Mastodawn

NHS defends cousin marriages because ‘only 15 percent lead to birth defects’

https://discuss.online/post/34083202

NHS defends cousin marriages because ‘only 15 percent lead to birth defects’ - Discuss Online

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”.

CompactFlax Jan 18

“It’s cultural”

HisArmsOpen Jan 18

Are we trying to explain the Royal family again……..

Tollana1234567 Jan 19

mcpoyle families

Tollana1234567 Jan 19

keep it in the family. mcpoyle over a 1000years in the same bloodline.

Devolution Jan 18

British teeth explained.

TheGrandNagus Jan 19

Brits actually have among the healthiest teeth in the world. A while ago they were joint first with Germany, but now they’re only joint 7th with Sweden.

The cousin fucking is very much a Pakistani immigrant problem.

UncleArthur Jan 18

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.

Devolution Jan 18

US yanks in red states too.

surewhynotlem Jan 18

“Brits are like US Southerners” is, arguably, a worse insult then calling them incestuous.

Devolution Jan 18

For who? The Brits or the southerners? Lol

surewhynotlem Jan 18

Whichever has more teeth

Kristell Jan 19

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.

It’s a fun stereotype, but you may find this map interesting

en.wikipedia.org/…/Cousin_marriage_law_in_the_Uni…

Cousin marriage law in the United States - Wikipedia

HisArmsOpen Jan 18

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.

Railcar8095 Jan 19

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.

Eager Eagle Jan 18

not making illegal and support from the national health service are vastly different things. 15% is a disastrous rate for public health.

workerONE Jan 18

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.

stephen01king Jan 19

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.

workerONE Jan 19

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.

stephen01king Jan 19

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.

workerONE Jan 19

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.

stephen01king Jan 19

Yeah, plenty of places where first cousin marriages are still not uncommon.

Tollana1234567 Jan 19

theres also dominant alleles that are the disease state, it also gets complicated when theres partial penetrance since its only half an half.

phutatorius Jan 19

The stats I saw show a 2.55% risk across all UK births. So a bit under 3%.

@eager_eagle It would be, if that figure was correct. Which I'm not finding support for, but I am finding what seems to be COUNTER-support:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage#Genetics

'In April 2002, the Journal of Genetic Counseling released a report which estimated the average risk of birth defects in a child born of first cousins at 1.1–2.0 percentage points above the average base risk for non-cousin couples of 3%, or about the same as that of any woman over age 40.'

Cousin marriage - Wikipedia

Railcar8095 Jan 19

Define “full incest”. Pretty sure siblings are not allowed

UncleArthur Jan 19

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?

Railcar8095 Jan 19

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.

UncleArthur Jan 19

Oh do fuck off, there’s a good chap.

It’s more about immigrants

bus_factor Jan 18

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.

phutatorius Jan 19

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.

HisArmsOpen Jan 18

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.

phutatorius Jan 19

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 practise is endemic.

Th4tGuyII Jan 18

Not defending cousin incest, but it sounds like the NHS is at least backing up its viewpoint with evidence.

Now as to unstigmatising cousin marriages, that's a no from me. There are 60 million other people in the UK, there's gotta be at least one that's right for you that's not also your cousin.

P.s. Trump should really have left the US out of this conversation given how infamous some of the Southern States are for this sort of "matrimony"

Midwives have been told about the benefits of “close relative marriage”

Nice spin. They do not list benefits but advocate that the risk have been exaggerated.

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.

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.

ameancow Jan 20

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.

AlmightyDoorman Jan 18

ITT: Blatant ableism disguised as concerns.

Should you be allowed to have children if you are a known carrier of some bad but not inmediatly deadly risk gene like fragile x, chorea huntington, mucoviszidosis, diabetes 1 (let's ignore the worsening of fragile x and chorea huntingtion across generations for a moment)? Should you be allowed to have children if you have trisomie 21, or some other mental disability? If you say no i think you are ableist and can't comprehend that people with special needs are still people that can be happy and can have desires.
If you say yes why can't two cousins have a child? What if they have two forms of birth control and just want to fuck? What if they are the same sex? I my experience most people who are against two cousins having sex do not give a flying fuck about some theoretical chile but just think it's icky. Which is a fair feeling you are allowed to have but should not be basis for a law.

surewhynotlem Jan 18

What law makes it illegal?

