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.

This doesn’t happen nowadays amongst elites in the UK. But yes - it was a mechanism for keeping money and power within a family group/ dynasty.

Even getting a temporary visa to visit the UK is eye wateringly expensive IMO. (It's outsourced to a private company who makes a profit and if they don't have offices in Eg the Netherlands you have to go to Belgium for an appointment which costs even more).

There are much bigger barriers to bringing a spouse over than there used to be (you have to be earning over a certain amount yourself or have a lot of savings) and the process is beurocratic and the costs do add up. I know people who have done it (not from Pakistan) and it's not that easy. Also, you don't get any of the fees back if you are rejected and it isn't always clear why you've been rejected. It's becoming more common for people to pay lawyers/private companies to make the requests for them to give a better chance of success, but that's yet more money.

Of course people still do bring their partners over (my friends managed it). But I don't think it would be fair to add another barrier which basically makes it impossible in practical terms to bring someone over. If they were going to do that, it would be more honest just to not allow spousal visas from those places at all rather than banning it by the back door. Also the more excessive barriers you put in, the more you encourage corruption or just the growth of lawyers/companies feeding of the complexity. Who then lobby to make it more complex. And you are left with a beurocratic nightmare that costs the government money and doesn't make any sense.

If you also want to hear my rant on the Dutch system for registering child paternity let me know! It's twice as long as the above rant.

That's not what Bigamy (or bigamous) is.
Bigamy is marrying someone while already legally married to another. Yes, it is illegal.

Cousin marriage is a matter of consanguinity (blood relation). And it should be made illegal too.

No - I know what bigamy is.
Someone said we shouldn’t legislate against cousin marriage because it’s too hard to know what people’s relationship is.
I was just making an analogy with bigamy .
Sorry if I wasn’t clear/ confusing the discussion

True. First or second marriages have eased now as far as we know but some are still currently marrying their distant relatives, and the connections still exist. It's a way to stay in the family while appearing to no longer practice direct cousin marriage.

Ok got it. Though for argument's sake, I'd say it's different. We do have a much easier way of knowing if someone is practicing bigamy than if they're marrying their cousin. One leaves a paper trail in legal, public records, whereas the other is often a private family matter with no official indicator of the relationship between the spouses.

But we are saying the same thing, which is that it should be banned as well.

ArrghNoJustNo
some are still currently marrying their distant relatives

If you start looking at ancestry in general, I think it has been shown (probably by an American whose ancestors came from Europe) that every single person with any European connection is related to Charlemagne. Go back a mere thousand years and we are all related, apparently. And other research indicates that every single one of us is likely to be descended from the same ancestor who lived 600 years ago, however much we may think that counterintuitive. (We don't know his or her name, though, thank goodness.)

Maybe we are all some sort of cousin to Shakespeare and none of us should ever marry anyone.

Go back a mere thousand years and we are all related, apparently.

Well obviously, excluding large scale migration. The number of direct ancestors increases with each generation you go back, but the population decreases. Population of England at the time of Domesday Book, 1086, is estimated at around 2 million. That's perhaps around 35 generations. How many ancestors would one person have by then?

A great many people are descended from Edward III, who died in 1377.

Claiming it's "God's will" is highly effective but should be seen for what it is: emotional blackmail.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/feb/12/one-in-14-children-who-die-in-england-have-closely-related-parents-study-finds

Maybe 🤷‍♀️

You’re absolutely right.

For donkeys years, Labour have relied on the Muslim vote, which is why they don’t intervene properly when they absolutely should.

How many Labour MPs rejected the Grooming Gangs inquiry for fear of ‘inflaming community tensions’?
And now the NHS is pretending that cousin marriage is all fine!
Nothing to see here.
Just loads of poor kids put through the ringer.

But, as long as Labour get those all-important votes, what’s a few disabled kids between friends?

“Among the elites, we do in the UK. For the same reason and worse”

No ‘we’ don’t, and haven’t for hundreds of years.

