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A comment on After discovering he has at least 17 kids, man sues fertility clinic. Parent comment

Re:After discovering he has at least 17 kids, man sues ferti... by reitanqild on Thursday October 03, 2019 @11:43AM (#21148298)
What I've learned is that there's significant risk even for cousins who have children together, so even more for half siblings.
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Re:After discovering he has at least 17 kids, man sues ferti... by pgeorgi on Thursday October 03, 2019 @11:59AM (#21148489)
... if the cousins' parents and grandparents are similarly closely related to each other, yes. Otherwise probably not.
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Re:After discovering he has at least 17 kids, man sues ferti... by jacobolus on Thursday October 03, 2019 @12:18PM (#21148692)
My understanding is that 1 generation of first-cousin marriage is very low risk.

The problem comes when you have many generations of family marriages in a row.

The Catholic church tried to make cousin marriages taboo as a way to break up clans and solidify church power.

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Re:After discovering he has at least 17 kids, man sues ferti... by blueblimp on Friday October 04, 2019 @02:38AM (#21155359)
You're right. It's weird that people are rushing in here to defend inbreeding.

What people might not realize is even when there's not a specific disease caused by the inbreeding, there is still an overall negative effect on health, "inbreeding depression".

Here is a paper that estimates the effect in humans: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26131930.

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