LIVING TOGETHER
Shaking Off the Shame
By SARAH KERSHAW
Published: November 25, 2009
MUNCY, Pa.
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
FAMILY TIES Shane Winters and Kimberly Spring-Winters, first cousins, married this year despite her
mother’s concerns.
The Laws, State by State
Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times
TOGETHER Kathy and Dale Hollenbach, first cousins, hardly knew each other until his wife died in 2007
and she sent her condolences. “What I tell everyone is that you don’t choose who you fall in love with,”
she said.
WHEN Kimberly Spring-Winters told her mother she was in love, she
didn’t expect a positive response — and she didn’t get one.
“It’s wrong, it’s taboo, nobody does that,” she recalled her mother saying.
But shortly after the conversation, Ms. Spring-Winters, 29, decided to
marry the man she loved: her first cousin.
Shane Winters, 37, whom she now playfully refers to as her “cusband,”
proposed to her at a surprise birthday party in front of family and friends,
and the two are now trying to have a baby. They are not concerned about
genetic defects, Ms. Spring-Winters said, and their fertility doctor told
them he saw no problem with having children.
The couple — she is a second-grade teacher and he builds furniture — held
their wedding last summer on a lake near this tiny town in central
Pennsylvania. But their official marriage took place a month earlier in
Maryland, at Annapolis City Hall, because marriage between first cousins is
illegal in Pennsylvania — and in 24 other states, according to the National
Conference of State Legislatures — under laws enacted mostly in the 19th
century.
While many people have a story about a secret cousin crush or kiss, most
Americans find the idea of cousins marrying and having children disturbing
or even repulsive. The cartoonish image of hillbilly cousins giving birth to
cross-eyed, deformed and mentally disabled children has endured in the
national psyche. But even in the United States — one of the few countries in
the world where such unions are illegal — marriage between first cousins
may be slowly emerging from the shadows.
Although it is still a long way from being widely accepted, in recent years
cousin marriage has been drawing increased attention, as researchers study
the potential health risks to children of cousins. And the couples themselves
have begun to connect online, largely through a Web site called
Cousincouples.com, which bills itself as “the world’s primary resource for
romantic relationships among cousins,” and is trying to build support for
overturning laws prohibiting cousin marriage.
For the most part, scientists studying the phenomenon worldwide are
finding evidence that the risk of birth defects and mortality is less
significant than previously thought. A widely disseminated study published
in The Journal of Genetic Counseling in 2002 said that the risk of serious
genetic defects like spina bifida and cystic fibrosis in the children of first
cousins indeed exists but that it is rather small, 1.7 to 2.8 percentage points
higher than for children of unrelated parents, who face a 3 to 4 percent risk
— or about the equivalent of that in children of women giving birth in their
early 40s. The study also said the risk of mortality for children of first
cousins was 4.4 percentage points higher.
More-recent studies suggest that the risks may be even lower. In
September, Alan Bittles, a researcher at the Centre for Comparative
Genomics at Murdoch University in Australia and one of the authors of the
2002 study, published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences that reported that the mortality rate was closer to 3.5 percentage
points higher. He said he expected ongoing research to find the risk of
defects to be lower than previously assumed as well.
“It’s never as simple as people make it out to be,” said Dr. Bittles, noting
that very early studies did not account for factors like access to prenatal
health care, and did not distinguish between couples like Ms. SpringWinters and her husband, the first cousins in a family to marry, and those
who are part of groups in which the practice is common over generations
and has led to high rates of genetic disorders. “But the widely accepted
scare stories — even within academia — and the belief that cousin marriage
is inevitably harmful have declined in the face of some of the data we’ve
been producing,” he said.
Dr. Bittles, who is working on an update of the 2002 study, and other
researchers argue that laws against marriage between cousins were rooted
in myth and moral objections, and that they amounted to genetic
discrimination akin to eugenics or forced sterilization. People with severe
disorders like Huntington’s disease, who have a 50 percent chance of
passing it on to their offspring, are not barred from marrying because of the
risk of genetic defects, he said, so cousins should not be, either.
Historically, marriage between cousins has been seen as desirable in many
parts of the world, and even today, slightly more than 10 percent of
marriages worldwide are between people who are second cousins or closer,
Dr. Bittles said. In the United States, the percentage is thought to be much
smaller, although it is difficult to estimate, since such marriages have long
been an underground phenomenon, because of laws forbidding them and
because of the lingering incest-related stigma.
Martin Ottenheimer, who wrote “Forbidden Relatives: The American Myth
of Cousin Marriage,” a 1996 book that was the first detailed examination of
the issue in the United States, compared marriage between cousins to
same-sex marriage. “People say, ‘If we permit this, what are we permitting?
We’re down the slippery slope toward chaos. Then we’ll permit people to
marry dogs,’ ” he said in an interview. “The stigma has stuck for so long.”
But others who have revisited the 2002 study warn that potential risks
should not be downplayed.
Diane B. Paul, a professor emerita of political science at the University of
Massachusetts, Boston, and a research associate in zoology at Harvard, was
an author of a paper published last year in the journal PLoS Biology that
described the difficulty of generalizing about the potential for birth defects
or increased mortality in the children of cousins. Each couple’s risk
depends on the individuals’ particular genetic makeup, she said, which
means “it’s very difficult to determine.” And even the small average risk of
defects reported in the 2002 study, she added, represents nearly double the
risk to children of unrelated parents.
