Marry your cousin, if you like

Defending incest

The Critic originally agreed to publish this pitch, but replied it was ‘a bit much’ for them when I went ‘nuclear’ in my defence of incest

Recently Iqbal Mohemed has come into much stick for defending first cousin marriage; a practice which Richard Holden is attempting to ban with his private member’s bill. In The Critic James Price has defended Holden’s position by citing the increased prevalence of birth defects among children of first cousins and the cost to the NHS of treating such children as reasons for prohibition. Both arguments don’t work. Accepting them would require an authoritarian control of marriage that a free society cannot countenance, and, the unacceptable banning of all sorts of activities such as gay sex and mountain climbing too. Now as before, liberals must defend incest with all the vigour they defended homosexuality in the recent past: Conservatives must not stand in the way of love again.

The central pillar of Price’s argument is allowing first cousin marriage increases the chances of birth defects to an unacceptable level, hence, a ban on first cousin marriage is warranted. His main evidence for this is ‘chromosomal, genetic and congenital anomalies account for 25 per cent more deaths of young children in Bradford [where cousin marriage is especially rife] than the national average’. Obviously, this argument is not sufficient to justify banning all first cousin marriages as many of them are not reproductive. So, Price’s real objection is to reproductive incest. According to one of the Bradford studies of Pakistani mothers Price himself cites, birth defects arise in just 6% of children of their cousin marriages compared to in 3% of children of their noncousin marriages. This compares to birth defects which arise in 4% of children to white women over 34.

Now I suppose Price could have a moral theory which is precise enough to draw a line to prohibit cousin reproduction but not the slightly better reproduction of the over 34s. I doubt it though: Price must either accept banning cousin and over 34 reproduction, or, banning neither. I hope enough of his libertarian instincts remain for him to choose the latter path. Certainly, Price must accept banning the disabled with inheritable diseases from reproducing should the birth defects their children face be of a similar degree of disadvantage as from cousin marriage. The second argument gestured to by Price is taxpayers should not be forced to pick up the tab via NHS treatment for the reproductive choices of married cousins. I’d agree with him, but on the libertarian basis no one should pay taxes at all. Returning to the real world, however, we find this argument would unacceptably warrant banning all sorts of things from rugby to motorcycle riding to gay sex because all hold a greater risk of needing medical attention compared to normal activities.

What can be said against my rebuttals? Well, Price could argue as immediate family reproductive incest is immoral, reproductive cousin marriage is immoral too for whatever moral reason is the former, meaning, an appeal can be made to draw the fine line between cousin and over 34 reproduction on its basis. The problem with this rebuttal is immediate family reproduction is not immoral. No doubt people will point to birth defect rates as high as 57% in children of full-blown incest as sufficient reason to ban it. Price would call children of such couplings ‘victims’ with ‘blighted lives’. Nonsense. To be a victim is to be harmed by another in some way. Children born of incestuous unions creating them and their birth defects together cannot be victims because they would not have existed at all were it not for incestuous unions, meaning, no harm can come to them. You cannot be harmed by the very act which creates you.

Two replies can be made to this. First, children might be entitled to a decent life which would stop the creation of severely disabled children via incest because they could not attain such a decent life. Even the children of immediate family reproduction appear to attain a decent life though, certainly, they don’t all have ‘excruciatingly painful and debilitating conditions’. Most of the disabled children of incest in this study were retarded and others had cataracts, heart murmurs and club feet. Not pleasant, but none of them, taken singly or together, warrant saying the average life of such people cannot be decent. Even if such people were born with the mental capabilities of pigs, granting pigs can lead decent lives, there should be no prohibition in bringing them into existence either. Returning to cousin reproduction, given 94% are born without any birth defects at all, and, the birth defects which do exist are minor, e.g., Down syndrome, the practice cannot be excluded on this moral ground (which I agree should prohibit a few cases of incest as an important qualification to the last paragraph).

Second, Price could argue only children with the fullest potential for an excellent life should be allowed into existence to serve the greater good of Britain, thus, disabled children from incest should not be allowed into existence. I know Price does not endorse this position, but it chimes with the ethical sentiment of his article. Note the collectivism in this phrase: ‘We must defend, and promote, and uphold our culture as something glorious, worthy of defence, and superior to all those tried around the world thus far.’ Should the moral basis of prohibiting cousin marriage be British culture is not adequately promoted by disabled people (a questionable notion) then we are very possibly on the road to the company of Madison Grant and his state sanctioned eugenics. What’s wrong with eugenics you ask?

The deep problem with eugenics founded on collectivism is it denies the moral fact each individual exists for his own sake; he does not exist to serve a higher purpose. This is what Holden and Price are implicitly denying in two respects. One, they’d rather children of first cousins didn’t exist to enjoy their lives, because, according to Holden, their very existence does not help advance ‘the national interest’. Two, both want to subordinate the individual freedom of people to love and have children with whom they want to the national interest too. And to what end? Preserving politeness, fair play and the Sunday roast? Fine things, I admit, but promoting them does not warrant breaking up any marriages because children of such unions might bring down the average height or total quantity of British culture.

Individuals should be free to marry their cousins should they wish. The minor risk of birth defects is no warrant to stop a loving union having offspring. This is true on the moral basis such birth defects do not make the children’s lives not worth living, and, the collectivist idea of only the best stock having a right to be brought into existence being false. Defending incest may be ‘icky’ but as F. A Hayek, himself cousin married, once wrote: ‘Freedom necessarily means that many things will be done which we do not like.’ Politicians should accept this wisdom and stay out of the love lives of the people, after all, it’s none of their damned business!

P.S. I should add I am obviously against unconsensual sex with people who are underage; Let me make that very clear.