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”.
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.
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.
ByteOnBikes
Eager Eagle