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| Britain |
| The babies paying the price of cultural tradition: It's estimated that more than half of Pakistani-heritage couples in Britain are in cousin marriages. Now community leaders are confronting the troubling medical risks |
| 2021-06-03 |
| [Daily Mail, where America gets its news] The Born In Bradford Study found that half the city’s babies born each year are to Pakistani-heritage mothers. Like Tahira, two-thirds of these women are married either to first or second cousins, a fact which heightens the risk of their offspring dying or having disabilities. This multicultural part of Yorkshire is not the only place where baby deaths or illnesses are being blamed on close-kin marriage. Britain’s second city Birmingham recently announced an emergency taskforce to investigate high levels of infant mortality after health and social care officials revealed deaths of newborns there are twice the national average. While poverty and deprivation play a role in the crisis, a fifth of all infant deaths are a result of genetic problems caused when cousins marry and have children, says a report from Birmingham City Council. Babies of Pakistani and South Asian heritage are disproportionately affected, with one in 188 stillborn compared to one in every 295 white babies. The disturbing disclosures so alarmed the former Chief Crown Prosecutor for North-West England, Nazir Afzal, that he said there is a case for barring marriage between close relations to end the suffering of ‘profoundly affected children and parents’. The prominent campaigner for women and children’s rights, whose own parents arrived in Britain from Pakistan, explained to the Mail: ‘The first duty of a Government is to protect its citizens from harm. There is a strong argument, down the road, for it to consider whether first-cousin unions should be outlawed in the same way as incest is. We are tired of burying our babies.’ Mr Afzal, who successfully prosecuted the Asian sex abuse gang in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, added it was ‘ridiculous’ that cultural sensitivity stopped people talking about a problem that has been in ‘plain sight’ for years ‘bringing misery to dozens of families’. The problem is that babies born in cousin marriages can suffer what are called ‘recessive’ genetic disorders, associated with severe disability and early death. These disorders are caused by variant genes. If you inherit one recessive variant gene you will not fall ill or die. If, however, a child inherits the same variant gene from each of its related parents, it is at higher risk of a health problem. The likelihood of a couple both having the same variant gene is 100 to one in the general population. In cousin marriages, that can rise to one in eight because people who are related to each other are more likely to carry the same faults in their DNA. And the problem only intensifies as cousin marriages continue generation after generation. Yet despite the health dangers, it is estimated that 55 per cent of Pakistani-heritage couples — like Tahira and her husband in Bradford — are in cousin marriages. And while British Pakistani couples are responsible for 3 per cent of births overall in the UK, they account for a third — 33 per cent — of children with genetic birth defects. The unions — called, in medical parlance, consanguineous, meaning a marriage between close relatives — are popular because they are believed to strengthen the family unit and keep wealth intact. Official government figures for England, uncovered by the Mail in 2018, revealed cousin marriages are a key factor in an average of two child deaths every week. Distressingly, many surviving children of the couples involved have physical or mental problems. These include blindness, deafness, blood ailments such as thalassemia — which can make sufferers anaemic — heart or kidney failure, lung or liver ailments, and myriad complex neurological or brain disorders. Doctors working with the Born In Bradford study have in the past identified 140 different gene disorders among local children, compared with 20 to 30 you would expect to find among the general population. |
| Posted by:Skidmark |
| #15 ^ Yes. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2021-06-03 15:22 |
| #14 Western compulsions to impose humanity on the sub-human. Preventing muslim self-erasure by vaccinating them, educating them, feeling sorry for them and whining about ohh my gawd the babies... sob! For fcuk's sake, let Darwin win and see that life is good. |
| Posted by: Dron66046 2021-06-03 14:38 |
| #13 #10 Pakistan: Infant mortality rate from 2009 to 2019 |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2021-06-03 14:14 |
| #12 What does Islam say about women marrying their brothers? |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2021-06-03 14:10 |
| #11 Sue Reid writes about the subject periodically for the Daily Mail. Here is one of her articles, from 2018. The other issue, besides the human tragedy of it all, is that the British taxpayer is paying for the increasingly expensive health care for these children, siphoning off funds and medical staff that otherwise would be used for the rest of the population. This is just another form of jizya as far as the devout are concerned, instead of the host nation insisting that either close cousin marriages are forbidden altogether due to to the risk, or only allowing those whom genetic testing shows to be low risk for reinforcing dangerous recessives. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2021-06-03 14:01 |
| #10 #4 More precisely "are bad" --> "only bad if you mind high infant mortality/need for culling".. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2021-06-03 13:20 |
| #9 I second comment #4 |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2021-06-03 13:15 |
| #8 #4 Any agricultural society - which involves animal husbandry - has enough grasp of genetics to know that first cousin matings are bad. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2021-06-03 13:14 |
| #7 In a clan-based society that knows squat about molecular genetics, it makes sense to marry your cousin. It keeps wealth in the family and does not drag you in to other people's alliances and feuds. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2021-06-03 12:44 |
| #6 So the Pakistanis have cousin marriages as an excuse. What's the western elites' excuses for their own lapses? |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2021-06-03 12:33 |
| #5 /\ London is coming along very well with the "stomping itself out" process. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2021-06-03 10:14 |
| #4 I don't see why we don't let this admirable race stomp itself out. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2021-06-03 09:56 |
| #3 How dare they imitate the royal families! |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2021-06-03 09:45 |
| #2 Not previously frowned upon by Abionite titled oligarchs. What has changed ? |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2021-06-03 08:52 |
| #1 Women are being pressured to have contraceptive implants because NHS staff don't trust them to take the pill, report claims |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2021-06-03 08:37 |