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?

It’s not for anybody to “decide”. It is a fact. The law in Germany is completely different to the law that is being implemented in the UK. The qualifying criteria and safeguards are totally different, so any analogy from one to the other is completely meaningless and the cases that you highlight could not possibly occur under the proposed UK law so are, by definition, “irrelevant” when discussing the UK law.

Yes, because those are also completely absurd. ID cards are standard in the majority of European countries and make life much simpler, reduce fraud and illegal black market working, enable more efficient provision of services and haven’t caused any social catastrophe as far as I’m aware any more than birth certificates, passports or driving licences do.

Yes. Not to mention the straw man argument that PP made claiming that because not all genetic issues are predictable in advance and possible to prevent (despite screening now being available for the most common issues as standard and for any known specific issues within a family) we should therefore continue to allow a practice that we know is harmful and vastly increases risks for which we cannot screen, thereby inflicting immense suffering on children needlessly and huge costs on wider society. That argument is madness and would mean that we should legalise incest between siblings as well.

It would be like saying that because some classic cars can’t be fitted with seatbelts we shouldn’t require anybody to wear one. Or that because some car crashes happen every year there’s no point in trying to improve the safety of cars to reduce the impact of this.

Illogical nonsense. The state legislates to reduce known and predictable and preventable harms when the restriction harmful behaviour will have a much lower impact than the level of harm caused by the behaviour; that is the justification for restricting a freedom in a proportionate manner. Given that nobody on this thread has been able to articulate a single benefit from continuing to allow cousins to marry (which inevitably means that more cousins procreate) and we know that the children of such marriages have far, far higher risks of severe genetic abnormalities, suffering, pain and shortened lives; and we also know that aside from that this inbreeding lowers IQ; and that it increases the risk of behavioural issues such as depression, irrational rage, psychosis etc; it’s obvious that it meets any sensible criteria for something to legislate against. There’s zero evidence that it’s beneficial in any way, and a huge amount of evidence that it’s harmful.

It’s quite astonishing that anybody is being so disingenuous as to continue to try to argue it should continue to be allowed when we have legislated against much, much less harmful and risky behaviour in many instances, and in this case the only restriction to anybody’s freedom that would be imposed is that they need to choose one of the other 4bn members of the opposite sex on Earth to marry who isn’t a close relative; hardly an unreasonable imposition. The fact that it results in miserable lives for so many children and yet people continue to engage in it anyway makes it particularly horrifying and verging on child abuse.

The entire point of the thread is that we should be legislating that they cannot, as for siblings, because the effects are similar (particularly when the practice is continued over several generations).

Firstly the Government was wrong to support a multicultural society in the UK. Multi-ethnic, yes!

Anyone who thinks less of someone because of the colour of their skin is a monstrous bigot. Your ethnicity, like your biological sex, is a verifiable fact, and something you are born with and cannot change. It says nothing about your personality, intelligence, courage, compassion, skills, likes and dislikes and so on.

But culture/religion is a social construct, not a biological fact. It provides an optional set of rules for how to live a 'good life'. Culture/religion, like 'gender stereotypes' can be used by men (depressingly aided by some foolish females) to control women and girls and make their lives small, powerless and dependent on men.

Education doesn't work. We've tried that and it's failed. Increasingly it is possible for Muslim girls to be educated within schools which are predominately Muslim in its pupils, staff and outlook. There aren't going to be classes on sexism, genetic issues with cousin marriage and freedom to leave your religion.

We can't effectively argue against the 'my perfect, infallible religious book says...' As I keep repeating (sorry!) you can't reason someone out of a position which they didn't use reason to get themself into!

We should urgently (and legally it IS possible to draft the required legislative clauses):

• ban all future marriage to first/second cousins
• require all religious marriages to include a civil marriage

This is very do-able and would have a significant positive impact on the lives of Muslim women and girls.

(Edited as pressed post too early. Sorry!)

And in China???

The issues for China’s citizens and restrictions on their freedom don’t stem from them having ID cards.

Delusional.

Absolutely.

It’s not about them being the source of problems. It’s about them being a tool to control and the terrifying extent to which they can be used for that.
You’re delusional if you think there’s no chance of our government using it as a means to control us.

I've got about half-way through this. There's a couple of things I want to put my oar in over:

• eugenics, specifically addressing points made by Mooncup
• arranged marriage as a form of human trafficking

Eugenics

The bad thing about historic eugenic practices isn't that it made fewer disabled people be born, but that the human rights of would-be parents were violated. I'll explain why:

1. An unconceived person has no human rights because they don't yet exist. We don't have to even consider their future human rights until someone starts TTC.
2. A would-be parent absolutely has human rights that should be respected, including the right to marry and found a family.
3. With the exception of the right to freedom from torture, no human rights are absolute but can be limited for reasons of the public good. These reasons can include public health.

