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.
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.
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.
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.