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?

What hyperbolic comments which entirely demonstrate the points I’ve been making. Nobody has suggested that “children with depression” would be covered by this legislation. You are fabricating utter nonsense. This bill is for people with terminal and incurable conditions who doctors verify will live for less than 6 months anyway.

We extend such compassion to animals to avoid them suffering needlessly and simply go to sleep peacefully - the kind of death I think every human on Earth would wish for themselves and those they love. Indeed, if you withheld such compassion to an animal in extreme suffering and pain you would be prosecuted.

Humans are animals, and also have agency. It is for you to put forward your argument why another human should not have the right to choose a peaceful, painless and not terrifying death when they have a terminal diagnosis which will mean that they will die within a few months, and why you think inflicting immense suffering and pain on them against their will is acceptable, if you wish to argue that.

Some pain cannot be alleviated by any medication. Doctors are prohibited (after Harold Wilson) from doing what they used to do and simply informally giving a higher dose of pain medication to make the end less distressing for these patients, with the family’s knowledge and permission and often after days of the patient begging to die. With some medical conditions patients end up vomiting up faeces. With others they end up suffocating, or drowning in fluid in their own lungs, or slowly starving to death because they can no longer swallow. You clearly have no idea of the reality of what many deaths involve if you are arguing that it is acceptable to inflict this on somebody against their will - when they have clearly stated that they do not want this for themselves and are perfectly capable mentally of making this decision. It is abhorrent and cruel beyond belief. You have clearly never seen much of death up close. Perhaps do some volunteering in a palliative care hospital, and then you may see the reality of what people like you are deliberately inflicting on others.

Effectively you’re advocating using these people’s immense agony and suffering as a human shield because you personally wouldn’t choose this because of your beliefs. You do not have the right to inflict this pain and suffering and distress on others and treat them worse than animals because they don’t share your beliefs. Neither is is acceptable or in any way “moral” (laughable) for you to use them as a human shield to supposedly protect the rights of the vulnerable. Robust processes are in the Assisted Dying bill to protect such people. Campaign for further protections if you want them, but inflicting more suffering on those who are facing terrifying and painful deaths and this very real harm in order to protect others from some potential harm (for which you’ve provided no evidence), is the opposite of moral. It is cruel and contemptuous of human life. Nobody is making you choose assisted dying for yourself, but for people like my father who will shortly be suffering an immensely painful and frightening death and whose final months of life are being ruined by his sheer terror at what is to come which is all completely avoidable if we were allowed to extend to him the same compassion as we would to a pet cat, you and all people like you who’ve done your best to delay the implementation of his right to choose a death that isn’t terrifying and appalling and painful and traumatic have blood on your hands.

I don’t know if “immense and incurable agony” can’t be used to describe chronic depression.

As decided by a proxy (and no discussion about palliative care)? You claim to be concerned about women misled about their marriage status but see no chance of those same women being coerced to kill themselves? With that death exempted from investigation?

And yes, many depressed people would describe depression that way. That is how severe mental illness works. But what is your empirical basis for stopping anyone killing the selves for any reason? What is your logic that says an adult with a terminal illness can kill themselves but a child without one can’t? Or for the state decide it is cheaper to get you to kill yourself than it is to provide good palliative care in a hospice? Or carers at home?

I think you’ve quoted the wrong person.

Why do you think vets administer peaceful deaths to animals in distress?

Do you think the legislation protecting animals from the cruelty of this being withheld and being made to suffer needlessly is wrong and should be repealed?

Do you advocate for the withdrawal of all pain medication, because somebody, somewhere, might get addicted to it or take an overdose? Or is the system whereby we provide it but restrict its prescription to the cases where is is needed and not misused appropriate?

What evidence have you got that disabled women in particular are going to be coerced into ending their lives and somehow all of the checks and balances in the Assisted Dying bill will be circumvented and enable this to happen? If you’re going to claim that inflicting immense and unimaginable suffering on people is necessary to prevent this then you need to provide some evidence that this will happen. As a disabled woman myself, I am not remotely concerned about this and have seen no evidence suggesting this will be the case in the most tightly controlled process of its kind in the world.

Once again, it appears that your views are based on personal beliefs not evidence of any kind, and like with religion generally the demand is always that others produce evidence to disprove your impossible to disprove conjectures for which you have provided no supporting evidence at all rather than understanding that if you want to argue against the existing evidence then it is you who needs to provide evidence that refutes the existing evidence and instead supports your own position.

