The Student Room Group

Should we allow incestuous couples to marry and adopt?

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Of course we should. Consensual incest is very common. You know people who have been involved, whether you know it or not, and you know healthy, attractive, intelligent people whose biological parents were close relatives. That's because most children born to close relatives are healthy.

There is no rational reason for keeping laws or taboos against consensual
incest that is consistently applied to other relationships. Personal disgust or religion is only a reason why one person would not want to personally engage in what I call consanguinamory, not why someone else shouldn't do it. An adult should be free to share love, sex, residence, and marriage with ANY consenting adults. Youthful experimentation between close relatives close in age is not uncommon, and there are more people than you'd think out there who are in lifelong healthy, happy relationships with a close relative. It isn't for everyone, but we're not all going to want to have each others' love lives, now are we? If someone thinks YOUR love life is disgusting, should you be thrown in prison?

Some people try to justify their prejudice against consanguineous sex and
marriage by being part-time eugenicists and saying that such relationships inevitably lead to “mutant” or “deformed” babies. This argument can be refuted on several fronts. 1. Some consanguineous relationships involve only people of the same gender. 2. Not all mixed-gender relationships birth biological children. 3. Most births to consanguineous parents do not produce children with significant birth defects or other genetic problems; while births to other parents do sometimes have birth defects. 4. We don’t prevent other people from marrying or deny them their reproductive rights based on increased odds of passing along a genetic problem or inherited disease. It is true that in general, children born to consanguineous parents have an increased chance of these problems than those born to nonconsanguineous parents, but the odds are still minimal. Unless someone is willing to deny reproductive rights and medical privacy to others and force everyone to take genetic tests and bar carriers and the congenitally disabled and women over 35 from having children, then equal protection principles prevent this from being a justification to bar this freedom of association and freedom to marry.

Some say "Your sibling should not be your lover." That is not a reason. It begs the question. Many people have many relationships that have more than one aspect. Some women say their sister is their best friend. Why can’t their sister be a wife, too?

Some say “There is a power differential.” This applies least of all to siblings or cousins who are close in age, but even where the power differential exists, it is not a justification for denying this freedom to sex or to marry. There is a power differential in just about any relationship, sometimes an enormous power differential. To question if consent is truly possible in these cases is insulting and demeaning.

Some say “There are so many people outside of your family." There are plenty of people within one’s own race, too, but that is no reason to ban interracial marriage. So, this isn't a good reason either. Let consenting adults love each other the way they want!
Original post by Crossedit
I just see things how they really are. There's little point in debating things within the internal logic of ideologies that rest on flawed paradigms, so parody serves as a better debate.


someones been using a thesaurus well done you.
Realistically we justify the law because of the higher risk of genetic diseases.

But we don't ban people with other risk factors from having children. Obviously the real reason is because society is like 'eugh mate that's grim!'
sure, why not? how is this an issue?
You need to keep it as it will explore more of what's really happening in the uk and give us more information. In my situation I've exp my own in Bangladesh and in uk.and actually it was very educational and made all more aware of what's about

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