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?

I think you are right that with very small populations like Travellers, a lot is to do with the small population. And there is a desire to keep culture and traditions, and if we are being honest, marrying outside would very likely dilute those things in the case of a group with such a different way of life.

Some social anthropologists think that is the reason that Jews at certain times in their history, for example, had so many complicated rules for remaining kosher. It makes it quite difficult to fully integrate into the general population, you can't really live together that easily, and intermarriage would be much less likely. So they continue as a distinct and separate population. And there is much less chance of dilution of religious observance then as well.

I think we should probably be honest that for groups like this, they are in many ways being asked to give up parts of a distinct way of life, and that will feel like losing their culture. And that is a hard thing in your own country.

The situation with immigrant communities is a little differernt. With small numbers coming into a large, established community, a family of newcomers will by necessity have a lot to do with the people around them. It will be natural to adapt in many ways to what people do around you, and certainly children born there are likely to do so. Such newcomers are often also, in such cases, disposed to do so - they know when coming to a new place they will have a new culture to adapt to.

And then there is the economic element - the fact that once you come to the UK, a lot of the economic drives toward things like cousin marriages are not there. That should make them less desirable over time.

Of course, the more similar the basic values and traditions people share, the simpler this process is likely to be. I think this even extends to religion to a large extent, a shared religion is another place where people can spend time together or can relate customs, holidays, and so on. It's a point of connection that draws people together.

The more differences, the more change is required, and the fewer connections, and the more effort is required on the part of the community to integrate new people. And it is far more difficult if there are a lot of them, and there isn't so much need for them to interact with the surrounding community. Especially on a social and friendship basis (rather than at work for example.) Especially where there is not a shared religion or belief system, pressure to change under these circumstances seem more like pressure on religious identity which is often resented.

I’m afraid that I have absolutely zero respect for the views of anybody who would willingly risk a child inheriting a preventable, debilitating, painful, life-limiting genetic disease that would ruin their life because they “aren’t comfortable using IVF”. That’s utterly disgusting, particularly if someone with such beliefs decided to have children anyway rather than choose to remain childless if they “disagree with” modern medical treatment.

Obviously, public policy should be evidence-based so such irrational, selfish and abhorrent personal views - while people of course are entitled to hold them - are of no relevance to determining reasonable public health policy and law. In fact, the law exists precisely so that there is a rational framework based on evidence to protect the rest of society from such irrational people inflicting their damaging “beliefs” on everyone else.

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.

You admit it isn’t beneficial and the thread has included an immense amount of information and links to evidence about why it is extremely harmful.

Please explain, therefore, why we should not legislate against it as we do with other harmful behaviour.

Yes, ofc quite a lot of people DO disagree with IVF for that reason, or think it shouldn't be used in that way. Those issues are still debated in

Personally I don't think it's wrong to select for an embryo less likely to be disabled, but I appreciate the slippery slope arguments. They did seem to come true in the UK with assisted dying, though the bill has fortunately been watered down in the house of Lords considerably.

It’s not fortunate for those still suffering immensely painful, distressing and terrifying deaths unnecessarily because other people are using their horrific and completely avoidable suffering as a human shield because they think it’s acceptable to make others endure this in the (misguided) belief that giving other humans the compassion we routinely show to other animals with terminal conditions in that level of distress (and would be prosecuted for refusing to provide to them) - even when the human has capacity to and has stated that they choose this, when the animal cannot - somehow protects their own rights not to be murdered which are already protected and obviously nobody has suggested changing.

Such views are abhorrent. I have a close relative who is soon to suffer such an horrific, terrifying and painful death and blood is on the hands of all of the people who have blocked sensible legislation on this matter for years; they are entirely responsible for him suffering this needlessly. Every single person who has played a part in campaigning to continue such cruelty to other human beings will be partly responsible for his inevitable and extreme suffering over the next few months, and many others like him as long as they continue to frustrate sensible laws on this matter being introduced.