The Assisted Dying bill won’t cover people with “chronic depression”. It covers only those with incurable and terminal illnesses whose death is almost certain to happen within the next six months, often in immense and incurable agony. Perhaps you didn’t read the posts properly, or don’t understand what the bill actually states. Sadly, for many, due to people like @CatchingtheCat its implementation into law will be too late to prevent these needlessly terrifying and traumatic deaths.

Have you ever seen a human being vomiting faeces? Would you like to see this happening to a member of your family, and them begging to die?

I thought this was interesting:

Assisted suicide is legal in Germany, but there has been very little data forthcoming about trends, demographics and reasons for choosing an assisted death. A study, unique in Germany, evaluated deaths from 2020 onward in one location, the city of Munich. Contrary to commonly held beliefs, the majority of service users were not terminally ill. And the majority were elderly females from affluent backgrounds.

https://blogs.bmj.com/spcare/2025/04/03/assisted-dying-in-germany-munich-study-raises-concerns/

Harold Shipman, not Wilson! 😆

Both objectionable people but not quite to the same degree. I am obviously far too tired today to engage in such discussions.

Are women being coerced into these false marriages following a very strict legal process involving validation by two different doctors and a court, to ensure that they meet the criteria and it is their expressed and genuine wish and they understand the consequences? No, they are not. In fact the entire problem here is the lack of state oversight, rules and constraints over these fake “marriages” without any legal underpinning, so your attempted argument to equate the two actually undermines your own position and demonstrates why legal rules and safeguards are required in both cases.

The law in Germany is very different to the law that is going to be implemented in the UK, which has the strictest criteria and controls and safeguards on the process by far of any law in the world. Cases as you describe literally could not take place under the new UK law and would not be approved so the situation would remain as now where assisted dying for these people is prohibited in the UK.

I'm not theoretically against assisted suicide. Some people undoubtedly have their lives extended cruelly. I don't think there's a country though that's brought in these laws that hasn't seen them extended and then extended some more. I think it's reasonable to have doubts about how successful we will be in avoiding mission creep when no one else has been able to.

It isn’t “my logic”. I am talking about what the bill actually says.

You are yet to provide any valid or rational reason for objecting to people who are covered by the bill, who are terminally ill and soon to die anyway, being forced to endure prolonged, agonising and distressing deaths which we could easily prevent them having to endure, which they have clearly stated they don’t want to endure, and which doctors have verified that they will inevitably endure if we deny them the medication that can prevent this even when they are begging in agony for it to stop.

Palliative care cannot alleviate all pain. Lots of people are left in agony for days or weeks. Many people are being forced to suffocate, drown in their own bodily fluids, die of starvation, vomit faeces.

Palliative care cannot and will not ever prevent this being the case for some people unless we behave humanely and allow them to die a dignified, peaceful, calm death like we routinely allow even for pets, but apparently you think this should be withheld from human beings because it doesn’t comply with your beliefs and you are prepared for other people to be forced to leave this world terrified and in agony against their own wishes due to your desire to force your beliefs on everyone else.

What unimaginable cruelty. When dogmatic insistence on your “beliefs” and desire to enforce compliance with them on others has become more important to you than what these religious doctrines were supposedly meant to achieve in the first place then you have truly lost your way from anything resembling a system of morality.

This is exactly why people’s religious beliefs should be allowed to have absolutely zero influence on UK law.

So object to any changes proposed to it later. We can’t object to proposed laws based on an idea that it might later be changed entirely and things that the proposed legislation specifically prohibits might later become legal based on separate legislation at a later date and we would disagree with changes that might be suggested later which are currently just a figment of people’s imaginations and the proposed legislation specifically prohibits.

That would mean no law could ever be made at all. It literally makes no sense. Any proposed legislation obviously can only be judged as appropriate or not based on what it actually specifies not what some people thing some imaginary piece of separate legislation later might say. This is the most absurd of all of the arguments about this (and that was quite a competition to win!).

Anyway, quite a derailment of the OP’s original thread, apologies @happydappy2. These false equivalences and disingenuous comments about assisted dying were so outrageous that I felt they had to be called out because ultimately the arguments people have attempted to make about that topic ironically simply reinforce the arguments about why the law should prohibit people marrying close relatives. Legislation, ultimately, is primarily to ensure that society remains functional and that people are prohibited from inflicting unacceptable levels of harm on others, which applies in both cases and is why legislating to reduce the number of instances of unnecessary harm in both cases is very obviously appropriate.

You can’t know for certain that it will never expand out once we have all accepted and got used to the idea of assisted suicide.
That’s many people’s reasonable concern.

I’m aware of the bill we have, just thought it was an interesting study.

