Prime Minister refused to ban 1st cousin marriage

[happydappy2]

Even though there is clear evidence of serious birth defects to babies born from 1st cousin marriages. It is deeply worrying that the bride and groom will have the same Grand Parents.....this is unsafe for women in a patriarchal family system.

Who takes on the bulk of the work caring for the disabled child-the woman...

Why is the British gov't promoting incest?

https://x.com/Basil_TGMD/status/1974371215629578344

I hope this is not true...but does anyone know any more about it?

No.

Explain how making cousin marriage illegal will make things “awful for entire populations”.

Thinking about advocating for the child-who has no voice this situation. Would they prefer to be born with severe disabilities that were entirely preventable? Or would they prefer the practice of 1st cousin marriage to be banned?

I think it would be the latter....

I think the Mothers would also....

why are people saying this is good for minorities. My friend in Afghanistan is married to one of her relatives. She also told me some people bury alive baby girls born with disabilities. The boys would get medical treatment.

I tend to think that other measures - mainly better integration - is not only likely to be more effective, but it would also have benefits in other areas and avoid some of the potential problems.

Changing the law without fixing the integration problem would not be all that effective, imo.

Presumably then you are against all genetic screening during IVF or pregnancy and consider it to be “eugenics”?

The argument that you appear to be making is that we should pretend that science and modern medicine don’t exist and instead deliberately enable children to be born with painful, distressing, life-limiting and life-shortening conditions.

You appear to view their suffering as collateral damage because you fear state overreach. In my opinion that is always a risk and why democratic societies must be active and vigilant and continuously hold their leaders to account.# The answer is not to inflict preventable suffering on babies and children to use them as a human shield to protect your own rights and freedoms to do have children in normal circumstances. I think that is morally unacceptable and clearly not an appropriate basis for policy. It is reminiscent of the arguments that some made against assisted dying being available for people with terminal diagnoses and pain that cannot be alleviated and who face horrific and frightening deaths, and that we should continue to force this on them because other people are scared their own unrelated rights might be eroded. Like the babies born with genetic diseases, these terminally ill people have no choice and it is not right for others to deliberately inflict this level of likelihood of suffering on them when it’s completely avoidable.

It is not remotely comparable to compare higher risks for, say, older parents to the risks from cousin marriages because:

Firstly the risks from the latter are cumulative, and much higher anyway when you compare the data properly (despite the clearly politically motivated misinformation campaign pretending that they are comparable);

Secondly, all rights exist in a balance against how much they infringe on the rights of others. Banning cousins marrying would not prevent the people marrying cousins from having any children at all, which is what you’d be doing if you said that anybody 35+ can’t have children. Given the risks of the former are much higher and compound over generations and are completely avoidable without removing anybody’s right to have children, the balance of the rights of the child and the rights of the parents to do what they want is clearly heavily weighted towards legislating against this practice;

Thirdly, banning pregnancies for people over 35 would necessitate and legally require abortions because some pregnancies of course happen accidentally even when using contraception. If cousin marriages were banned it would give legal standing to the natural aversion to and taboo of inbreeding and as a PP noted the communities primarily engaging in this practice generally don’t have babies outside marriage so the numbers would decrease significantly. We cannot base policy on the fact that a few people might be prepared to engage in criminal behaviour: that’s an argument for enforcement, not one that should affect policy making. Banning actual pregnancies would be eugenics. The law proposed is not stating that if two people unaware that they were cousins had sex and conceived a child that child should be aborted.

Fourthly, we legislate all the time against harmful social behaviour. All laws must balance the rights of the individual with the rights of other people who may be impacted by their actions directly, and indirectly (e.g. the impact on wider society through the funding demands on the NHS). Life is not black and white, it is nuanced and judgements have to be made in the cultural and scientific context of the time. In this case many children can be protected from suffering avoidable harms without restricting anybody else’s rights in an unreasonable manner that would have any negative impact on their life, given they have 4bn other opposite sex partners on Earth to choose to marry instead who aren’t close relatives.

#Things like not voting for parties who are pledging to abolish human rights charters would be a good start.

That isn't the argument though.

The argument is that if you use a particular justification for certain restrictions, you must consider that same justification could also then apply to other situations.

If the possibility of genetic problems is an adequate reason to ban marriages, then why restrict it to cousins, and not, say, people with known genetic disorders?

My partner has the sickle cell gene for example. If preventing genetic errors being passed on is important, why not try and prevent him from passing on that gene which is known to have potentially serious consequences? Is that less important than potential problems from a cousin marriage , which might not even manifest?

