Right wing newspaper The Telegraph supporting right-wing MPs campaign to ban cousin marriage by cherry picking health service docs that aren't there to promote but giving guidance to health professionals on how to treat patients and have zero impact on whether people choose to marry their cousins or procreate with them.

The prevalence is higher in UK Pakistani communities like Bradford. Having a right wing politician cherry pick info they dislike about minorities to start a crusade against minorities is as old as time.

I didn't think reactionary right wing politics would get so much traction on Lemmy of all places. Critically assess your sources, who is publishing, who is saying, and why.

Next week. Right wing MP pushes to ban the burka as it has x% impact on pedestrian safety at road crossings. When racists cannot directly discriminate, they don't stop, they just go for indirect strategies.

You need to parse the sentence a bit. "85 to 90% of cousin couples do not have affected children" does not mean that the odds of one child being born with a hereditary genetic defect is 15%. It means that, for the average family size of a first-cousin couple, the odds are 10-15% that at least one of the kids is affected.

So, let's conservatively say the average family size among those who marry first cousins is 3. The odds of at least one in those three kids having a genetic defect are stated to be 15%. So that means the odds of any individual kid whose parents are first cousins having a genetic defect are a bit under 5% (the odds of a given event happening at least once in three independent trials).

The odds will be substantially lower if that 15% figure were based on a larger family size than 3.

As a baseline, tn the UK, the odds in the overall UK population of a genetic defect occurring are around 2.55%.

So the risk is roughly double the baseline for any individual child. But the way the numbers are presented makes it seem misleadingly high and has led to predictable screeching from the usual quarters. There is also no measure of severity. For example, despite my parents being unrelated, I have a genetic defect that causes high cholesterol levels in my blood. However, it's cheaply treatable (woo hoo, statins!) so its impact on pubilc health is next to nil.

I'd favour banning marriages where the partners have first-cousin and closer degrees of consanguinity, but I also see the point of not catastrophising the actual impact.

On the scale of things, I think this rate's a "who the fuck cares?".

I don't really care if cousins get married. I don't really care if they have kids together. I do care if they have birth defects and we should do things medically responsible to reduce or eliminate birth defects, but the whole cousin thing doesn't really bother me as long as there's no external pressure (like British royalty or stereotypical Southern Hicks).

Who is really that bent out of shape on this and why should we care?

"I can count 6 reasons on my left hand why we should allow this...."

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.

I wonder if they're also weighing the societal costs of having potentially serious birth defects in 10-15% of the population?

This is what happens when people are afraid to criticize...

Roll tide!

An unfortunate aspect of Pakistani culture that has carried over to the UK.

Families would marry within the family to keep their wealth within the family.

Unfortunately after successive generations, this can cause serious problems.

I don't think marriage is the problem. It's having children

What is the rate among the control group?

Ban cousin marriage.

Cousin marriage is a heavily exaggerated statistic. Unless it happens many generations in a row the genetic variation does not nearly reach anything representing sibling marriage.

I think incest is icky and we should "aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population"

/s

I think these sorts of conversations are too nuanced for any politician to have, like the death penalty. They'd just use it to target people the right doesn't like.

This is maybe an unpopular opinion but I remain on team “stay the fuck out of other people’s business.” This fits soundly in the “other people’s business” category.