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 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
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.
Roll tide!
An unfortunate aspect of Pakistani culture that has carried over to the UK.
Families would marry within the family to keep their wealth within the family.
Unfortunately after successive generations, this can cause serious problems.
Thank god no European family of significance has ever done anything like this.
spoiler
Obviously they have, it’s just very few and far between.
It’s a bit silly to bring up royal families and pretend their lifestyles are similar to that of the common man.
Look at this map and tell me the issue is European culture.
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This is a problem with Pakistani culture in Britain when it comes to marrying family members.
There’s a reason why the hotspot of birth defects for all of Europe is in Bradford, an area of high Pakistani immigration where over 80% of married adult Pakistanis are married to cousins. That is an insane stat.
Brits have been doing this for literal hundreds to thousands of years.
No, some German-descended royals did it for a few hundred. And they are absolutely not representative of the average Briton. Most normal people aren’t continually marrying from the same royal families of other allied nations, like royals used to.
Do you think maps like this are mere coincidence?
I think there is also a small town in Eastern USA that currently has an issue with everyone being too closely related
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
What is the rate among the control group?
This is what happens when people are afraid to criticize…
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
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.
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%
I think this might be relevant
61% !
What is the Roll Tide equivalent in Pakistan?
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-country
I don’t think marriage is the problem. It’s having children
They have to justify the inbreeding of the monarchy somehow.
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.
Yeah, but what can the NHS do with that?
They just treat folk. People will make those choices regardless.
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.
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.
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.
Only?
Yeah no shit. 15% is fucking huge
Les cousins dangereux
Now I want to watch Cruel Intentions.
