea that it would be compulsory to register all cultural weddings

I just don't see how you could find out who's met within a sports hall, another country, etc. It would all be self reported or reported by faith/community leaders.
Which is the importance of community engagement.

Insane comment

Absolutely, just look at the uk and european royal families. Any wealthy or land-owning family did this.

As we now know, it actually sealed their fates, rather than ensured their legacies. This seems like established knowledge now, but the practice only stopped a few generations ago.

OneNewEagle · Today 01:11
its not something that would be banned in the uk due to the class structure and the way they keep the money in their family over the generations.

Can you give an example in the past 100 years of some families who have married their cousins to keep money in the family?
In landed families primo geniture is generally practiced so if a daughter married her cousin who was also from a landowning family, she wouldn’t be bringing any money, land or works of art - or at least very little - to her husband’s family.