I have no doubt that the venn diagram of those who are in favour of allowing cousin marriage and the deliberate infliction of entirely preventable genetic disease, pain, distress and early death on children, and those who are happy for my family member and others like him to die in immense and avoidable fear and pain overlaps very significantly, all based on some spurious “argument” that they feel makes such babies, children and terminally ill people acceptable collateral damage to supposedly protect their own rights and “beliefs” that were never remotely relevant to these issues in the first place.

The irony is that such people attempt to convince us that the position they are adopting and trying to inflict on other very vulnerable people who have no say in the matter is in some way “moral” when in fact it is contemptuous of human life and suffering and any kind of empathy or morality at all.

Starmer is an idiot
The evidence is all out there that first cousin marriages create health risks

Its not fare on the children and quite frankly it’s not fare on the nhs and tax payer

I really do not understand how we ever voted in such an idiot for a PM.
Im guessing he’s worried about losing more voters as there’s no other sane reason to allow it

@PrincessSophieFrederike
the huge difference is that now we have scientific evidence of the health issues by cousins marrying

Despite the fact that the Hapsburgs were a well known family of inbreeders with health and physical problems I doubt that families like the Austin’s were very aware

We have had a procession of incompetent idiots as PMs (and politicians in general) for decades now, and sadly not only does the quality seem to be getting progressively worse but the electorate, instead of being enraged by this and demanding an improvement, according to opinion polls are determined to make it even worse than it is currently and if given the chance to vote again now would opt to elect people who are even more incompetent and economically clueless.

Hopeless politicians and a clueless electorate. The former won’t change until the latter does, so the former does everything possible to prevent any change in the latter.

It’s a very sorry state of affairs. There have been many posts in this thread about the lessons of history. We should learn them well, and add to that at a decent basic understanding of basic maths and economics in the general population. Until that happens it’s incredibly unlikely anything in the UK will improve. Most attempts at any political discussion disintegrate into irrelevancies about things which might be irritating but are an insignificant drop in the ocean in terms of the UK budget and would make no difference to anything economically even if they were changed/ resolved.

Living standards in the UK will continue to fall for the foreseeable future because we have not one political party proposing the obvious measures that could be taken to improve things and would be taken by any Government that was vaguely competent and actually acting in the best interests of UK citizens. And no, the vast majority of them aren’t about immigration but about distribution of public spending and redirecting this into productive areas, making long-term decisions rather than popular ones (i.e. complying with their legal responsibilities and the MPs’ charter) and having a vague idea about economics, industrial strategy, infrastructure, trade policy, tax policy without ridiculous cliff-edges which lower productivity, implementing public sector institutions that aren’t reliant on ponzi scheme principles and are unsustainable so are now starving the productive economy of investment (and now, as a result, also jobs and growth), etc.

It’s mind-boggling that people seem hell bent on electing people who have made it clear they have even less idea what they’re doing than the current lot and the last lot, but the British voting public aren’t known around the world these days for making rational decisions so brace yourself for things getting far worse. 😔

Exactly. AFAIK it only happened once in the Austen family, it wasn't a generational thing (though Jane's brother James had also thought of marrying Eliza)

The norms on it have fluctuated in England, but they've thankfully stayed fairly consistently negative after the genetic consequences were definitely known.

This video certainly appears at face value to back up the scientific data showing the effect of inbreeding on IQ.

Sadly I have to agree...tbf though the Sun ofc likes extreme examples of people for readers to mock, & as pp said Travellers are often pressured by parents to leave school younger so that wouldn't help...

You are either someone who enjoys lying to people (presumably you know you won’t be able to mislead me or the other posters here who’ve challenged you on your attempts to misinform people and deliberate refusal to understand that data, but are aiming these deliberately false claims at trying to convince others who might read this thread, hence why I feel this sort of nonsense misinformation needs calling out every single time people like you try to do it).

The base rate is not 3%

The risk if you’ve 35+ is not 6%. Given that the average age of a mother in the UK to have their first child is now 31, do you realise how absurd this claim is (aside from the fact that medical data was posted with links many times on this thread disproving such nonsense)?

