If we ever get Medicare for All, I hope our national insurance agency doesn't put out a paper extolling the virtues of fucking and impregnanting your cousins.
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2026
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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.
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.
That's because like NHS in this case, X-COM *lies *.
Alabamba hootin’ and hollerin’ intensifies
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.
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
Found a cousin fucker.
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.
What law makes it illegal?
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.
US yanks in red states too.
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.
"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
“85 to 90 per cent of cousin couples do not have affected children”
So imagine 10 couples: 1 couple has an affected child, the other 9 couples do not have any children. In this case, 90 percent of couples do not have affected children but 100 percent of children are affected. I wonder why they presented the statistics using that particular, odd means of phrasing.
Lots of things lead to increased risk of birth defects, like having children after the age of 30. I thought it was pretty well known that the risks associated with inbreeding drops off pretty sharply at the cousin level? At that point I think the appropriate reaction is social stigma, but not legal ramifications.
It also compounds over generations; if you're the child of first cousins, you really should seek someone who it would take genealogy research to find a common ancestor with. If you're not, it's still a serious risk to have kids with anyone too closely related, but level ramifications seem really harsh, especially thinking of situations like adoption where someone could end up there accidentally. And to your point, it isn't the only way to end up with that kind of risk profile.
We are talking of a huge difference between risks to a child by parents over 30 compared to a clear 15% risk with cousins having children. The actual risks are higher where there are recent (parent and grandparents) who were also more closely related.
Midwives have been told about the benefits of “close relative marriage”
Nice spin. They do not list benefits but advocate that the risk have been exaggerated.
Not defending cousin incest, but it sounds like the NHS is at least backing up its viewpoint with evidence.
Now as to unstigmatising cousin marriages, that's a no from me. There are 60 million other people in the UK, there's gotta be at least one that's right for you that's not also your cousin.
P.s. Trump should really have left the US out of this conversation given how infamous some of the Southern States are for this sort of "matrimony"
“It’s cultural”
Are we trying to explain the Royal family again........
British teeth explained.