Blue states?
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] Studies show that children born of two blood-related parents have double the risk of congenital problems such as heart and lung defects, cleft palettes, and extra fingers.
Children of inbreeding are also twice as likely to be treated for an illness requiring antipsychotic medicines, like schizophrenia.
Yet despite the known risks of inbreeding in humans, 19 US states and the District of Columbia still allow marriages between first cousins. They mostly fall on the coasts and in the southern states.
First cousin marriage is permitted in the following states: Alabama, Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, and Virginia,
Some states allow first-cousin marriages with some exceptions.
For instance, it is permitted in Arizona if both people are 65 or older, or one is unable to reproduce. In Maine, it is permitted if the couple obtains a physician's certificate of genetic counseling.
The practice of marrying close relatives and reproducing is relatively common in parts of North Africa, the Middle East, and West Asia, with roughly 20 to 50 percent of marriages being consanguineous, meaning, between two blood relatives.
Professor Alan Bittles, a genetics expert from Australia, posits that over 10 percent of the world population are either married to a biological relative or are the product of inbreeding, a total which he says is almost certainly an undercount.
Most of the scientific evidence pointing to the reproductive effects of inbred marriages have stemmed from relationships between cousins as they account for almost one-third of all marriages.
When two first cousins, relatives who share a set of grandparents, get married, their baby’s risk of congenital problems such as heart and lung defects, cleft palettes, and extra fingers doubles, according to a study that looked at 11,300 babies born to a range of ethnic groups in Bradford, West Yorkshire in the UK, which has higher levels of blood marriage in the city’s Pakistani community.
And the childhood death rate among children of first-cousin marriages was roughly 5 percent higher than the rate in nonrelated marriages.
Meanwhile, a separate study by Lynn B. Jorde of the University of Utah from the 1980s found that mortality before age 16 among descendants of first cousins was 9 percent higher than among offspring of unrelated parents.
An Egyptian study in 2013 reported that ‘stillbirths, child deaths and recurrent abortions were significantly increased among consanguineous parents’ compared with non-related parents.
The study looked at more than 8,100 patients in a Cairo children’s hospital. Over 93 percent of the patients who were deaf had parents who were related to one another. More than 76 percent of patients with mental retardation had related parents and 92 percent had limb abnormalities.
The children of two cousins are likely to have lower IQs and higher rates of mental retardation. A 2014 study published in PLOS One that examined the IQs of 408 children found that those who were the product of inbreeding were short between 10 and 25 IQ points compared to those whose parents were not related.
The children of first-cousin marriages are also more likely to experience mental health disturbances. A 2018 report in JAMA Psychiatry considered the rates of depression and anxiety in children of cousins who married in Northern Ireland.
The researchers from Belfast reported that children of first-cousin parents were three times as likely to be prescribed antidepressant or anxiolytic medications. And they were more than twice as likely to be taking antipsychotic medications to treat conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder compared with children of non-related parents.
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