Cousin Marriages In Pakistan: Cousin marriages in Pakistan, has always been a very popular trend. In Pakistan, about 50 percent of married women are married to their first cousins and another 9 percent are married to their second cousins. If this figure is correct, then it means that Pakistan has one of the highest rates of cousin marriages in the world. Well, it is not only children, but their parents also usually have it. In this regard, Pakistan is at number one, not a good thing. And probably India is at number two, then Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iran, etc.
Medical science has told us that this spreads many genetic diseases further and affects a new generation and if the parents are also first cousins and then again first cousins get married then the dangers increase. This is a topic which people really do not talk about much and the diseases which are genetic, the most visible disease among them is Thalassemia is because in every city, in every street, there are blood banks and thalassemia centers and a lot of good and useful work is also being done but as cousin marriages are the most common in Pakistan, similarly, the most number of thalassemia patients in the whole world are also born in Pakistan and other related outcomes, that is, their life span, their complications, are also the most in Pakistan.
In thalassemia disease, there are about 6 genetic diseases, 6 types and all of them are related to cousin marriage, for example, one is heart defect, perhaps heart defect is also included in it, kidney diseases are also included in it and hearing and visual disabilities, are also included. About 80% of the patient’s diseases are related to cousin marriages. Sometimes there are some such relationships that the family members do not understand, for example, people understand that if the relationship is from the father’s side, then that is included in cousin marriage, if it is from the mother’s side, then it happens because we understand that the name comes from the father’s side, so the genes also come from the father’s side, it does not happen like this, it happens more in the tribal areas or in the rural areas, and even in the cities. Wherever there is poverty, there will be fewer options for girls to get married. So their exposure and the exposure of the family will be limited. We have seen that where women are more educated, just like in cities, the women there get more choices, they get more opportunities and their parents also allow them to marry outside the family. When cousin marriages and then marriages in the second generation happen, we have seen more impact and there may be some physical disease or not look, genetic diseases can affect any part of the body, so the brain is obviously so complicated things inside it, there are nerves, your chemicals, neurotransmitters, so about more than a thousand genes control only the brain, so there will be some in it which can cause seizure disease or epilepsy which is called epilepsy, if it comes very early in life So, it can happen that the school performance of the children is low, so the intellectual disability which is called low IQ includes autism spectrum disorder which is becoming very common now, where children are not able to socialize properly, its link is happening with this, so many such diseases are back to this gene pool thing which we have read in books in childhood. But we don’t have the awareness of it, when the gene pool becomes limited, for example, we have Syed families and till this generation, it was said that Syed girls will not go out, and they have to stay with the Syed family only, till date, even in educated families, this is 100% true, we have observed some change, minds are opening up, education, as you said, when girls get educated, then they say that why do we have to follow this, so it is a matter of gene pool and social attitude, right? And it is like this, when experts explain that the problem with the child has happened because of this, then the first question that comes from the parents is that cousin marriages happen a lot in their family, their parents were also cousins, their brothers and sisters also get married in a same way. If it happened in cousins then it did not happen in their children, so how can you say, then everything that happens is a matter of chance, for example, every disease has genes, every gene has two copies, one copy comes from the mother and one copy comes from the father, all of us sometimes carry a defect, if there is a defect in the gene of one copy, then there will be no issue, the person will just be a carrier of that disease.
But the effects of the disease will never come on him, what happens is when you reduce the gene pool in this way, cousins marry again and again, then the chances of union of two cousins, both of whom have one copy affected, increases, so those dormant genes can become active, then it is like this, it is called recessive, that if it happened on one copy then he is a carrier, but when both the copies are affected, then there is no active copy of that gene in the child, so the chance of it becomes about 25 percent, if Is both the parents are carriers then sometimes it happens that people say that if this was the case then it should have happened in every child, yes why in this and why not in this, then the system of nature is not like this, there is a 25% chance, if the parents are carriers then just by chance or if they have good luck then the children come out fine, but sometimes we there are such families where three children in a row are victims of such a serious genetic disorder that they either do not survive or they have a very difficult life, well one more thing that we have to look at is infertility, right because again and again in extended family and people who know it happens that one of the results of cousin marriage is that they cannot sometimes have children.
It is definitely a cultural issue, for example in Hindu culture cousin means sister or brother, so they go far away and meet many people and if they do not find any line then they get married, similarly Christians also do not believe in this thing, we were talking about this tribal people in rural areas, now Jews are the largest community in the world, they have this tradition, Parsis have this tradition and Muslims have this tradition, so this is a cultural issue, basically what it is that a person wants that the culture, the customs, the same things, if he has to give his daughter somewhere then such a tradition should be there.
Give it to people where they know how the daughter will be treated, how will her life be in the future, in tribal areas, one very important thing is that if the girl goes away, say if she goes to some village 200 km away, then perhaps the parents may never see the girl or the children of that girl, so all these things happen which people in the same village, in the same community want, so doctors have tried to create a lot of awareness on this, but there are examples of urban classes, pure urban classes, Parsi, Jew and the middle class Muslim families, like the example of Syeds, I know many Jat families, they will kill the girl, they will not give her out, in that the economic factor will also be obvious that the property may also not be lost, but both these things are mixed.
When turkey and Iran started their Thalassemia Control Program, firstly, for one whole year they only did awareness campaigns, only awareness campaigns, nobody went to tell anyone that cousin marriages are bad or this is that, they only talked about the disease because if the family has never seen that disease then that picture is not in their mind, they will say we are talking about something else, this does not happen here. It happens, right, so they warned that all these men that you see in the community, these children who are doing this in schools, did they even make laws about this? There are laws in some places, but do you make laws anywhere specifically? I think that would be a wrong method in Pakistan because in some of our provinces, the law is that it is mandatory to do a Thalassemia test before marriage. How many marriages would you have attended? Qazi had never asked me about it. So it is such that it becomes very difficult. It is easy to make a law, but it is very difficult to enforce it.
Gradually awareness is increasing, some families come when the relationship is about to be fixed, or They are thinking that either something like this has happened in the family before or they must have seen or read about such a program, so they come and ask and both the boy and the girl can undergo tests. It is called prenatal screening or prenatal genetic screening, so that you can see, before marriage itself, which things you are carriers of. If you come to know, then either the couple themselves can decide that they do not want to take the risk and look for a relationship somewhere else.