I keep thinking of the couple in “People under the Stairs” when I read this.
So, if two people have a high chance of having unhealthy offspring, is it the government’s role to stop them from marrying and reproducing? I find that to be a very tough question. Ignoring the brother/sister thing, and just thinking “genetically incompatible”, then how do you justify the government getting involved in some cases, but not others (two people with mild sickle-cell, say). Then again, won’t someone think of the (un-concieved) children?
As for parents marrying children. I am strictly against this. As someone who ran a business for 12 years in partnership with a parent, I can say that the parent/child relationship does not translate well into an equal relationship. It (IMO) will almost always cause problems. Whether it should be legislated against, I’m not sure, but I do feel this type of marriage is wrong.
All I can think of with regard to legalized incest between consenting adults (people over 18) is, damn, that will really cross the wires of your family tree and create some odd tensions at family reunions. Families are screwed up enough without having everybody screwing each other.
Eugenically, isn’t sibling breeding a good thing? Any potentially dangerous recombinants they have go ahead and recombine, and eliminate themselves from the gene pool. Any offspring that don’t croak are, statistically, likelier not to have the recombinants. The average quality of the offspring goes up. (That’s very tersely and inexactly expressed, of course, to say nothing of callous, but as long as we’re being all objective about this, why worry?)
I think the problem with brother-sister (or brother-brother) incest is not a big deal, to be honest. There’s the genetic angle to think of, but hey, if they don’t plan on procreating it’s no skin off my back. I am also sure it happens a lot more than people talk about, especially in less-developed countries.
Now, on the other issue, the parent-child incest one, that’s a whole different issue. It’s a question of power and such to me. The parent will always be seen as a ‘power’ figure, even after the child is grown, so how realistic is it that a parent-child consensual relationship really is consensual? I think it’s a morally slippery slope.
Similar to teacher-student relationships, to a degree. A student can hook up with a teacher after that teacher isn’t the student’s teacher anymore (try saying that one three times fast! :)), and I wouldn’t look askance at that, but you don’t stop being someone’s parent or someone’s child.
I too am in the If-They’re-Consenting-Adults-Let-Them-Get-It-On crowd. It seems that the main reason it’s not allowed is because of the religious and “ick” factor. The genetic factor is an issue, but we clearly let people with all sorts of nasty genetic diseases breed, so it shouldn’t be a dealbreaker. In any case, if the genetic issue were the only societal issue that kept it from happening, you could make incestual breeding illegal, but not incestual relationships.
But, in the interests of strategy, I think it would be better to first get gay marriage approved before even bringing other sexual issues to the national debate. If gay marriage were linked to incest, we’d prolly be staring at another 100 years before complete national legalization…
There is some biological evidence for the incest taboo, suggesting that not screwing your brother/sister is more than just “conditioning.” It’s called the Westermark Effect (also called the Familiarity Hypothesis) and it suggests that “animals are not sexually stimulated by the individuals with whom they interact during critical periods in their early lives (Gray 1985:198).” While siblings are the most obvious candidate for someone with whom you interact with during these critical periods, the evidence extends the Effect even to non-related individuals with whom you were raised. Further, even in the cases where sexual activity occurs, these relationships have much lower rates of reporductive success and, when marriage occurs, much higher rates of divorce (Gray 1985:215).
If this is the case, then perhaps “conditioning” is what causes the incest…not what precludes it.
Reference:
Gray, J. Patrick
1985 Primate Sociobiology. HRAF Press, New Haven.
Yes, but people who already have genetic diseases can’t help it. Forbidding them to breed would be cruel because their genes were caused by forces outside their control. But when you breed with a sibling, you’re knowingly exposing potential children to problems. You’re creating a genetic disease where none existed.
Really? I’m sure that millions of gays as well as thousands of Native Americans and mental patients who were sterilized by the state would call you on that.
Note: the USSC has never ruled that marriage is other than a union between a man and a woman. Thus when the USSC ruled marriage is a basic civil right, they weren’t thinking about gays. “Gay marriage” is a logical impossibility of the definition of marriage depends on it being between people of the opposite sex.
Really? Is there a trustable cite to this as I was under the impression recent research was showing the genetic concerns to be overblown.
My problem with incest comes from the supposition I have that it is overwhelmingly abusive. As such the state can regulate (or ban it) even if it does infringe on the rights of the minority of cases where it is not abusive. I’ll confess up front to not having evidence to hand on that, though.
I think that was meant to be read as ‘thousands of mental patients who were sterilized’ and ‘millions of gays who aren’t allowed to marry’, but I can give you a cite on the sterilizations:
The website also provides additional citations. You can also google ‘eugenics’ and '‘sterilization’. In the Name of Eugenics by Daniel Kevles is a good, though somewhat dense, read.
No specific. But breeding close kin is a common practise in husbandry and pet breeding when you want to bring out certain specific traits. The same happens in human close kin breeding. The bad as well as the good is crystallised and emphasised.
A cite for what? That the effect will be there after 1 generation or that cousin marriage has shown to increase the number of inherited defects? The effects of inbreeding is not something which magically appears after X generation. The consequences are accumulative but felt from generation 1. Whether it’s anything to worry about in generation 1 is another question.
The number of children born with severe handicaps living in Copenhagen has increased by 100% within the last 10 years. This is given as a result of:
A) Higher age of mothers.
B) More children survive.
C) A larger immigrant community where cousin marriage is more common.
Here is “Ugeskrift for læger” (Weekly Journal for Doctors) which is the (modest) Danish version of the Lancet.
I don’t know if one can assume the effects of sibling marriage is twice that of cousin marriage, given that they share twice the number of genes. Probably not, but I think it’s safe to assume the effects are greater. Whether the concerns are overblown depends on what they were presentes as being.
I’ve just been reading the novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, about a kid whose grandparents had been brother and sister… on top of that, his parents were cousins… and this concentrated a recessive gene that produced an intersexed child. Raised as a girl, turned into a boy during adolescence. The novelist cited a scientific paper on 5-alpha-reductase gene defects, something something, as a basis for the novel’s plot. As genetic screwups go, this one was fairly benign. Just a change of gender. Could have been something much more unpleasant.