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And that’s basically it!
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
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.
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.
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.
US yanks in red states too.
"Brits are like US Southerners" is, arguably, a worse insult then calling them incestuous.
It's more about immigrants
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
Only?
Yeah no shit. 15% is fucking huge
Alabamba hootin’ and hollerin’ intensifies
"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
If we ever get Medicare for All, I hope our national insurance agency doesn't put out a paper extolling the virtues of fucking and impregnanting your cousins.
Er, we do. It’s called the NHS.
This is what happens when people are afraid to criticize...
Roll tide!
“85 to 90 per cent of cousin couples do not have affected children”
So imagine 10 couples: 1 couple has an affected child, the other 9 couples do not have any children. In this case, 90 percent of couples do not have affected children but 100 percent of children are affected. I wonder why they presented the statistics using that particular, odd means of phrasing.