Ripping out people's reproductive organs, banning inter-racial marriage, etc doesn't come close to qualifying as legitimate limitation of the right to marry and found a family, because the former stops someone from having kids at all and the latter stops someone from marrying hundreds of thousands or more people based on skin colour or national origin. Additionally, forced sterilisation is arguably a form of torture.

Likewise, bundling disabled people into gas vans to murder them is a clear breach of their human right to life.

So all that stuff that happened in the US in the early 20th century, and later on in Germany, is absolutely violating people's rights: the rights of born people. No unconceived people's rights were violated because no one can have rights prior to conception. (Whether forced abortion violates the foetus's rights depends on your views of the concept of foetal personhood and settling that debate is way beyond the scope of this post.)

Stopping someone from marrying a specific small group of people based on proximity of kinship isn't an unreasonable limitation on the rights to marry and found a family because the people can still have kids and they can marry any of literally millions of people. Adding first cousins to the list of people you can't marry is a warranted and very small limitation on the right to marry and found a family, given the harms caused by repeated cousin marriages demonstrated by Born In Bradford and other research.

Stopping someone who is likely to have a congenital genetic disability from even being conceived by preventing two cousins from marrying and founding a family together isn't a breach of that non-existant person's human rights because they aren't a person to even have rights yet. To the contrary, we have a moral imperative to ethically attempt to minimise the likelihood that someone is born disabled because of the adverse impact that disability will have on that person's life, in just the same way that we don't let pregnant women take thalidomide even if they are on a drip for hyperemesis gravidarum.

Arguably, because some people believe in foetal personhood, preventing a conception by preventing a marriage and consequent sexual union is more ethical than IVF and discarding embryoes that have genetic problems, and more ethical than in-utero testing followed by abortion.

Lastly, it's less discriminatory against disabled people to have a blanket ban on first cousin marriages than it is to have a case-by-case assessment based on gene testing, because gene testing will result in more disabled people than non-disabled being told "no, you can't your cousin, even though your brother can". Example: cystic fibrosis, recessive genetic condition, someone with it has two copies of the gene so if they marry a cousin with one copy, half the kids will have CF and half will be carriers, so they get told "no", but their brother who lucked out and isn't even a carrier is told "yes".

Banning first cousin marriage isn't a slippery slope to forced abortion etc because it's a completely different, purely legislative, intervention that violates no one's rights.

Human trafficking

In the half of the thread I've read so far, no one seems to really consider arranged marriage as a form of human trafficking. You've got marriages that the couple can't really say "no" to and these marriages are absolutely being used to get British-born people's overseas cousins into the UK on spousal visas. And when it's a woman brought over on a spousal visa, her ability to flee DV is limited greatly by her not being British, possibly speaking little English, and having "no recourse to public funds" stamped on her visa.

We know from Jewish women that an abusive man will look overseas for his arranged marriage bride to overcome the refusal of every family in his local community to let their daughters wed him, because families get reputations for their men being batterers and the parents in the community learn to avoid them when picking matches for their daughters. What makes anyone think that abusive men in other ethno-religious communities won't pull this stunt to get wed?

If we demanded proof that marriages performed overseas were not first cousin marriages and refused to recognise first cousin marriages for immigration purposes, we could reduce this form of trafficking and consequent abuse, because a) the parents of the UK-born spouse involved will be less motivated to get a more-distant relative into the UK and b) being married to a second cousin instead of a first cousin means fewer relatives in common, more relatives not in common, and so more people who might take a DV victim's side if she opts to leave.

Proofreading failure.

gene testing will result in more disabled people than non-disabled being told "no, you can't marry your cousin, even though your brother can".

Whereas cousin marriage isn’t taboo and is relatively widely practised.

Not here it isn’t - it is widely frowned upon. Especially now we know the serious genetic consequences.

Repeated first cousin marriage creates a far greater risk of serious congenital abnormalities (info upthread) - a 30% increased risk from memory. 12% increased infant mortality.

You are putting the cart before the horse. We don’t need to know how to implement this law. We just need to ask the government to do it and their legions of well paid legal and social behaviour experts can work out the rest.

It’s not going to be an instant fix but education alone clearly hasn’t had the desire effect, particularly where you have 2nd generation immigrants here who rigidly stick to the old ways and new immigrants from specific areas that still prioritise it for reasons of power.

The seatbelt law was unpopular and difficult to police when it was brought in - I remember absolute fury from some. Now look at us as a society. Seatbelts everywhere.

This could be affecting as many as 7500 children per year. A humane society should not knowingly allow practices that lead to such widespread suffering.

please set out exactly how you would deal with existing cousin marriages?

We allow those existing marriages to continue but also introduce a clause that makes them voidable by either spouse, so that women trapped in them don't have to divorce to leave.

or the fact that people can get married abroad

We already don't acknowledge the validity of some overseas marriages when a resident of one of the home nations enters into a marriage that would be illegal in the home nation where she dwells.

Just so that everyone is clear as I’ve seen it mentioned a couple of times. No one is proposing that existing first cousin marriages be annulled, cancelled or otherwise removed.

