Cousin marriage
[54] Pragmatic reasons for the husband, such as warmer relations with his father-in-law, and those for parents of both spouses, like reduced bride price and access to the labor of the daughter's children, also contribute.
But during the 11th and 12th centuries, dispensations were granted with increasing frequency due to the thousands of persons encompassed in the prohibition at seven degrees and the hardships this posed for finding potential spouses.
[81] Eventually, the nobility became too interrelated to marry easily as the local pool of unrelated prospective spouses became smaller; increasingly, large payments to the church were required for exemptions ("dispensations"), or retrospective legitimizations of children.
The writings of Scottish deputy commissioner for lunacy Arthur Mitchell claiming that cousin marriage had injurious effects on offspring were largely contradicted by researchers such as Alan Huth and George Darwin.
[98] They further point out that since property belonging to the nobility was typically fragmented,[clarification needed] keeping current assets in the family offered no advantage, compared with acquiring it by intermarriage.
Jack Goody claimed that early Christian marriage rules forced a marked change from earlier norms to deny heirs to the wealthy and thus to increase the chance that those with wealth would will their property to the Church.
[103] Anthropologist Martin Ottenheimer argues that marriage prohibitions were introduced to maintain the social order, uphold religious morality, and safeguard the creation of fit offspring.
Perhaps most important was the report of physician Samuel Merrifield Bemiss for the American Medical Association, which concluded cousin inbreeding does lead to the "physical and mental deprivation of the offspring".
[10] Since that time Kentucky (1943) and Texas have banned first-cousin marriage, and since 1985 Maine has mandated genetic counseling for marrying cousins to minimize the risk of any serious health defects for their children.
[127] Limited existing data indicate some remaining cousin marriage of types besides father's brother's daughter in many villages, with percentages usually in the lower single digits.
[citation needed] In the 1980s researchers found that children of closely related Pakistani parents had an autosomal recessive condition rate of 4% compared with 0.1% for the European group.
Dr. Ahmad Teebi, a professor of paediatrics at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, said that the rate of cousin marriages had decreased in Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, and Mauritania, and in the Palestinian population in Israel, but has increased in the United Arab Emirates.
For Muslims, governed by uncodified personal law, it is acceptable and legal to marry a first cousin, but for Hindus, it may be illegal under the 1955 Hindu Marriage Act, though the specific situation is more complex.
[171] Texas passed a ban on first-cousin marriage the same year as Amrhein and Andrews married, evidently in reaction to the presence of the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS).
"[10]In a different view, William Saletan of Slate magazine accuses the authors of this study of suffering from the "congenital liberal conceit that science solves all moral questions".
Second, improvements in public health have led to decreased death rates and increased family sizes, making it easier to find a relative to marry if that is the preferred choice.
[184] Cousin marriage is important in several anthropological theories by prominent authors such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sir Edward Tylor, and Lewis Henry Morgan.
[189] In contrast to Lévi-Strauss who viewed the exchange of women under matrilateral cross-cousin marriage as fundamentally egalitarian, anthropologist Edmund Leach held that such systems by nature created groups of junior and senior status and were part of the political structure of society.
Under Leach's model, in systems where this form of marriage segregates descent groups into wife-givers and wife-takers, the social status of the two categories also cannot be determined by a priori arguments.
[191] Per Murphy and Kasdan, the Arab system of parallel cousin marriage works against the creation of homogenous "bounded" and "corporate" kin groups and instead creates arrangements where every person is related by blood to a wide variety of people, with the degree of relationship falling off gradually as opposed to suddenly.
[195] This follows a 2003 Steve Sailer essay published for The American Conservative, where he claimed that high rates of cousin marriage play an important role in discouraging political democracy.
[3] Taking a contrary view, Protestants writing after the Reformation tended to see the prohibitions and the dispensations needed to circumvent them as part of an undesirable church scheme to accrue wealth, or "lucre".
[228] Irrespective of marriage preferences, alleles that are rare in large populations can randomly increase to high frequency in small groups within a few generations due to the founder effect and accelerated genetic drift in a breeding pool of restricted size.
[234][235][236] Long-term studies conducted on the Dalmatian islands in the Adriatic Sea have indicated a positive association between inbreeding and a very wide range of common adulthood disorders, including hypertension, coronary heart disease, stroke, cancer, uni/bipolar depression, asthma, gout, peptic ulcer, and osteoporosis.
[237] The Latin American Collaborative Study of Congenital Malformation found an association between parental consanguinity and hydrocephalus, postaxial polydactyly, and bilateral oral and facial clefts.
[237] Studies into the influence of inbreeding on anthropometric measurements at birth and in childhood have failed to reveal any major and consistent pattern, and only marginal declines were shown in the mean scores attained by consanguineous progeny in tests of intellectual capacity.
In the latter case, it would appear that inbreeding mainly leads to greater variance in IQ levels, due in part to the expression of detrimental recessive genes in a small proportion of those tested.
Genetic counseling in developing countries has been hampered, however, by lack of trained staff, and couples may refuse prenatal diagnosis and selective abortion despite the endorsement of religious authorities.
[20] There is also the possibility of more births as a compensation for increased child mortality, either via a conscious decision by parents to achieve a set family size or the cessation of lactational amenorrhea following the death of an infant.
Studies consistently show a lower rate of primary infertility in cousin marriages, usually interpreted as being due to greater immunological compatibility between spouses.
2 See sections on India and Hinduism .
1 Some US states recognize marriages performed elsewhere, especially when the spouses were not residents of the state when married. [ clarification needed ]
