Mick Hartley

From the Telegraph:

The NHS has defended cousin marriage because most do not lead to birth defects, it has emerged.

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”.

Some 15% of cousin couples have children with genetic defects (the national average is 2%), but it’s not a problem? The appeasement of regressive cultural mores is so deeply ingrained in our institutions that even birth defects aren’t a problem if its their culture.

Marriage between cousins is most common in Pakistani communities in Britain, and has led to fears around the greater risk of genetic conditions in their offspring and oppression of women.…

The NHS guidance, meanwhile, goes on to describe the benefits of cousin marriages.

The papers explain how “marriage within the family can provide financial and social security at the individual, family and wider kinship levels”.

They add that “any discussion of the potential risks” to a child’s health “must also be balanced against the potential benefits” that come from “collective social capital” of such a union.

From the Times:

Richard Holden, a Conservative MP who is campaigning to ban cousin marriage, said: “I just find this unbelievable. It is really concerning to me. There are no benefits to marriage between first cousins, only massive downsides for health, welfare, individual rights and the cohesiveness of our society.”

Michael Muthukrishna, professor of economic psychology at the London School of Economics, said: “When marriage is restricted to family members, communities become more isolated, limiting social integration.

“This isolation is what has allowed for over-representation of radicalisation and grooming gangs. Normalising cousin marriage doesn’t help mothers, nor babies affected by the well-documented health risks of repeated inbreeding.”

The reason cousin marriages were banned across Scandinavia was largely because of the coercion:

The Swedish minister of justice, Gunnar Strömmer, correctly argues that a ban could help combat marriages entered into under pressure or coercion. Cousin marriages are frequently arranged or forced. In some cases, refusing to go through with the marriage can result in violence or even so-called honour killings. By banning cousin marriages, the Swedish government aims to break the cycle of coercion and control rooted in these practices.

And:

Pakistan is the country with the highest rate of consanguineous marriages, and the practice has come over here with immigration. A 2005 report, commissioned by MP Ann Cryer, revealed that the Pakistani community accounted for 30 per cent of all births with recessive disorders, despite representing 3.4 per cent of the birth rate nationwide. From that same period Dr Peter Corry, Consultant Paediatrician at Bradford Royal Infirmary, said his hospital saw so many recessive genetic illnesses that it had became a centre of excellence for the treatment of some of them. They’d identified about 140 different autosomal recessive disorders among local children: he estimated that a typical district would see 20 to 30.

See also, Matthew Syed.