Midwives have been told about the benefits of “close relative marriage” in training documents that minimise the risks to couples’ children.
The documents claim “85 to 90 per cent of cousin couples do not have affected children” and warn staff that “close relative marriage is often stigmatised in England”, adding claims that “the associated genetic risks have been exaggerated”.
On the scale of things, I think this rate’s a “who the fuck cares?”.
I don’t really care if cousins get married. I don’t really care if they have kids together. I do care if they have birth defects and we should do things medically responsible to reduce or eliminate birth defects, but the whole cousin thing doesn’t really bother me as long as there’s no external pressure (like British royalty or stereotypical Southern Hicks).
Who is really that bent out of shape on this and why should we care?
As you stated, the worst thing of such marriage is having kids with health problems that can accumulate very fast with each new generation(silent mutations that get only worse and someday pop out with loud bang). This is mostly the only thing that stops such relationships.
I think it’s just another dog whistle tbh, like caring about animal welfare when it’s Halal, or worrying about parking when a HMO is opened.
Cousin marriage is a brown person activity, so suddenly pearls are clutched.
They add that “any discussion of the potential risks” to a child’s health “must also be balanced against the potential benefits” that come from “collective social capital” of such a union.
I wonder if they’re also weighing the societal costs of having potentially serious birth defects in 10-15% of the population?
Right wing newspaper The Telegraph supporting right-wing MPs campaign to ban cousin marriage by cherry picking health service docs that aren’t there to promote but giving guidance to health professionals on how to treat patients and have zero impact on whether people choose to marry their cousins or procreate with them.
The prevalence is higher in UK Pakistani communities like Bradford. Having a right wing politician cherry pick info they dislike about minorities to start a crusade against minorities is as old as time.
I didn’t think reactionary right wing politics would get so much traction on Lemmy of all places. Critically assess your sources, who is publishing, who is saying, and why.
Next week. Right wing MP pushes to ban the burka as it has x% impact on pedestrian safety at road crossings. When racists cannot directly discriminate, they don’t stop, they just go for indirect strategies.
I wonder where this 15% figure comes from. All the research I can find estimates the probability for these disorders at around 2-4% for first degree cousins. This is about the same as becoming a mother at 40 with a non-related man.
The article only talks about some NHS training documents and is very opinionated in style. Smells like a snappy headline about a controversial topic was more important than proper research.
Yep, this is rage-bait or some sexual kink thing surfacing as a news story because the authors know it will get shared to hell and back. While I have absolutely no doubt that there are plenty of right-wingers with weird sexual hangups that they’re trying to make everyone’s problem, cousin-marriages are pretty low on the list of things we need to worry about. As long as everyone is adult and consenting I literally do not care what people do with their peepees.
Plus in the absence of any power dynamic* why shouldn’t absolutely anyone be allowed to choose to be in a relationship with literally anyone else? Especially as people are increasingly choosing to not reproduce.
* If this is even possible
Usually the argument goes into the ethics of bearing children in a way that, knowingly, creates a significantly and markedly higher risk for every kind of disorder reducing the child’s QOL. I don’t usually find this argument anywhere near airtight, since there’s a plethora of other ways to do that that aren’t banned AND this veers into eugenics territory. But that’s the argument I’ve seen, at least.
Am I the only one that thinks 15% is way too high of a chance to be rolling the dice like that? I’ve played enough XCOM to know that even a 99% success rate will still bite you in the ass.
That’s because like NHS in this case, X-COM *lies *.
It lies in your favor, though. On difficulties below the highest, the modern games have hidden modifiers that affect the hit chance that you can’t see, but all of them are cheating for you. IIRC your hit chance secretly increases when you have missed shots recently, when you have dead soldiers, when you are outnumbered, and maybe some other things.
Now tell them vaccinees have less than 15% chance of causing autism.
While it’s true that the chance is less than 15% you missed about 10^-5 0’s there.
Yeah, but what can the NHS do with that?
They just treat folk. People will make those choices regardless.
“I can count 6 reasons on my left hand why we should allow this…”
6 fibers used to be fairly common, until they started getting lynched and burned at the stake due to religiously zealotism. Or so I read one time sheet watching the princess Bride
Devils advocate: I have a genetic defect that has 50% chance of being passed to my children. It causes bone tumors that range from stetic to life changing.
