Keeping Marriage in the Family

The Oprah website has an article about cousin marriage:

Most people balk at the idea of first cousins marrying each other, but the practice isn't as forbidden or as risky as you may think.

In other parts of the world, marrying your first cousin is socially acceptable; in the United States, it's a bit more taboo. But in 21 states, it is legal for first cousins to get married, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures' website (NCSL). Professor Alan Bittles of Murdoch University and Edith Cowan University in Australia has studied cousin marriages for the past 30 years. He says it's likely 10.4 percent of people worldwide are married to a close relative or are the children of such a marriage. "This equates to over 700 million people," Bittles says.

The assumption that children of first cousins are likely to suffer from health problems has been around for centuries, Bittles says. "Although there has been a tradition of cousin marriage among royalty, major land-owning families and some business dynasties, the highest rates of consanguinity [cousin marriage] are actually among the rural poor whose general health status often is marginal," he says. "Under these circumstances, unless appropriate allowance is made for adverse family socioeconomics, just about all health problems have simply been blamed on consanguinity, even though there usually is no specific evidence of a causal relationship between consanguinity and the disorder in question."