Nobody can possibly know how any law might be changed one day in the future to be completely different to what is being discussed now. Such hypothetical scenarios have no relevance whatsoever to whether a law actually proposed now should be implemented.

It makes no sense to be objecting to legislation because it doesn’t say something that you would not want it to say.

Interesting, yes, but not relevant at all to the UK legislation.

That isn’t for you to decide.

Of course it does!
Are you as dismissive about people’s concerns about ID cards?

This is a very complex issue for starters and brings in loads more complex issues the more you think about it. I can see the superficial appeal of legislating against cousin marriage as a way for Parliament to try to slightly challenge some communities’ extreme patriarchal norms in the UK.

But how would this actually be policed, we are talking about families with young kids? If a married couple say move to the UK with their kids from an country where cousin marriage is common practice and it turns out they’re cousins, there’s no benefit to anyone for the UK police to be coming to their home to split up that couple and family because their marriage is illegal is there? Or the many married couples who have been for years in the UK and who are also cousins?
To enforce this law we would have to be happy for some very intrusive policing to happen and I would be very worried about the implications of that.

The ‘increased genetic problems’ angle is true but is a red herring. Because we don’t police this level of slightly increased genetic risk in other areas - whereas we do already legally proscribe actual incest for example, which is much more likely than cousin marriage to produce genetic problems by human inbreeding. So I feel the law has already done its work regarding genetics here. A thing to do could be to make our whole society and media more interested in sharing the results of research which are looking to discover more about genetics and health. Then communities can take their own steps if they can see clearly that there is a big increased risk if this is proven to be the case. (I’m not sure it has been, sounds more like small increased risks have been evidenced)

The real issue seems to be about how to integrate and support communities with extreme patriarchal values living in the UK in all kinds of aspects of living life here. And that’s a much more complex cultural issue which the UK hasn’t really collectively tackled yet and would require complex cultural discussions to try to challenge or change, but these discussions would need to be taking place internally to those communities initially for there to be voluntary changes.

Governments can’t legally and forcibly impose cultural changes via external sources on communities to the extent of changing key cultural practice and still call themselves a democratic government that supports multiculturalism.

I definitely don’t want to see the total cultural about-face and major values change that a UK government would have to undergo to give in and give itself powers to go into communities and force change on people like this and actually split up families.

A good place to start would be teaching all kids in every UK school more about democracy and why it’s protective and important for everyone in society whoever they are. Teach kids more about sexism and why it hurts women and men. Basic values education.

But even if that happens, many families will still have kids with genetic problems and we should never move to position of stigmatising those kids who need a lot of support because we’ve blamed the parents for their behaviour which may have slightly increased the risk of the genetic problem happening. Exactly as I don’t want to ever see legally enforced younger parenthood across society either.

A law being hard to enforce should not be a reason to not have the law.
We should treat cousin marriage exactly as the law would treat sibling marriage. We already have the blueprint. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Education and access to testing hasn’t worked. We need a firmer stance now.

Yeah but virtually no social culture in today’s world would ever promote sibling marriage. It’s a huge taboo. Whereas cousin marriage isn’t taboo and is relatively widely practised. So the issues of sibling marriage are theoretical but the issues of cousin mirage are extremely real and complex.

It’s not as simple as ban cousin marriage in the UK going forward. please set out exactly how you would deal with existing cousin marriages? or the fact that people can get married abroad, and then move here. And the fact that people can have religious weddings in the UK that are already not legal weddings, and then start a family. How would you actually police this?

What would the reasons Parliament gives to change the law actually be? How might marital, relationship or sexual behaviour change as a result? How might behaviour in maternity units and the NHS genetic health care change? would midwives have to report women in labour if they suspect the partner is a cousin?
Would everyone in the UK who has kids or gets pregnant have to have genetic relationship testing with their partner? That’s wildly intrusive on every level. What best left alone information would that also reveal- we have about a 10% non paternity rate in the UK?

If you could explain in simple practical terms how you want it to work then fine, otherwise just calling for a ‘firmer stance’ looks a bit buzz wordy.

@Thedevilhasfinallycaughtupwithhim , We should treat cousin marriage exactly as the law would treat sibling marriage. Absolutely not. Sibling marriage is not legal in any way. Cousins can marry.

The same could be said of any law introduced. It literally makes no sense to be trying to argue against a piece of legislation because it doesn’t say things you wouldn’t agree with, but at a later date other legislation might say things you don’t agree with that have nothing to do with the current legislation.

If we took your approach to this with all legislation no legislation could ever be passed because something it doesn’t say that we might not like might be suggested as different legislation later. It’s a totally nonsense argument.