We only managed to ensure it wasn’t with expensive DNA tests pre - implantation.
Should I be barred from marriage if I can’t pay for that?
It’s not a hypothetical
Not sure what marriage has to do with it in either case tbh. The cousinfuckers can have babies without getting married and so can you lol
But I do understand your point. It’s an ethical dilemma and not a simple one. I mean on a policy level. I imagine on a personal level it’s easier to say “the risk is too great, I won’t do it” as opposed to policymakers saying “the risk is too great, you shouldn’t be allowed to have children”
I’m just following that logic, I made a similar comment about marriage =! Children
https://lemmy.world/comment/21642724
For me this is a good thing (remove the restriction). I would love the message to be more of support rather then “well, some will have defects” though
Oh I didn’t disagree with you. I’m just wondering why tf they’re talking about marriage anyway. In this day and age, I think most babies are born out of wedlock.
There’s a law that prevents the marriage from back when marriage==children.
It’s a stupid law, but an even more stupid reason to change it.
In this day and age, I think most babies are born out of wedlock.
Around 40% in the US.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/out-of-wedlock-births-by-country
That’s already a lot but apparently in the UK which the article is about it is now over 50%
There are far fewer practising Christians in the UK. Also there’s no tax incentive favouring marriage, everyone files separately.
Do you think it’s (morally) right for you to have kids that you know would have a 50% chance to have bone tumors?
Sex bans are generally not workable. A marriage ban for you would be restrictive. This is very different for cousins, because there’s plenty of non-cousin alternatives for everyone.
The worse question is, is it more morally rightful for me to have children when I can afford the test that ensured he wasn’t affected versus those who can’t afford it? Does wealth and access make me rightful?
I don’t think marriage bans are OK in general. Consenting adults can do whatever they want. Hell, let’s bring polynomy forward too (but I’m not sure how consent would work there). As a matter of fact, I’m not even married so restriction or not didn’t matter
You need to parse the sentence a bit. “85 to 90% of cousin couples do not have affected children” does not mean that the odds of one child being born with a hereditary genetic defect is 15%. It means that, for the average family size of a first-cousin couple, the odds are 10-15% that at least one of the kids is affected.
So, let’s conservatively say the average family size among those who marry first cousins is 3. The odds of at least one in those three kids having a genetic defect are stated to be 15%. So that means the odds of any individual kid whose parents are first cousins having a genetic defect are a bit under 5% (the odds of a given event happening at least once in three independent trials).
The odds will be substantially lower if that 15% figure were based on a larger family size than 3.
As a baseline, tn the UK, the odds in the overall UK population of a genetic defect occurring are around 2.55%.
So the risk is roughly double the baseline for any individual child. But the way the numbers are presented makes it seem misleadingly high and has led to predictable screeching from the usual quarters. There is also no measure of severity. For example, despite my parents being unrelated, I have a genetic defect that causes high cholesterol levels in my blood. However, it’s cheaply treatable (woo hoo, statins!) so its impact on pubilc health is next to nil.
I’d favour banning marriages where the partners have first-cousin and closer degrees of consanguinity, but I also see the point of not catastrophising the actual impact.
Probability is 5.27%for each kid
You’re right, I shouldn’t try doing these calculations in my head.
But qualitatively, same conclusion: cousin marriage roughly doubles the risk of hereditary disease for each kid, from 2.55% (the NHS publishes stats on it) to 5.27%.
Excuse me! Loads of Western European countries allow full incest (e.g. Belgium, France, Spain, etc.) so let’s not pick on us Brits for allowing cousins to fuck.
I’m partially agreeing with you, but just because other countries say it’s OK, it doesn’t mean that we should.
Haven’t looked at the data, but still, 15% risk is high. From a social a health care perspective, this is horrible for those children too.On the other hand, you can have marriage without children and children without marriage.
Unless you start punishing them for having children, it’s naive to ban marriage.
not making illegal and support from the national health service are vastly different things. 15% is a disastrous rate for public health.
But it’s not a 15% risk. Unrelated couples have a 3% chance of having a child with a birth defect while cousins have a 5% chance of having a child with a birth defect.