We know that once you make arguments like this in law the consequences can spread - look at how quickly Canada's MAID program has spiralled on that basis.

Don't underestimate the degree to which many people might find the idea of preventing those with genetic defects from reproducing appealing, and justify it because it's "child abuse" etc.

I don't fully agree with your position but I share your worries on potential slippery slope.

I listen to the Blocked And Reported podcast (covers various controversies esp re GC issues) & I'm a discussion on the sterilisation of Native American women, I was really shocked to see a lot of (presumably US) people justifying it on the grounds that drug & alcohol addiction were & are common in Native communities. People there are normally mainly reasonable so this really disturbed me.

If you watch the programme that a poster provided a link to earlier you will see that some families refuse to accept science. Many or them continued to claim marrying cousins was fine when presented with the evidence of harm. One couple said that three of their six children having severe disabilities (blindness, deafness, constant pain and shortened life expectancies) was “the will of God” and “God’s test” despite having had geneticists and doctors explain it to them. They continued having more children anyway and blamed the doctors, saying their children’s disabilities were caused by the doctors’ medicine. Numerous people in the film including influential religious leaders refused to accept scientific evidence.

Some people cannot and will not be educated no matter how hard you try. A woman in Bradford who had worked on a public health campaign about it said they had received threats, people had torn up their leaflets, accused them of racism; so they stopped the public health campaign and rates of genetic disease have continued to rise. Legislation is clearly necessary.

Muslim and Traveller women do have the same rights as other British women.

Do you honestly think Travellers would change their marriage practices because the law said they were not allowed? I think that is massively doubtful and it could easily have the opposite effect in the way it often does when people perceive that a hostile group are attacking their cultural identity.

I see what you mean, it could mean more mistrust of services & more difficulty helping people affected.

Personally I find it hard to believe second & third generation British-Pakistanis would be mainly resistant to this knowledge. I think as you say, trying to integrate the community more would help. On another thread someone told me that most Bradford Muslim teens go to mainstream (not Islamic) state schools, but are they still mostly with other Muslim students? That's not really ideal for integration, maybe there could be other initiatives like youth clubs? It's the younger generation who should be focused on.

Traveller women are a different case.

From the little I know, (I apologise if wrong) I had the impression Travellers are often quite resistant to schooling & remove their kids often at 12? I think there is a similar issue with the Romany community.

Ireland seem to be running similar programs to try & educate, I'll look up how it's going.

My experience (working in a Scottish secondary) was that the [Traveller] girls stayed on at school until 16 (when they could be legally married under Scots law) but boys often left earlier to be home-schooled work with their dads.

We had one girl who had a lavish wedding to a boy 3 yrs older than her. She left him because he was beating her. She was shunned by her relatives.

ETA We had one Romany teenage girl who informed us that she'd already had two 'traditional' marriages and divorces (abroad). She was under 16.

I am not sure why you seem to be suggesting that anyone thinks first cousin marriage is a positive cultural practice. The thread has been unanimous in thinking it isnt.

I am not sure why some are so determined to claim that anyone who does not think making it illegal is the best approach therefore approves of the practice or even thinks nothing should be done.

But it seems like the possibilities are that they aren't bothering to read what people are saying, or they are being dishonest in their argument.

So to be clear, in your opinion if your daughter is the carrier of a debilitating, traumatising, painful and life-limiting genetic condition and scientific testing exists to enable her and a potential partner to test whether he carries it also, they should ignore this and go ahead anyway and risk inflicting this avoidable harm on a child? Why?

If she is the carrier of a known condition then surely what she would do is establish if her partner also has this condition and - if he happens to (far, far less likely for people who aren’t related to be carrying the same recessive defective gene anyway) they can use IVF to ensure they have a healthy baby and don’t inflict pain and suffering on a child. That is the wonder of modern medicine.

Nobody has suggested carriers of genes that would lead to disease and disability if a baby inherited it from both parents should not have children at all and it’s baffling that this is what you’re implying.

The difference with cousin marriages is that not all genetic diseases are yet known or identifiable. They only manifest when two carriers procreate and pass on two copies of the same recessive gene to a child. As most of these diseases are extremely rare this is usually, statistically, highly unlikely to happen in a healthy gene pool where people aren’t marrying close relatives. Clearly, in a small and restricted gene pool it is orders of magnitude more likely to happen and becomes increasingly likely to do so when the gene pool is restricted over several generations. Genetic screening/ testing cannot mitigate the risk in these circumstances because many of the genes/ illnesses in question are not yet possible to test for and rule out embryos that would have miserable, painful lives. Therefore, the best available measure to prevent such harm is not to marry your close relatives and procreate with them in the first place.