Risks aren’t additive. You clearly don’t understand basic maths. So no, even if there was a 6% risk of a child with parents over 35 years old having a genetic illness (there isn’t, as the data shows) this would not become 12% if they married a cousin because the risks are different risks caused by different factors.

The risk over successive generations of inbreeding, however, is cumulative and does grow exponentially if these incestuous practices continue within narrow genetic pools of inbreeding. Everyone’s seen what this can do to breeds of dog and other animals with small populations in the wild due to extinction risks etc. Humans are subject to the same biology and effects whether you like it or not. Science won’t bend to your “culture”, which is why even the leaders of several extreme Islamic states are now also, finally, discouraging inbreeding within families because they’ve finally realised what was apparent to anybody with a modicum of intelligence centuries ago and what has been proved by science many decades ago: that inbreeding - especially across multiple generations - lowers IQ and causes hugely elevated risks of catastrophic genetic illness. Why would anybody want this for their child when there are literally billions of humans on earth that one could choose between as a partner with which to procreate?

Nobody who is a decent, sane person would want to do this, especially when the risks have been proved and the data is clear and published for all to see. So either people are being coerced/ forced to do this, or they are appalling people who are willingly inflicting harm on children. The former should be protected and the latter should be stopped. Legislation is the obvious first step to take towards stamping out such appalling practices.

And perhaps some extra education in maths and science for the affected communities who seem to have a particular struggle with it given their inability to grasp very basic scientific concepts that my 8 year old understands.

Agreed. I feel very sorry for these women. They are indoctrinated from birth to think this it is normal for them to be house slaves, uneducated, to have no life outside the home and no financial freedom. They’re so brainwashed that they defend this vociferously as a “right” and get angry if it is challenged because they’re had it hammered into them ever since they learned to speak and deliberately prevented from engaging with any other part of society where they might see that there are other ways to live and therefore challenge this.

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist”.

I feel great sympathy for them, and clearly the longer it goes on, the harder it will be for subsequent generations to integrate or break free or maintain a normal level of IQ or genetic health in general. However, that’s all just yet more evidence demonstrating why these practices should be illegal.

It may be hard to enforce the law on specific communities, travellers being one of the most difficult ones I should imagine, as it is with pretty much all other areas of law like their children being required to be in education or formal training until 18, which is vanishingly rare. That’s not a reason not to enact evidence-based law in the first place, though. What the law states is required has a huge impact on social norms in general and cannot be based on how a small minority might be annoyed about it or offended by it. It must be based on evidence and the evidence in the case of cousin marriages is crystal clear and undeniable.

The fact some people are so uneducated or brainwashed by “culture” or religion that they don’t understand the science and try to pretend it doesn’t exist is not relevant to what the law should state. The issue of how best to enforce it is, and must always be, separate.

This post really sums up the whole thing very succinctly (which clearly I am very bad at!).

Thank you. What you wrote says pretty much everything about why it is so important that we, as a society, legislate against this.

How many British girls are told at 10 that they’re going to marry their cousin?
How many British girls are not at all involved in picking their own husband?
How many British girls are told they cannot continue their education because they’re female?

They don’t get the same rights. Their rights are taken away and we pretend they’re their choices because we’re too uncomfortable to actually do anything about it. Much easier to ignore it. Much easier to pretend something we would find abhorrent for British girls to suffer is a perfectly acceptable way for Muslim girls to be treated.

Just had a thought, if you marry your cousin and your parents were cousins you share roughly 25% of your DNA which is the same as marrying a half sibling. That makes it a bit more stark, we wouldn’t think it’s fine for half siblings to marry (I assume, but by some of the responses on here I’m not entirely sure someone wouldn’t think it’s totally fine).

The reality is cousin marriage is bloody terrible for women, can you imagine the family pressure if your husband is abusive to not say anything, the health consequences for your children. Everything can be hidden. It suits men fine I’m sure. Matthew Syed wrote an article where he talked about the rates of children born from incest being much higher in Bradford. I’m talking about the childs father being the mums brother or dad. Thats how well these closed clans can hide things.

