A German brother-and-sister couple are fighting to have their country’s incest laws overturned. Will Saletan’s summary:
Details: 1) They were raised separately. 2) They met when he was 23 and she was 15; they began living together a year later. 3) They have four kids. One has epilepsy; two have “special needs”; three have been put in foster care. 4) The brother has served a two-year sentence for incest. 5) He recently got a vasectomy. Couple’s arguments: 1) The law is outdated. 2) It violates our civil rights. 3) We’re not hurting anyone, so just leave us alone. 4) The law lets couples with genetic risks (due to advanced age) or hereditary diseases have kids, so why not us? 5) If we live together and don’t have more kids, how can the government prove we’re having sex without becoming dangerously invasive?
My own tendency is to think that incest laws of a certain sort are justifiable, but that they should be fundamentally about early history rather than genetic relatedness—so a brother and sister raised separately wouldn’t be covered, but an adoptive sibling or parent, say, would. The only reason to focus on genetics is the risk of birth defects, and that’s a pretty thin reed to hang a prohibition on, given that we don’t generally police people’s reproduction this way. Relationships flowing from a long period in which people were raised in conditions of both intimacy and power imbalance (as between a parent or uncle and child, or older and younger sibling) strike me as likely to have an ineradicable coercive component, whether or not the parties are genetically related. The trouble, of course, is that genetic relatedness is a lot easier to define legally than things like “intimacy” and “power imbalance.”
3 responses so far ↓
1 Glen Whitman // Mar 9, 2007 at 5:09 pm
Do you think that a coercive power imbalance still exists after the child has become an adult? Do you think there’s a power imbalance between adult siblings?
2 Brian Forsgren // Mar 12, 2007 at 12:01 am
Julian, We don’t generally police people’s reproduction on whether there exists a power imbalance either…. which would be more reasonable to prohibit?:
John and Martha were raised together as Martha’s mother was a servant in John’s family…. John and Martha as adults decide they are in love and wish to get married/procreate…….
It is discovered beyond all doubt that when Samoans and Icelanders procreate, there is a 99.99% chance of the child having severe mental and physical disabilities. John is Samoan and has fallen in love with Bjork…. they want to have children….
3 Steve // Mar 13, 2007 at 4:00 am
This is, to my mind, some pretty weak sauce.
Desperately poor people need money a lot more than people rich enough to employ them and set the terms of their contracts. That’s a well noted ‘power imbalance’. Why doesn’t that justify minimum wage laws?