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.

Ive seen similar in education ( learning difficulties and disabilities )

Like other posters have said, the big risk is repeated cousin marriage, not so much a one-off. And it would be hard legally to ban cousin marriage without banning disabled people with genetic conditions generally from having kids, which would start to feel a bit like eugenics.

But bizarre that the NHS said it was OK. There should be a really hard-hitting campaign to educate people in affected areas.

Arab countries can do that because legal marriages are Islamic marriages and the law is Sharia law.

In the U.K. it’s not the case. Any laws surrounding legal marriage do not impact Islamic marriage because they are not legally recognised in the first place. The same way I could have a pagan hand fasting “marriage” to 3 men but it’s not legally recognised.

The only way to fix this would be if Islamic marriage becomes legally recognised (which it won’t because it follows Sharia law not British civil law) or change the incest laws to include cousins, which would involve criminalising a lot of people.

That or a hell of a lot of education. The Jewish community voluntarily introduced genetic testing because they wanted to fix the problem.

And would you say the same to someone with a heritable disability who plans to have a child?

I don't think it's just about not wanting to look racist. It was legal in UK long before most of those immigrant groups people are referring to arrived. My DH has first cousins who are married in his family, and they are white from South England (and not upper class!). So as a county Britain has accepted it in living memory, it's not something that has been imported.

That said I agree it should be banned or educated against now, especially if it is becoming more common again, not only for public health reasons but also i feel like there is more scope for grooming and abuse within a family.

It's not the same thing...

Maybe they should put the Habsburgs of the school curriculum!

I worked in a city with a big South Asian population, in child protection. I saw first hand the terrible disabilities caused by first cousin marriages.
Of course it should be outlawed, no one would surely disagree.
It was deeply worrying to hear a senior midwife being interviewed about it and not saying it is a problem.
As others have said people don’t want to be seen as racist.

No, it wasn't very common.

Not a geneticist.

I would imagine though that two cousins marrying as a one off and having children is not nearly as risk as two cousins marrying from a family where both sets of parents, and grandparents and so on are also all genetically related.

In the UK we don't really have a tradition of marrying our cousins so it's not really ever been an issue. In other communities it is a tradition to ringfence property and money and keep in in the families.

Why would banning cousin marriage prevent disabled people having kids?

I whole heartedly agree with this. I know a family (White, British) who were cousins. All 4 kids were severely disabled. All had to go into full time care. At the tax payers expense.

It isn’t racism to point out over half of Pakistani originated people in the UK have married a first cousin.

And therefore it is FAR more likely they will marry a first cousin than a white Brit.

I think people with an inheritable disability should think hard before having children yes. It obviously depends on the disability and how much it affects quality of life. And if you weigh up the pros and cons and if the child’s life is likely to not be affected too badly then they may decide to go ahead. I myself am a carrier of cystic fibrosis. I thought it was likely before I had children as it’s in my family. I was tested and it turned out I was correct and was a carrier. I then got my husband tested. He turned out to be negative. Has he have been positive I would have looked into options of genetic testing embryos before having children. I understand these days cystic fibrosis is not the life sentence it once was, but I have had 3 cousins die of it so I would not want to inflict that on a child if I could help it. My right/want to have children does not override a child’s right to at least the chance of a healthy life in my opinion.

😂 and whilst we are at it maybe we could look at Queen Victoria’s lineage. Nothing to see there either. Certainly the occasional benefit to be found re: international relations and in the pseudo medical sphere (especially if your name was Rasputin - for a time at least 😜) .

I'm generally quite up to speed on health and social issues but I had no idea this was such a big problem. I don't have a lot of contact with the south Asian community though.

I saw this in an article - that the issue isn’t first cousins per se, it’s first cousins where their parents are also first cousins and their parents are first cousins… so the inbreeding embeds deeper through each generation.

To be fair I know three people who married their cousins. All white British. One couple chose to not have kids, one have three kids and the other couple two, one who has Down's syndrome.

None of them grew up with or near their future spouse.

Yeah Charles 2 was a real combination of genes let's face it

😂

I’m not sure it was really “accepted”, and certainly not within our lifetimes. How did their family and friends react when they got together?

@YuleBeBack we only need to look at the royal families of Europe and the famous Hasburg jaw

However they dont do it anymore just like we don't do many things now we have better insights into biology and medicines etc.

I've read it's a part of the coercive control of women ,easier to keep them under control and buried under family upon family etc.

Make the ties of obligation even worse.

I really don’t understand why people continue to have more and more children when they are all born with medical issues.

I believe there was a tv show on previously with Muslim girls about their own concern about cousin marriage and defects and how genetic testing should be done.

This sounds cruel but surely that's literally evolution in action? It's morally taboo to interfere with people's life and particularly partner choices but if they repeatedly make decisions to have inbred children, then at some point the offspring will simply no longer be able to procreate. The whole point of genetics is that it solves issues like these by itself.

I mean, I used to have a crush on my cousin when I was a teenager, we’re Cornish though so it’s normal down here 🤣 On a serious note though, I knew it was legal here to marry your cousin but I assumed people knew it was weird as f**k to do so and you definitely do not breed!

One first cousin marriage is probably OK, it's when it happens through the generations that it gets to be really dangerous. But even without the cousin marriages some genetic problems can affect multiple children in a marriage.1st cousins share about 25% DNA, so sharing bad bits of DNA is not all that likely.

It was pretty common in the past partly to keep wealth within the family for the rich, and just who you knew in the less wealthy. The Hapsburg royal family were probably one of the worst.