Mother and son in New Mexico face jail time for incestuous relationship

[CapnAwesome]

The risk of genetic defects multiplies massively when both partners have similar genetic profiles. Guess when that happens? Yes, when both sexual partners are closely related, even more so when the relation is in the first degree (parent and child or brother and sister). The fact of the matter is that incest does make it far more likely that children of such a union will have genetic defects that will either make their lives harder or kill them than would normally be the case for children of unrelated persons (unrelated to a reasonable degree, you're not going to get two people who don't share a common ancestor somewhere).

Can you support this with hard data in the form of numbers? If you're going to say "far more likely", I'd like to see percentages, myself.

I was scanning some studies and for it to be a real problem you need a sizable population to be engaged in inbreeding, not just individuals. At which point it does become a huge problem. Look at the European nobility and hemophilia and a number of other disorders they had. It could be a justification of that law, it's not hard to imagine a religious community that maintains inbreeding as a practice, considering all the small Christian (and other) cults that have had strange sexual practices in the US. A group of 100 starts inbreeding legally on a religious basis, and you are going to have children with defects. Without an inbreeding law, such communities would be legal. I don't think the legality of inbreeding real has much of an effect on people who want to fuck their siblings, parents or children on an individual level anyway.