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”.
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.
Having children with disabilities via voluntary incest is a choice. Same with having kids with a terrible genetic disease. It’s also questionable how good a parent, if not person, you are for willingly wanting to bring in someone who will suffer into the world. Especially when there’s adoption available. If you can use technology to prevent a literal disease, that’s different.
People who get kidney failure or lost an arm definetly didn’t make that damn choice.
If anything is ableist it’s your opinion; people with disease or injury don’t want to have it, or made the choice to have it - let alone have they’re loved ones get the same thing. It’s about not judging the person’s potential abilities in specific areas or mistreating them despite the disease.
But advocating for the spread of the disease is fucked up. Your logic is no different than advocating a blind parent should have the right to blind their child intentionally.
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. It’s 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.
Should disabled people be blanket banned from having sex or children? No obviously not. Not really workable anyways and quite morally hazardous to put into law, as you point out.
Should people with disabilities ought to (in a moral sense) have children that are at high risk of sharing their disability? Also no. To be frank, there’s a reason we call it disability. Even though they can have good, rich, valuable lives, they much more often don’t.
This is definitely a question of degrees. Society and medical support can change this line. Like where diabetes used to be a death sentence now it’s serious but treatable. So less problematic to pass on diabetes today vs 200y ago, but why would you want to?
Finally let’s get to cousins. Beyond the additional risk that they have children with health problems, there’s a question of consent. Even between cousins (like siblings) there’s often a power dynamic that makes consent hazardous. So IMO, obviously immoral. Making this illegal is not very restrictive (it affects you banging like 0-100 specific people out of literally billions) and codifies what was a taboo anyways (which is like, a pretty significant amount of law). 24 US states agree with me.
What law makes it illegal?
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage
Is it eugenics now to say people should avoid conceiving children that are likely to have birth defects?
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.
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.
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.
So that’s why it’s a marriage ban?
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.
(When I say basically I mean I’m too tired to check half of the US’s laws on this, and the source I’m using says sexual contact is generally not permitted)
removed by mod
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.
You’re not as persuasive as you think you are…and you’re not fooling anyone.
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.
…jfc dude
Source
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 in, 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?