By David Rosenberg /The Media Line
Should first cousins be allowed, or even encouraged, to marry?
A traditional dance being performed during a wedding ceremony in Doha. At a recent public debate on intermarriage in Doha, discussion focused on the tensions between cultural practices and the science cautioning against consanguineous marriage
That was the subject of an unusually contentious debate that pitted geneticists, social commentators and an audience in Doha that touched on birth defects, cultural preferences and individual rights.
Both laws and attitudes vary greatly around the world, but in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) it is universally legal and more widely practiced than anywhere else. A survey conducted by one of the debaters, Alan Bittles, an adjunct professor at the Centre for Comparative Genomics at Australia‘s Murdoch University, estimated that between 20% and 50%-plus of the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) -region marriages are consanguineous. In the West, they account for less than 1% although many countries permit them.
At the Doha Debates, an eight-times-a-year forum for experts to tackle controversial issues and answer questions from an audience, Bittles strongly defended the practice.
“Humans have been marrying first cousins and even closer for literally thousands of years. We started with 700 to 10,000 people living in Africa; we now number 5.8bn. If cousin marriage/cousin mating had been all that problematic, we wouldn’t be here today,” he told the audience.
In the West, especially in the US where most states ban tie-ups between first cousins, consanguineous marriages are looked on with suspicion and widely assumed to greatly increase the odds of producing children with genetic defects. In fact, geneticists say the risks are not that great.
A 2002 review by the US National Society of Genetic Counsellors of six major studies conducted over a 35-year-period and involving thousands of births, found that first cousins are somewhat more likely than unrelated parents to have a child with a serious birth defect. But the danger is not large enough to discourage cousins from having children, the researchers concluded.
Although the increased risk of birth defects in a child born of two cousins is almost double, it is still very low, the study found. For instance, the chance that a child will be born with a major birth defect, such as spina bifida, is between 3% and 4%; for first cousin parents the chance adds another 1.7 to 2.8 percentage points to that.
The problem, however, is magnified if cousin marriage extends across generations because it means that two first cousins marrying are, in fact, genetically closer to each other than ordinary first cousins, increasing the odds of passing along genetically induced diseases.
The controversy over cousin marriage wasn’t confined to genetics. Samar Fatany, a Saudi journalist and broadcaster, said Gulf Arabs choose spouses from their extended families because the practice is in line with the close family life of the region.
“Families kind of feel comfortable if their daughters marry within the family, rather than marry a stranger with no background. They’re not sure whether she’s going to be happy, safe and what not,” she told the audience. “Some families feel kind of offended if, like, a graduate in the family just came home and there are so many pretty girls in the family and he decides to marry outside the family.”
The only thing that would discourage such a marriage, she said, is if there is a chronic hereditary disease within the family. She backed the idea of getting genetic counselling.
Sarfraz Manzoor, a British commentator and broadcaster specialising in social and cultural issues, said he opposed cousin marriages exactly because they encourage such close family ties and encourage the insularity and alienation that he said characterises, for instance, Britain’s Pakistani immigrant community.
“You’ve got communities who, if they’re marrying within each other, they’re not facing the wider society and therefore they’re having a danger of being more retrenched and basically having effective segregation,” Manzoor said.
He dismissed Fatany’s claims that cousin marriages were typically based on love and mutual attraction. “These marriages are arranged by families who want to keep wealth and property in the family or it’s a way of getting people into Britain,” he said, citing his own personal history of being pressured by his family at age 17 to marry a cousin from Pakistan.
One thing the debaters did agree is that governments should not ban cousin marriage. They did, however, squabble over how big a role doctors and geneticists should play in discouraging cousin marriage.
“Once you start a process of ‘discouragement,’ where does it end?” asked Bittles. “And especially in a society or in societies where there isn’t the requisite scientific personnel or medical personnel or genetic counsellors to actually provide information in a dispassionate and unbiased manner, then you are going to have difficulties.”
Moderator Tim Sebastian asked the audience how many were in cousin marriages or contemplated one and elicited only a small response. Presented with a resolution -- “This House believes that marriage between close family members should be discouraged” -- the audience voted in support by a large margin of 81% to 19%.