GSA/CAI info

[cantori]

Note: A 41-year-old woman has a 10% higher-than-average chance of birth defects, because of her age.
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http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?n...= 72001&rfi=6
[...]Robin Bennett, manager of the Genetic Medicine Clinic at the University of Washington Medical Center, with Arno Motulsky, professor emeritus of medicine and genome sciences at the University of Washington, presented a paper on consanguinity in the 2002 April issue of the Journal of Genetic Counseling.
In a summary of the paper, the authors conclude that the genetic risks to offspring of consanguineous relationships have been overstated.
Bennett, in a telephone interview with The Register Herald, said first cousins are third-degree relatives, uncle/niece are second-degree, and sibling/sibling or parent/child are first-degree.
"Uncle/niece risk is somewhat higher than first-cousin risk, which is between 1.7% to 2.8% above the background risk," said Bennett.
"Risk in first-degree relations is 7% to 31% - based on limited studies," she said.
Following Bennett's reasoning, the genetic risk of morbidity (the relative incidence of disease) in uncle/niece relationships is somewhere between 2.8% and 7% above the risk of unrelated couples.
"These (incest) laws are old and draconian," contends Alicia Craffey, a genetic counselor at the University of Connecticut in Farmington.
"The (genetic) risk is usually a little bit higher, but not exponentially," said Craffey [...]
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http://writ.news.findlaw.com/colb/20070725.html

Should Pro-Choice and Pro-Life Approaches to Reproductive Rights Carry an "Incest Exception"?

By Sherry F. Colb
Special to FindLaw.com
Wednesday, July 25, 2007

[...]
The Categorical Imperative

Immanuel Kant introduced the moral notion that one should behave in a manner that, if adopted as an axiom by the entire population, would not be destructive. Kant referred to the requirement of generalizing one's proposed course of action in this way as the "categorical imperative." As a Kantian, if I feel like stealing an iPod from Circuit City, I cannot rationalize it by noting the slight impact that such a theft would have. If everyone behaved as I did, the harmful impact would be grave and unjustifiable - and that is enough to make my iPod theft immoral.

If one takes a Kantian approach to incest, then it might seem that even though a particular incestuous coupling may have little impact on the population, the generalization of this practice could bring catastrophe to our species. Therefore, one might say, it is appropriate to punish incest criminally and thereby penalize those people who act in a manner that could not, without courting disaster, be generalized to everyone else.

The problem with this argument, however, even if one is a strict Kantian, is that the "harm" of incest - its tendency to increase the odds of birth defects - is not unique to incest and is also not universal in cases of incest. A ban on incest is, accordingly, both under- and over-inclusive.

Under- and Over-Inclusiveness

In a world in which genetic testing is unavailable, avoiding incest may be among the only steps one can take (short of infanticide) to guard against congenital birth defects. In our world, however, people can (and often do) undergo genetic testing before they decide to have a child together. People might undergo a test for a particular gene before marrying, before trying to achieve conception, or during an extant pregnancy.

As a result of this possibility, a true effort to minimize birth defects - even by force of the criminal law - would require genetic testing and would prohibit the union of individuals who share a gene for a particular disease or disorder, whether or not the man and woman were related. In this sense, then, the current ban is under-inclusive. Within some communities of Eastern European Jews, for example, where the incidence of the gene for Tay Sachs disease is heightened, people are strongly encouraged to be tested and to plan their marriages accordingly.

A broader version of such an approach could become the law, if we wanted to prioritize the prevention of genetic birth defects. Our reaction to such efforts, however, is to view them with suspicion and even outrage, because they are literally "eugenic" policies, reminiscent of what the Nazis (not to mention the U.S., in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries) did. Though it would be bad for the species to have enormous numbers of people born with congenital birth defects, we rely on voluntary efforts (including optional genetic counseling for couples) and choose not to impose mandatory eugenics on the population. Given the relative infrequency of incestuous couplings, it would seem arbitrary to single them out for coercive regulation in the campaign against genetic birth defects.

Similarly, it would seem arbitrary for one who considers himself generally "pro-life" to make an exception, on this basis, only for pregnancies that are the result of incest. Indeed, many pro-lifers emphatically oppose permitting abortion even when amniocentesis reveals the near-certainty of genetic illness as bad as or worse than the illnesses that incest may risk.

Conversely, there are many incestuous couplings that will not lead to birth defects, even though the odds increase. Indeed, an incestuous couple might - in any given case - have genes that are, relative to a particular non-related couple, unlikely to lead to a birth defect. Furthermore, many couples who do not intend to have (or cannot have) children will not create a birth-defect problem in the population. In this sense, a ban on incest is over-inclusive. Sexual relationships are, despite religious efforts to the contrary, not synonymous with procreation, and a criminal law premised on the view that they are is necessarily going to be quite imprecise.

Encouraging Incest? No

Despite my foregoing defense of a legal right to incest, I do not believe that incest is a wonderful thing that ought to be encouraged. If it turned out that I was wrong and that millions of sibling couples were patiently waiting for legalization to attempt to populate the earth, I would find the prospect profoundly disturbing. But this is true, as well, of other choices that we allow individuals to make in a free country: For example, I would be disturbed to learn that everyone in the population had turned away from reproduction and would practice contraception for the rest of their lives. Such a course of events would, in fact, lead to human extinction far more quickly than even universal incest. Yet I suspect that neither of these nightmare scenarios is remotely likely to come to pass.

Survival of the species depends on a complicated combination of genetic and environmental factors, some of which may be counterintuitive and unknown to us. Rather than embrace a discriminatory brand of mandatory eugenics, we should focus our efforts on facilitating and informing voluntary choices.

Like the species as a whole, every individual within it has an inherent interest in protecting the health and survival of her family and can - and generally should - be relied on to act accordingly, without legal intervention.

Sherry F. Colb is Professor and Frederick B. Lacey Scholar at Rutgers Law School in Newark.

[nearly_died]

I'm not sure if it happened overnight that lifting ban on first degree unions, even if people completely forget the taboo. That they will instantly turn their attention to their close relatives.

Even if you were born in such society, I don't think that you could fall in love with a sibling you grew up with. There's a thing called 'Westermark' effect that keeps you from falling in love with people you grow up with.

Whether there is a law or not with these unions, I don't think our species will be seriously compromised. Of course I could be wrong, very wrong..

I prefer to stick by the Biblical laws - up to first cousins only, nothing closer.