In short, you are making a completely false equivalence between two situations that are not at all comparable.

Why would we not use the available knowledge and medicine?

Do you genuinely think that people who are bullying and emotionally blackmailing and even threatening their children (see the documentary posted) into marrying cousins, who are determined that their children must not even marry unrelated people of their own ethnicity, cultural background and religion, are going to “integrate” and start widening their gene pool by marrying into the general multi-cultural and multi-ethnicity UK population?

This. Absolutely.

Although this evidence, largely, isn’t new at all.

The cognitive dissonance involved is quite shocking but there are very significant numbers of people who’d rather engage in scientific denial and self-contradictory beliefs that ever acknowledge the consequences of their own behaviour and have the courage to admit they made a mistake. It must be a sad way to live for them, wrestling with the fact that their “beliefs” contradict all empirical evidence.

It is, however, disgusting that such people would be so determined to refuse to admit they are wrong about something that they would needlessly cause further suffering to their own children and grandchildren and given that clearly a significant number of people are prepared to do that because their pride is more important to them than not inflicting avoidable suffering on children, legislating against their behaviour is the appropriate approach.

Don't underestimate the degree to which many people might find the idea of preventing those with genetic defects from reproducing appealing, and justify it because it's "child abuse" etc.

As noted above, the study of genetics enables people with identified genetic abnormalities to have healthy babies via IVF. This alleviates very distressing worry for parents who know they are carrying a gene that could cause a debilitating genetic condition. Genetic testing enables testing of their partner to see if they are also a carrier, and the IVF can be used if required to ensure that they have healthy children. These advances in modern medicine are hugely to be benefit of those who have had genetic diseases in their family, many of whom might otherwise be too frightened of passing on these genes to have children at all. Why on Earth would someone want to ignore the available medicine and pass on these genes and inflict a terrible life on a child completely unnecessarily when the means exist for them to have a healthy child?

That is entirely different to people continuously inbreeding in a small gene pool where children are orders of magnitude more likely to receive double recessive genes from two parents carrying the same rare genetic condition that would never have manifested in any illness at all for a child who is simply a carrier with one defective and one healthy gene, and would be highly unlikely to inherit two defective genes for the same rare illness from unrelated parents. The situations are not comparable at all. As I said earlier, many of these conditions are so rare in the general population that the relevant genes causing them have not yet been isolated or no test for them exists. Therefore, the way to vastly reduce the likelihood of this (obviously) is not to marry your close relatives, and it follows that our laws should prohibit this unnecessary behaviour which causes immense unnecessary suffering to children and is not preventable by genetic testing (aside from causing various other social harms and abuse and control of women as other posters have outlined, which I was previously unaware of, being someone focused on science).

What are the arguments in favour of people marrying cousins? Apologies if I’ve missed this but I’ve not seen anybody articulate any positive impact it has on health or society. So why would we not legislate against something which clearly causes a great deal of preventable harm and has no positive benefit to anybody whatsoever?

This is one of the worst things I’ve ever read about here. Absolutely barbaric.

I think we come back to why cousin marriages are happening. In
the case of travellers I suspect it's about numbers, they are a small community.
With Pakistanis the numbers are far greater.There are no population pressures for cousin marriage.
This means it is a choice based on tradition and a committment to a clan /family system.
Because of this there will continue to be community pressures on maintaining cousin marriage. The alternative is integration into their host country embracing modernity. That is the ideal, however I see more separation and sectarianism not less.

Pakistan is routinely the 'focus country' with the largest number of cases of forced marriages reported to the FMU. There were 107 cases (45% of the total 240 cases) linked to Pakistan as the focus country in 2024, of those 65% were female and 35% male.3 Jul 2025
www.gov.uk
Forced Marriage Unit statistics 2024 - GOV.UK
The practice has no place in our society and actively works against integration.

It’s funny, I was talking about this issue this week, as I went to see the importance of being Ernest, and had forgotten that (spoiler alert) the big happy ending involves two first cousins ending up together.

I think that the only solution to this kind of cultural problem is social integration. Something which takes time, and to some extent can be a generational thing.

That has been made far more difficult because of the stupid immigration policies of successive governments. In fact such policies are largely responsible for the fact this is a problem of some scale.

There is no quick fix for this kind of issue, making a law isn't going to be one either.

I recall watching the biopic of Toulouse-Lautrec, and it being suggested there that his health problems were the result of his parents being first cousins. It wasn't until I Googled that I discovered that they'd had another child who died in infancy.

