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.

but legislation does needs to come first; sometimes the stick rather than the carrot approach is necessary and to continue as we have so far, has yielded a limited positive response. Much like female genital mutilation, when it was criminalized in countries around the world many reported much lower prevalence in practice. Of course you'll always have factions which continue these practices, no method is infallible, but actions having direct consequences will undeniably act as a deterrent.

I do think a ban would send a strong message and also give the women concerned additional ammunition to say no. Education can only go so far. Even if rates dropping they are still extremely high in some areas and the human toll and financial cost is huge. Yes some may try and circumvent with religious only ceremonies but if visas are required they’d need legal marriage route.
It could have been done in the legislation raising age to 18, seems a missed opportunity.
It’s always the male religious leaders speaking for the community. Never the young women who will bear the burden of their children dying or caring for disabled children.
I used to review medical notes and some were heartbreaking. One had an entry when she was 15 or 16 with her reporting to a teacher she was at risk of forced marriage to a cousin. There was some sort of ss referral but nothing else. She’d obviously been prevailed upon as a couple of years later she was mum to a disabled child. Notes reported she was in a consanguineous marriage. More disabled children born. There was a line in a report saying she parented alone as husband spent extended time back in his home village in Pakistan. Maybe if had been illegal it would have spared her and those like her.

Awareness and education are often seen as attacks on a culture as a whole or labeled as racist. That’s why the education about a clearly problematic issue is hardly seen. People are not prepared to draw a line between science and an attack on a culture.

It's causing human misery. At that point I can suggest what can be done with cultural understanding

I agree with you completely but there are those who want to protect their cultures at all costs, even if it comes with the price of human misery. Just look around at the world today.

Yes i would expect smokers, drinkers and drug takers to pay towards their car but it will never happen.

I was at Heathrow and was in arrivals at the same time as a flight from Pakistan. There was a large number of very young pregnant women accompanied by older women. I just wondered if they were girls from Britain who had been taken abroad to be married/impregnated, or brides coming from Pakistan that men from the UK had married. Either way, it was to my eyes bothersome - it seemed transactional.

Oh yes, I’ve been following it.

Define "disabled" in this context and then compare it to the levels of disability in populations of similar socio-economic need.

Define the level of disability. Lots of people are disabled and live entirely unremarkable lives. Is Tanni Grey-Thompson disabled? Evelyn Glennie? Tom Shakespeare?

It's just a statistic without any context or validity. Like quite a lot of this thread.

Are you quite sure you understand either genetics or statistics?

Do you have skin in this game?

The duties and taxes imposed by HMRC on alcohol and tobacco are extremely high. Before the 1960s campaigns to stamp out smoking, I read that tobacco duty covered a high percentage of the cost of the NHS, which was obviously a smaller and less capable service then.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5079102/

This is a very interesting read re migration and cultural reasons behind practice.

It’s just people think it’s more understandable and justified with some than others.

Because, knowing the can’t pay, you want them to die instead. We don’t do that in this country. Particularly not to children.

maintaining our society values is more important than punishing those who fall outside of it. I don’t want to live in a society that chooses to charge some people for their health care in the knowledge the will die through non payment

Should be banned just as FGM is banned. We don’t allow little girls to be mutilated while we gently try to “educate”.
Girls are being forced into cousin marriage and women bear the grief of having children with multiple disabilities. It’s cruel and barbaric to turn a blind eye.

From the Born in Bradford Study:

"The core finding is confirmation that consanguineous marriage is a major risk factor for CAs, even after adjustment for deprivation."

borninbradford.nhs.uk/our-impacts/publications/cousin-marriage-and-congenital-anomalies-in-a-multiethnic-birth-cohort/

CA = Congenital Abnormality. Congenital abnormalities (CAs) cause stillbirths, infant deaths and many later life disabilities.

Today, many British Pakistani women will have given birth to babies with severe birth defects. This will be as a direct result of her being in an arranged (often forced) marriage to her cousin. Because of repeated first cousin marriage their genetic similarities will be more comparable to being brother and sister.

If she had freely chosen to marry a wholly unrelated man, her baby would - almost certainly - have been healthy. All that heartbreak could have been avoided. And she would have married someone of her own choice, hopefully a man she loves.

Why would anyone oppose legislation?

Education has been tried and failed. It doesn't work. It needs to be combined with severe legal consequences in order to change minds and behaviours. And to protect future children.

A change in the law would make a very clear public statement that cousin marriage is wrong, both legally as well as morally. The law should include punishments such as heavy fines or even prison for those clerics who still carry out illegal marriages between cousins.

We don't marry our cousins in the UK in the 21st century. It's incestuous and, so often, horribly damaging for the resulting children. It must stop.

Becoming disabled due to illness or injury having been born perfectly healthy is one thing, becoming disabled due to an injury at birth is the same, having children with a 1st cousin where the risk of having children with an inherited disability /disorder is not OK. That could have been avoided by marrying outside that gene pool.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39372840/

Here's some reading detailing the impact on childhood death rates & disability.

I agree with this. It is becoming less common with those born and raised in the UK but there is still the push from the older generation to 'marry from back home' and it is usually a family member. This allows another family member to come over to the UK, have a better life and also support the older generation 'back home'.
Educated British work Pakistani women are not in favour of this as it's often an uneducated man from a rural village with 'traditional values'. This is why the number is reducing. The flip side of this is British born med are still marrying women from Pakistan. These are less likely to speak up, here on spouse visas and no support system.
Arranged marriages still happen and is the norm. Very few families I work with have 2 British born Pakistani parents.

We don't marry our cousins in the UK in the 21st century. It's incestuous and, so often, horribly damaging for the resulting children. It must stop.

But how do you prevent cousins from marrying in Pakistan, or anywhere else where it's legal, then coming to live in the uk?

(Does anyone have any figures for cousin marriages and numbers/percentages of children born with genetic disorders in Pakistan?)

It's also legal in a large number of US states.

That doesn’t make it ok!

I think you are getting mixed up - consanguinity and endogamy are different things .
This thread is about first cousin marriage through generations- not about marrying within the same religious or ethnic community ( which is endogamy)

If you feel it's the will of God, it eases - maybe deliberately in some cases- the guilt you would feel at having caused the disability.

Pigs will fly before Starmer finds a backbone - he hasn't found one yet in relation to the unethical puberty blocker trial on 200+ children.

Jewish people, as already mentioned in the thread, try to reduce the chances of genetic abnormalities by screening.

One of the problems in the Pakistani community that posters have mentioned is that people have multiple children with genetic disorders, even though it could be avoided.