Incest and children.

[robvalue]

I think that if we stopped siblings having children on the grounds of risk of defects, we would also have to stop anyone with a similar or higher risk of passing on serious problems. Otherwise, we're just picking on this issue.

I haven't done much research, but I would guess that allowing this would not be much of a threat given the size of populations we now have. I'd love to see more parents taking responsibility and not having kids when they know they could easily pass on medical problems (one of the reasons I'm not having kids) but singling this issue out seems wrong. I think it's a dumb thing to do, but I don't think it should be illegal.

Having kids is a pretty unregulated business, you don't have to pass any aptitude or medical tests. You don't need anyone's permission. It's ironic to me that it's the biggest, most impactful decision anyone can make yet it's the one that least gets any sort of policing.

The alternative is to run tests on parents, for parenting skills and medical stuff, and disallow certain people. This is pretty totalitarian, so what we have is the lesser of two evils I think.