Laws against cousing marriage “seem ill-advised”
This is, I think, one more bit of evidence in support of the conclusion that we shouldn’t take scientists too seriously when they attempt to translate their research findings into ethical paradigms.
inbreeding is the source of jokes about British royalty and is associated with increased birth defects among offspring. The practice is so reviled that 31 U.S. states ban marriage between first cousins or allow it only if the couple has undergone genetic counseling or at least one partner is sterile or no longer fertile because of age.
But those laws “seem ill-advised” and “should be repealed,” a geneticist and medical historian write in today’s PLoS Biology. “Neither the scientific nor social assumptions that informed them are any longer defensible.”
The US “cousin marriage” prohibition stretches back to the 1858, when Kansas barred such marriages; Texas was the most recent state to pass a ban, in 2005, write Diane Paul, a political scientist emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Hamish Spencer, head of zoology at the University of Otago in New Zealand. (European countries didn’t ban the practice because there, “the rich and noble were marrying” their cousins, Spencer tells us. “In America it was immigrants and the rural poor — a much easier target of legislation than your monarch.”)
First cousins share about an eighth, or 12.5 percent, of their genes, according to a 2002 study in the Journal of Genetic Counseling. Because of that overlap, there’s a 1.7 percent to 2.8 higher risk of intellectual disability and genetic disorders, including seizures and metabolic errors among children whose parents are first cousins than among the general population, says Robin Bennett, a certified genetic counselor and lead author of that research.
That elevated risk is “comparable to a 40-year-old woman having children and we consider that perfectly acceptable,” Spencer tells ScientificAmerican.com. “I can’t imagine a law saying they’re not allowed to have children.”
Mark Shea notes that this is really a fairly logical outcome of the sexual revolution. At first, Sex was something that was only proper in a marriage. Then sex was only proper between a man and a woman (the marital constraint was ignored). It’s hard to say exactly what happened next, but for the most part it seems that the next step was that sex was proper between men and women (the limitation on numbers somewhat loosened), and then that sex was just fine between consensual participants (limitation on numbers and gender of participants now swept aside).
That’s basically where we’re at today: the only social constraint still in place, where sex is concerned, is the notion of consent.
And when that’s all you have to go on, as Mark Shea notes, then almost anything goes. And in such cases, one expects to encounter, before too long, people who will gladly pontificate about how it isn’t cousin-marriage, but laws against cousin-marriage, that are improper…simply because the numbers don’t suggest that there’d be any problem with the kids.
As if that were the only consideration.