That kind of uncertainty doesn’t sit well with many people, including some
legislators. Despite the efforts of some in Minnesota and New Hampshire to
overturn state laws against cousin marriage after the 2002 study was
published, it remains illegal there. And as of 2005, it is against the law in
Texas as well.
The Texas ban was part of a law targeting polygamy, and the state
representative who proposed it, Harvey Hilderbran, a Republican, said he
would not have introduced a bill simply to prohibit marriage between
cousins. Still, he said in an interview: “Cousins don’t get married just like
siblings don’t get married. And when it happens you have a bad result. It’s
just not the accepted normal thing.”
ALTHOUGH their mothers are sisters who are friendly and live only a halfhour apart, Ms. Spring-Winters and Mr. Winters barely knew each other
growing up, because he spent most of his childhood with his paternal
grandfather in a town about a half-hour away. The two connected a few
years ago, when she was student teaching. Her aunt — who is now also her
mother-in-law — suggested that on nights when the weather was bad, she
stay with Mr. Winters, who lived closer than she did to her teaching
assignment. She began to spend time with him, and the two grew close.
“I worried that people thought I was just resorting to my cousin because I
couldn’t find anyone else,” Ms. Spring-Winters said.
As a religious Methodist, she said, she also worried that marrying her
cousin would be wrong in the eyes of her church. But as it turned out, the
Methodist Church has no official position on marriage between cousins,
unlike the Roman Catholic Church, which requires cousins to obtain
dispensation before marrying. And after talking to a relative who is a
Baptist minister, Ms. Spring-Winters said, she discovered that the Bible
does not say anything explicitly negative about cousin marriage, although it
does list examples of sexual impurity, including relations with “close
relatives,” like sisters, stepchildren, grandchildren, aunts and stepsisters;
and those between mothers and sons, and fathers and daughters.
“If the Bible said no, we wouldn’t have done it,” she said.
They are somewhat open about being cousins, and have told some friends,
Ms. Spring-Winters said, but they don’t tell everyone.
Hanging in their home are photographs of each of them at different stages
of their lives, from infancy to adulthood, paired in frames, along with
pictures of their shared maternal grandparents and Mr. Winters’s 13-yearold son from a previous marriage. One picture of the couple embracing is in
a frame with the word “cousins” written over the top and, along the bottom,
“the most important thing in life is family.”
Ms. Spring-Winters’s mother, Eileen Spring, said that the photograph
makes her uncomfortable, and that she has asked her daughter not to
display it so prominently.
Mrs. Spring, a school nurse, has tried to make peace with herself about the
relationship, she said, but it has been a struggle. She has been afraid to tell
people about it, and when she has, she said, they have been shocked. Even
in a small town in Pennsylvania, she said, it would be easier for her to tell
people her daughter was a lesbian.
“I knew what people would be saying,” she said. “Nowadays anything goes,
but they still don’t like cousins.”
She is worried about her future grandchildren, she added, partly because
diabetes runs in the family, but also because she fears they will be treated as
outcasts or ridiculed by their peers.
But when she found out her daughter wanted to marry her cousin, she said,
“Even though I was torn, that little voice kept saying, ‘O.K., Eileen, you
taught her to be her own person.’ ”
For other married cousins, though, family relations have deteriorated
irrevocably.
One couple living in upstate New York, who spoke on the condition that
their full names not be published, knew each other well while they were
growing up. They spent holidays together and were regular pen pals. When
they were teenagers, they began to acknowledge their romantic feelings,
and 16 years ago, when Bob was 20 and his cousin was 18, they married.
“I must have asked her to marry me about a million times,” Bob said, but
his cousin kept saying that it was wrong and that the family would not
approve.
She was right.
They now have two daughters, 13 and 14, who are in good health, he said,
but her parents — his aunt and uncle — refuse to speak to them. Their
daughters have never met their maternal grandmother, and they met their
maternal grandfather only once, at a funeral.
The couple, who live on a military base, have advised their daughters not to
tell friends that their parents are cousins.
“We don’t typically tell folks,” Bob said. “We told our daughters, ‘It’s not
something to be ashamed of, but if you tell your friends, your friends may
trust you today, you may be good friends, however, roll the clock forward,
people are fickle, and preteens and teens can be downright cruel.’ ”
But many cousin couples say they believe the happiness they’ve found
together far outweighs the risk of offending other people.
Two first cousins, Kathy Rohrer, 52, and Dale Hollenbach, 70, hardly knew
each other until a couple of years ago. After Mr. Hollenbach’s wife died in
2007, Ms. Rohrer wrote him a condolence letter, and he visited her at her
home near Atlanta. She was married, but was in the process of divorcing,
and over the next few months they spent time together.
“I was on a cloud nine,” Mr. Hollenbach said. “It’s like Kathy said, we didn’t
know each other before, and then you meet somebody and it’s love at first
sight.”
She was excited but nervous, she said, adding, “He was so much fun to be
with, I just kept wishing he wasn’t my cousin.”
Then she found the Cousincouples.com site and said she realized “it wasn’t
as strange as I originally thought.”
Last June, they had a small wedding in Georgia, where marriage between
cousins is legal, with a horse-drawn carriage transporting them to and from
the chapel. They said they both have adult children who were
uncomfortable with the fact that they are cousins, but generally, family
members have come around.
“What I tell everyone is that you don’t choose who you fall in love with,”
said the new Mrs. Hollenbach. “You can deny your feelings, but that leads
to being a miserable person who goes through life trying to find a partner
just like your cousin. Which will never happen.”