But I quickly discovered that researchers wouldn’t return emails or calls. When I got through to one geneticist, he said: “I can’t go there.” It was like hitting a succession of ever-higher brick walls. I then came across evidence that scientists examining the UK Biobank had found that levels of incest (father-daughter, siblings etc) were significantly higher in the British Pakistani community than the wider population.

https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/silence-on-cousin-marriage-is-the-unspeakable-face-of-liberalism-870z5rpmf

I’m brown (not muslim, my lot aren’t allowed to marry someone form the same village and definitely not anyone related within a few generations, marrying into the same family twice with no blood connection is also frowned upon). I would really appreciate it if people didn’t throw brown women under the bus in an effort to appear anti-racist. We are actually human too and if you wouldn’t want it for your white daughter and you can see why it could be awful for her, then why would you want it for my brown one. Stop covering mens arses.

You make some excellent points. I would also like to add that not even a majority of British Pakistanis and Bangladeshis support the practice

I posted a yougov poll upthread that said "39% of British Pakistanis and Bangladeshis say cousin marriage should be legal – although 47% of this group still say the practice should be prohibited"

and that is from communities where around half of the marriages are cousin marriages. How about we listen to them instead of self styled community leaders?

In Sweden, marrying your first cousin has long been legal, though as in the UK it is widely frowned upon. Yet in response to the growing number of cousin marriages in Sweden after a rise in migration, the government has announced plans to ban the practice next year. A Bill is currently being drafted. In Norway, a ban on cousin marriage was adopted this summer. Denmark may soon follow in the footsteps of its Nordic neighbours.

Despite cousin marriage being a well-known issue, for too long any debate on this subject has been shamefully sidelined

The reason for the move is the same in all the Nordic countries; within certain large immigrant communities, the practice of cousin marriage remains common. In parts of the Middle East and North Africa, up to half of all marriages are between relatives. Pakistan, which has a significant immigrant population in the UK, has one of the highest prevalence of cousin marriages in the world.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-sweden-is-cracking-down-on-cousin-marriages/

Sirojiddin Toghaev is dependent on crutches, a wheelchair, or scooter to move around.

A resident of Uzbekistan’s southeastern Surkhondaryo region, he blames his health condition on being born in a consanguineous marriage.

“My father married his cousin, the daughter of his father’s sister,” he said. “It was arranged by my grandfather. My elder sister, Oibahor, and I were born with birth defects because our parents were blood relatives.”

The only healthy child in this consanguineous marriage is Firuza, who has been looking after her brother and sister since their parents died a few years ago. The siblings, all in their 30s, live in their parent’s house in the town of Denov.

Marriage between bloodline cousins is widespread in many parts of Uzbekistan, especially in the Toghaevs’ native Surkhondaryo and the neighboring Qashqadaryo region.

Uzbek authorities now want to end to the practice, blaming the phenomenon for genetic disorders among newborns.

www.rferl.org/a/uzbekistan-cousin-marriage-ban-consanguineous/33052359.html

So Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Uzbekistan are all banning cousin marriage.

The first three are obviously similar societies. Uzbekistan could not be more different but has followed the science and came to same conclusion.

How funny. Things have changed so much since 1894 haven’t they - we don’t stuff small children up chimneys either. That’s progress I guess.

Thanks to *MainframeMalfunction *for a series of intelligent, well-argued posts.

I've found this conversation fascinating. I hope we follow in the footsteps of other countries and ban the practice, as it is so dangerous to the unborn child. Anyone who accuses me of racism for wanting this practice to stop needs to back up why it is racist....highlighting a problem within a particular group of society is not racist.

And as a PP shared, Saudi Arabia has introduced a program to discourage cousin marriages.

Also to be blunt it is a financial burden on the state. The cost of supporting a severely disabled child for decades is astronomical. Before anyone says Yes, but what about (insert hereditary disease/accident etc) these are by and large unforeseen. Entirely different from knowingly marrying cousins generation after generation and steadfastly saying that any resultant disabled children are due to god’s will. God or whoever is not sticking his hand in his pocket to support them.