Isn’t the problem being that the probability increases with each subsequent generations? That’s why having a child with a cousin should be discouraged, to prevent the accumulation of bad recessive genes.
If you have one person with recessive genes and one person with dominant genes, then the baby will have the dominant gene. So if the grandparents were cousins both with recessive genes it wouldn’t matter, as far as I know.
The thing is, with subsequent incestual generations, the likelihood of the recessive gene manifesting increases a lot. So, the problem is not a single generation of incest, it’s the normalisation of incest that might lead to multiple generations doing it.
Oh I see what you’re saying. I did some reading earlier that said that in a lot of places 20% - 40% of all marriages are to first cousins.
Yeah, plenty of places where first cousin marriages are still not uncommon.
theres also dominant alleles that are the disease state, it also gets complicated when theres partial penetrance since its only half an half.
The stats I saw show a 2.55% risk across all UK births. So a bit under 3%.
It’s more about immigrants
US yanks in red states too.
“Brits are like US Southerners” is, arguably, a worse insult then calling them incestuous.
For who? The Brits or the southerners? Lol
Whichever has more teeth
It’s a fun stereotype, but you may find this map interesting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage_law_in_the_United_States
Fun fact: Most of the places it’s legal in are blue. Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina are the only red states it’s legal in, out of 17 total states. If we include states where it’s conditionally legal (usually based on age/fertility) it’s Utah out of 7 states.
Define “full incest”. Pretty sure siblings are not allowed
Pretty sure they are. Incestuous relationships between consenting adults (with the age varying by location) are permitted, including in the Netherlands, France, Slovenia, and Spain. Why not check before making such a statement?
Not only wrong, but also childish about it. First, this topic is about marriage. They are not taking about letting them be in a relationship, but marriage.
And marriage between siblings is not allowed in several countries you mentioned, which you would know if you checked instead of being “pretty sure”.
Not go be a wrong ass somewhere else.
Oh do fuck off, there’s a good chap.
I think this might be relevant
Wow 10 of them are almost half (or more). That surprises me. I knew it happens in arranged marriages, but I didn’t think it was this frequent.
For convenience, here’s the link that’s written in the footer on the picture:
https://brilliantmaps.com/consanguineous-marriage/ And the source link from there:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/inbreeding-by-country61% !
What is the Roll Tide equivalent in Pakistan?
Roll tide!
They have to justify the inbreeding of the monarchy somehow.
deleted by creator
This is what happens when people are afraid to criticize…
Only?
Yeah no shit. 15% is fucking huge
Lots of things lead to increased risk of birth defects, like having children after the age of 30. I thought it was pretty well known that the risks associated with inbreeding drops off pretty sharply at the cousin level? At that point I think the appropriate reaction is social stigma, but not legal ramifications.
It also compounds over generations; if you’re the child of first cousins, you really should seek someone who it would take genealogy research to find a common ancestor with. If you’re not, it’s still a serious risk to have kids with anyone too closely related, but level ramifications seem really harsh, especially thinking of situations like adoption where someone could end up there accidentally. And to your point, it isn’t the only way to end up with that kind of risk profile.
Good thing that it’s possible for a couple to take a test that gives a good measure of their degree of consanguinity.
This is a particular risk not only in countries with first-cousin marriage, but in those with small founder populations. For example, Iceland, where the government provides this measure to any couple who asks, so that they can make an informed decision about the risk before reproducing.
And ethno-nationalists can choke on this fact: the best strategy to reduce the risk of genetic defects is out-marriage. The less closely genetically similar two partners are, the lower the odds of autosomal recessive disorders afflicting their offspring. So I did the rational thing, and married someone whose ancestors came from a different part of the world than mine.
We are talking of a huge difference between risks to a child by parents over 30 compared to a clear 15% risk with cousins having children. The actual risks are higher where there are recent (parent and grandparents) who were also more closely related.
It’s not a clear 15% risk. The actual risk to an individual child is in the 4-5% range, compared to 2.55% for the population as a whole.
Isn’t that likely compounded if children of first cousins end up reproducing with children from first cousins, and so on? As a one-off, those figures might be the case, but could well increase if the practice is endemic.
