It will become illegal for first cousins to marry each other in Tajikistan starting Friday, leading to an unprecedented demand for marriage licenses in a country where every third disabled person was born to parents of such arrangements.
The small mountainous Asian country moved to ban marriages between first cousins earlier this year after too many babies were born with birth defects. The parliament’s decision was widely disputed, as many siblings want their respective children to get married.
“Parents want their son to marry the daughter of his aunt or uncle, and they don’t realize this could lead to a child being born with a disability,” Saodat Amirshoeva, the member of parliament, said when she introduced the legislation in 2013, according to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR).
Tajikistan is primarily a Muslim country and the ongoing holiday of Ramadan is the most popular time to get married, which adds to the already unprecedented number of applications.
“We are getting unprecedented number of applications from young couples, most of whom are first cousins,” an official from the Dushanbe civil registry told Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty.
People who oppose the ban call for more research backing up claims that first cousins run a higher risk of having babies with birth defects and genetic diseases.
The Health Ministry estimates that between 30 and 35 percent of the country’s 25,000 disabled children stem from consanguineous marriages.
Close relatives also run a higher risk of having babies who die as infants. Mariam Jumahmadova, who married her cousin, lost all of her seven babies within five weeks of giving birth.
“The death of every child hit me hard,” Jumahmadova told IWPR . “I was very upset, and I told my mother she shouldn’t have arranged a marriage to a relative.”
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