I've just remembered the 1959 Bill Travers' film, 'The Bridal Path'. It's a comedy, but the premise is that the main character has to leave his Scottish island in order to find an unrelated bride.

(Spoiler. In the end, he marries the girl he really loves, a 'cousin' after it is revealed that her actual father is not her mother's husband. However, the main character then reveals that he would have been happy to marry the girl anyway.)

You know many people actually are not happy or comfortable to use IVF to screen out genetic problems, or even to test for them during a pregnancy. There are a lot of ethical questions around an approach like that, you can find reams of articles in medical ethics publications.. You are quite wrong to think your view on this is anywhere near universal, a lot of people think it's quite a dystopian approach. There have been whole books and films exploring such ideas, you might find it worthwhile to explore this kind of thing to begin to understand why your beliefs aren't universal.

But in a way it doesn't matter, because no one is saying cousin marriage is beneficial. And I think you know that, and you are being quite deliberately manipulative in your argument.

Ok. So: it’s socially harmful, damaging to society and integration and increases social and cultural division; it damaging to the gene pool; it causes unnecessary miserable lives to children with avoidable disabilities who lives in immense pain and suffering and often die very young; it means their mothers (who have often been deliberately poorly educated) have to watch them suffer and spend their lives in misery caring for these distressed children and watching them die at a young age from unnecessary rare genetic diseases they’d have been astronomically unlikely to have if their mothers hadn’t married a close relative; it increases risks of family abuse to women by perpetuating a patriarchal system incompatible with much of existing UK law; it causes ongoing lowering of average IQs across generations which resulting from ongoing inbreeding within a small group of people; it creates risks that compound over time to the extent that even the leadership of several of the most extreme Islamic nations whom the implications of the scientific research on the matter are discouraging; and public health/ information campaigns have been attempted on the matter for over 20 years and a significant minority of people are still utterly determined that geneticists and doctors are lying to them and in fact the doctors caused their children’s disabilities by giving them medicine to try to treat the symptoms of their genetic illness and still nearly 50% of people in certain communities continue to marry their cousins despite scientific evidence being available for over 20 years demonstrating the harm this will cause so are clearly impervious to evidence (and, indeed, blamed medical staff who’ve attempted to educate them about it and blamed them for their children’s disabilities).

I don’t think anybody is saying that legislation prohibiting cousins marrying will prevent cousins procreating entirely, but it would clearly significantly reduce the number of people doing so because the number of people who are prepared to engage in criminal activity even if they believe it should not be criminal is far lower than those who will continue to do so. This is evident from the introduction of many, many laws from wearing seatbelts to smoking in public buildings to prohibiting domestic violence against women and marital rape, etc. Legislation alone doesn’t prevent something but it almost always vastly reduces its prevalence, particularly when it is enforced strongly, and then becomes an accepted social norm. However, enforcement is a separate issue and this thread is purely about the principle of whether marrying cousins should be illegal: it seems clear from the evidence that it absolutely should be illegal, does it not?

Failing to legislate against clearly harmful behaviour, over time, makes people believe that it’s a matter of judgement and that the behaviour is morally acceptable and - especially if they live in an isolated bubble - even to believe it is normal despite a mountain of evidence that it’s clearly harmful. Social norms, therefore, begin to move in a harmful direction, and this is what legislation can put up a wall against. These backwards and ignorant practices have no place in a modern society and people who seek to perpetuate them against all scientific evidence should be held to account by the law, the purpose of which is to prevent harm being inflicted on others. We should not be scared of offending people who have no regard for this.

The very fact something is illegal will make many people think twice, and also give the women being coerced into marrying cousins against their will more support and ability to stand up to this abuse, be protected by the police and other agencies, because the behaviour will be overtly criminal in a manner that is far easier to prove than “mere” coercive control within a family.

As always, the test of state overreach should be applied so if the behaviour is only harmful to the individual themselves then a much higher bar exists before it should be legislated against, whereas if it’s harming other individuals in a significant way (clearly the case here) and society at large (clearly the case here), then balance tips towards it being appropriate to legislate against the harmful behaviour. In this case it seems clear that the balance of rights lands in favour of making this behaviour illegal given the immense harm that marrying close relatives causes to those force to do so against their will, to the children born in such marriages, to society at large via the enormous healthcare costs that are completely avoidable, and via the detrimental impact it causes to integration in wider society according to the evidence posted on this thread… and meanwhile this practice having no benefit whatsoever to society that anybody on the thread has been able to articulate (unless you count some abusive men being able to exert even more control over the women in their family and ensure that there is no possible escape for them, ever, because they’ll just marry them off to their brother’s son anyway as soon as it’s legal to do so as a “benefit”).