Kristell Jan 18

This. I haven’t seen an argument about incest that doesn’t immediately devolve into eugenics, or talking about power imbalances that aren’t present with adult cousins

circuscritic Jan 18

Found a cousin fucker.

Kristell Jan 18

Solid observational skills! They have, however, failed you. Just because someone is pointing out that certain arguments don’t actually hold water doesn’t mean they engage in the activities the arguments are against.

I just don’t care if two cousins wanna fuck because the arguments against it are things that I’m actively opposed to, or don’t apply to the situation.

circuscritic Jan 19

You’re not as persuasive as you think you are, and you’re not fooling anyone.

Kristell Jan 19

What, persuasive about not wanting to fuck my cousin? I don’t particularly care if anyone thinks I do. If I did, I wouldn’t be in a thread about fucking your cousin saying I think it’s fine to fuck your cousin. I know that people will make assumptions about my sex life based on my position alone.

If you mean about the arguments against it being eugenics, I care more about that point, because they are, and eugenics is bad.

circuscritic Jan 19

…jfc dude

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.

Kristell Jan 19

I… Don’t even actually see the point here? I have access to the internet, and know how to use a search engine? You can literally look that up on Wikipedia, are you trying to imply that because I looked at a Wikipedia article for this post that I want to fuck my cousin?

What a strange outlook on obtaining knowledge. If just knowing what states it’s legal again, something that takes about 30 seconds to find, makes you a cousin-fucker, wouldn’t that make you one too? Or is it just the first person in the thread doing it?

Children of first-cousin marriages have a 4–6% risk of autosomal recessive genetic disorders compared to the 3% of the children of totally unrelated parents.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage

Is it eugenics now to say people should avoid conceiving children that are likely to have birth defects?

Cousin marriage - Wikipedia

Kristell Jan 19

I don’t know, but do you also think it should be illegal to have a child if you’re over 40?

Do you also think that it should be illegal for people with heritable disabilities to have children?

Because your argument isn’t anti-cousin-marriage, it’s anti-birth-defects, and there are a whole lot more sources of them than incest, and ones that are way more common.

Also, yes, preventing people from having children who would have birth defects dates back to the original eugenics movement, it is literally a core belief of the eugenics movement.

How babies are affected by their mother’s age – Uppsala University

24 US states ban cousin marriages. No states ban people over 40 from having children. You want to equate the two but there is a line between that that you can draw, as evidenced by half of the USA doing so.

I’ve expanded on my views elsewhere in thread.

Kristell Jan 19

25 US stated by my count, but also I let my ethics develop separately from the law. There’s been a lot of very questionable things in the law in the past, and as such it’s not exactly a trustable guide for ethics imo.

That’s not the point you presented here, though. The point you presented here was birth defects.

The point you brought up there I still object to, though. While there can be power dynamics between cousins, it’s fairly rare for those to continue into adulthood, and I have long taken the stance “I don’t believe the state should have a say in what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home.”

The line that’s been drawn is people allowing their disgust to inform policy at best. If it were based in anything else the policies would be different.

NHS defends cousin marriages because ‘only 15 percent lead to birth defects’ - Lemmy.World

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”.

“I don’t believe the state should have a say in what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home.”

So that’s why it’s a marriage ban?

Kristell Jan 19

Why did you bring birth defects up if marriage is the concern? You don’t get birth defects from a wedding.

Also in basically every state where it’s illegal to marry your cousin it’s illegal to have sex with them, too.

Goodeye8 Jan 18

The issue I have with your argument is you can use the exact same argument for sibling incest. If two cousins can have a child, and we’re dismissing the birth defect risk argument, then why can’t a brother and sister have a child? What if they just want to fuck? What if the entire family is into the aristocrats style gang bang?

Your argument doesn’t draw a line between cousin incest and parent-child or sibling incest. If one is okay then the other should also be okay and I don’t know about you but I’m definitely not okay with the latter. I’m not saying you’re in the wrong but I do disagree with the argument you made for it.

Parent-child incest has the power dynamic issue. Its basically impossible to consent in that relationship. As to siblings, I’d argue that the logical conclusion is that it is probably okay, unless there’s a limit to how much birth defect risk is allowable, which as noted above, comes with other issues.

Siblings definitely have power dynamics that make consent very hazardous. I’d argue first cousins also have such dynamics. Perhaps to a lesser degree, but there’s no real benefit from having cousins marry and there is an increased risk of birth defects, so better to disallow it.