The Genetic Toll: Cousin Marriage Pervades Pakistan, Leading to Alarming Rates of Child Birth Defects

Cousin Marriage in Islam: Islam, you already know, is the world's second-largest faith, with billions of followers. When it emerged around the seventh century, it offered rules that many people then considered groundbreaking. Over the centuries, however, like every tradition, it has also inherited problematic practices. One of those that has persisted, generation after generation, is the tendency for boys to wed their maternal or paternal cousins.In this country, marrying cousins is expected. Today we’ll speak of an Islamic nation where every young man is quietly taught that his first choice for a bride should be a cousin. More than half the weddings that take place here are intra-family unions. Advocates list an array of supposed advantages—economic, social, and emotional—but the unspoken price is an alarming rise in inherited diseases that the hospitals here can no longer ignore.Marriage, at least in its customary form, is still largely an affair of the clan.This is especially true in Pakistan, a nation whose borders we share. Though cousin marriage has drifted away from the modernising compass of many Islamic lands, the practice has not dimmed here. Across the region, formal knots once bound only cousins and close kin, and though medicine and political borders have since widened the circle, Pakistan has remained islanded. The consequences, as lamented at dinner tables and among pediatrics, are scarcely hidden and hardly trifling. Numbers report the familiar refrain. The Friday Times surveyed village and quarter alike, and found that in the countryside 65 to 70 percent of unions are still intra-familial. The towns are not much better: City-born cousins pair at a still high 55 to 60 percent. The same report notes, to an uneasy hush, that 46 percent marry the child of a mother’s or father’s sister or brother. Medical science has long warned that such tight unions are more than familial occasions. In such pairings, the hereditary bad copy that every family harbours gains a twin carrier, and the risk that the next child will inherit the same defect is, at minimum, doubled.When neither partner is a close blood relative, the probability of passing on harmful genetic traits is cut by half for their children.