The law needs to be changed in order to give a clear steer on what is acceptable in society. Repeated first cousin marriage is harmful. The government needs to decide how best to sort that out.

Analogy to your point

Person A: We want to mandate seat belts.
Person B: You can't do that, some classic cars don't have them.
Person A: We will make a grandfather clause in the law so that cars that don't have seatbelts don't have to get them retrofitted, but all new cars will have to have them, and if you do get a seatbelt retrofitted to your classic, you have to leave it installed and use it. As older cars reduce in number on the roads, so the number of people killed by flying headfirst through the windscreen will fall.

People should have to take a test before posting on threads about law changes to make sure that they know about grandfather clauses and other legislative features.

The sad truth is the gov't won't address this issue for fear of upsetting muslims. They value their votes and prefer to turn a blind eye to the suffering of these children born from 1st cousin marriages...rather than do something quite straightforward & simple to prevent this needless suffering, Is just so sad AND we are paying to provide lifelong care for these children...

Yes. This is the terrible reality and I feel like we have been sleep walking into a situation where the government will bend over backwards because they (wrongly) think it will keep the Muslim vote.

We need to speak up now to stop this government selling us all down the river like Theresa May tried to do to women.

Why? Because he does not want to lose the votes from the ethnic minorities where this practice is common.

Hence why Icelanders use the Islendiga-App to determine how closely they are related before they hook up. Previously you would have to go and look up your prospective shag in the Islendingabok, which kind of breaks the flow on a date.

I agree, except that second cousin marriages should also be included in the ban. The risks to the child are lower but again compound over generations of continued practice to concentrate genes. By the time you get to third cousins there is sufficient new input into the gene pool to reduce risks exponentially, but banning first cousin marriage and not second would likely result in a huge rise in these people hell-bent on inbreeding massively increasing the rate of second cousin marriages and continuing this practice until it results in outcomes nearly as bad as the first cousin marriages. If we’re going to legislate against it, ban both in one go and be done with it.

There are no benefits whatsoever. There are huge health risks that are totally unnecessary. And it seems there are huge social problems associated with this also, with “clans” and family control and abuse of women. It’s a no-brainer to simply say “no more inbreeding here, thanks”, until you get to a degree of removal where it’s not significant, which seems to be the third cousin level as a minimum to have a healthy gene pool. It’s actually really quite gross that anybody finds the idea of marrying even extended family members acceptable or appealing. 🤢

As you say, it’s hardly a huge imposition to restrict anybody’s rights in the extremely minor way that they are permitted to marry only one of the ~4bn opposite sex people on Earth to whom they are not a close blood relative. And frankly anybody determined to ignore all the evidence and do this anyway, illegal or not, is a pretty horrendous human being who should not be allowed to have children in their care given they’ve proved themselves to be someone who will willingly risk severe harm to a child that is completely avoidable and unnecessary.

This is a great point. Reading about Travellers today, I was unhappy to learn that their rate of consanguienous marriage is apparently as high as 71% if you count marriages to first cousins once removed & to second cousins.

https://dontforgetthebubbles.com/irish-traveller-health/

The same link says their infant mortality rate is the highest in Europe! Surely this is connected...? ☹️

I've always been fascinated that baby girls are born with all the eggs (as immature egg cells called oocytes) they will ever have. So my grandmother when pregnant with my mother was also forming the egg/oocyte which would at a much later date become 50% of the genetic basis for me.

Like a very weird Russian doll!

It seems insane that we allow a cultural norm to continue that results in young British women being bullied into marrying a close relative; whose sperm are much more likely to result in her giving birth to a child with a severe disability.

If I were Starmer I would push through a ban on Cousin Marriage (both 1st and 2nd) and require all future religious marriages to include a civil marriage.

If I achieved little else as PM, I would always think - Hundreds of British children will be born this year free of a terrible disability. Thousands of British women will have greater choice over who they marry.

Because of changes I made, despite the outcry and the huge pushback from Community Leaders. It was worth it.

That would involve politicians caring about women and children. Bar a few, they don't.

Maybe we need to persuade him on the basis that some of those profoundly harmed children will be male?

I looked at the BBC article in Bradford again. So many PPs have airily said ‘we can deal with the increased risk by genetic screening or counselling’ but that does not work either the Muslim culture. Families interviewed have the view that a disabled child ‘is gods will’ so they will not be doing anything to stop having disabled children.

At present, the UK is still following the policy of "genetic counselling", in which first cousin-couples are educated about the risks of having children, and encouraged to get extra screening in pregnancy.

This only works if the family is prepared to go through the heartbreak of abortion. What happens if repeated pregnancies show abnormalities? They are unlikely to agree to stop having more children.

Absolutely agree with everything in this post.

And it would be many thousands of children born every year who were saved from carastrophic genetic disabilities that ruin their lives by this one measure, not hundreds.

It’s unequivocally the right thing to do and any decent politician would do so without hesitation.