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

[CapnAwesome]

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. 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.

No doubt -- laws aren't preventative, they're punitive. And I think you and I would agree that even if such a law did prevent these things, it still isn't the government's place to regulate this sort of thing; as others have pointed out, the gov't doesn't regulate other unions likely to produce birth defects.

But -- when I see the term "far more likely", I like to calibrate that judgement for myself. I know the logo behind the argument, but I want to see data that supports it.

So I poked around the internet for a bit and found a lone czech study on incest that shows that 1st degree incest (siblings or parent/child) results in almost 50% of children having a mental or physical deformity.

A group of genetic counselors reviewed the research on the biological consequences of sex between relatives (consanguineous relationships) (here). They found a surprisingly small increase (about 4 percent) in birth defects among the children of married cousins. Incest between first degree relatives, however, was a different story. The researchers examined four studies (including the Czech research) on the effects of first degree incest on the health of the offspring. Forty percent of the children were born with either autosomal recessive disorders, congenital physical malformations, or severe intellectual deficits. And another 14 percent of them had mild mental disabilities. In short, the odds that a newborn child who is the product of brother-sister or father-daughter incest will suffer an early death, a severe birth defect or some mental deficiently approaches 50 percent.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ani...lem-incest


Some of that is probably the result of generational incest though. So it's hard to say exactly what a lone case of incest like this one will do to a child. However I think you could still justify the law because of what groups or families of people could do, rather then individuals. A church group, say something like the Westboro baptist church or fundamentalist Mormons, could legally have incestuous relationships that fuck up generations of children if incest laws were repealed.  I'm not really sure personally how I feel about the law, other then incest is gross to the max. However I do see more to the law then just enforcing our inherent gross out factor on consenting adults.