Who are these Elites marrying and procreating with their first cousins?
Not just once but again and again until the chances of having a healthy child becomes less than an unhealthy one?
No ‘we’ are not doing this. And never ever have in this scale, even hundreds of years ago.

What is the reason?? The so called reason?
it’s dowry, another medieval practice that makes women chattel.

One if my nephews was born with and died from a genetic disorder, his parents weren’t related, it was really bad shit luck.
To knowing do that to a child, to make them, birth them, knowing they won’t live past a few months old, in pain, it’s not human, it’s not ok and people shouldn’t he doing it.

“But, as long as Labour get those all-important votes, what’s a few disabled kids between friends?”
If they were just friends there wouldn’t be a problem..
What’s a few hundred thousand white working class ‘child prostitutes’?
Girls. Children, raped, tortured, murdered, impregnated birthing children as children themselves (at least these ones aren’t inbred).
The left are very big on guilt by association, well they are getting into bed with these rapists and torturers and I’ll never forgive them.
That could have been me and my sisters, it still could be my little ones, because it’s still happening.
Pandering to these people on “cousin marriage” aka incest, is giving them the green light to carry on with everything else.
Fgm is illegal, only 2 people have gone to prisons for it: that’s not because it’s only happened to 2 girls, it’s because people are turning a blind eye exactly like, and for exactly the same reasons they did before.

I'm really sorry about your nephew

UK has had cousin marriage among elites fairly recently obviously Queen Victoria, also William and Mary, and George IV. Enough to cause issues like haemophilia but never to the terrible extent of Bradford, I agree.

Absolutely.

All those innocent and vulnerable children sacrificed on the altar of courting the Muslim vote.

It’s so base, it makes me nauseous.

“UK has had cousin marriage among elites fairly recently obviously Queen Victoria, also William and Mary, and George IV.”
Again you’ve named 3 examples, all from 100 years ago and the Royal family.
If it was just the elites it wouldn’t be a big problem.
”We” stopped doing this a long time ago, maybe the Hapsburgs were lesson enough.
Once will probably be fine, again and again, obviously not fine.
Still in Bradford, 50% of marriages are between close relatives, these people are now third generation and nothing, the obvious consequences of their actions don’t seem to be stopping them, so maybe it’s time for the law to step in.
“Relatively recently” is now. It’s happening now.
In towns and cities up and down this country.
All these babies are being born now, in pain, with no hope of a healthy life, costing us a bloody fortune for absolutely no reason other than medieval ideas about dowry and women’s worth as chattel.
Everyone talking about Epstein island and how what happened there was abhorrent, well we’re an island and what happened and is happening here doesn’t just make me nauseous it makes me absolutely furious.

That's not accurate.

Demographic studies of the British peerage and aristocracy found a very high proportion of married noblewomen around the 1600s were childless, with some estimates placing it between 30% and 40%. The rate for the general population was roughly 10%.

Pope Gregory the Great banned cousin marriage under Canon Law in the 590s.
Henry VIII re-introduced it in the UK in 1540 so he could marry his fifth wife Catherine Howard, who was Anne Bolyne's first cousin and it has been legal ever since.

So are some of the people from Bradford childless and what happens then to the women

What you say is irrelevant to this issue and shows misunderstanding of the issue you are trying to blame on cousin marriage. Victoria wasn’t a haemophilia carrier because she married Albert. The royal houses of Europe did not have haemophilia because of who people married. They had haemophilia because they were descended from Victoria. Whomsoever the Queen married her descendants would have had haemophiliacs among their number.

She may however have become a haemophilia carrier because of previous consanguineous marriages but this is a possibility not fact.

Elishiva
Fgm is illegal, only 2 people have gone to prisons for it: that’s not because it’s only happened to 2 girls, it’s because people are turning a blind eye exactly like, and for exactly the same reasons they did before.

It is not in the least relevant to this thread, but I can't help wondering whether the reason so few people have been imprisoned for perpetrating FGM is that it might be hard to prove in a court of law who was actually responsible for it. I doubt any of the people involved would be eager and willing to give evidence, since they'd probably incriminate themselves if they did and certainly lay themselves open to anger from their communities.