Is my sister’s baby at risk of disability due to our sex in the past?
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Hi,
First of all, I thank you for creating such a useful platform at AA, where we can discuss something which we can not discuss anywhere in the real world. I am having a problem and deeply worried but happy to see this blog and hope to get helpful advice.
I am 28. I had sex with my younger sister three years back. We continued having sex, though not very frequently, till she got married last year. After her marriage, we never did it. Now she is pregnant for last 2 months after having sex with her husband. This is all I can say here. I am not interested in explaining how it happened as it has nothing to do with my question.
I have heard that incest relation results in disability in the baby. We are deeply worried. I want to know, what is the possibility of the baby being disabled and is there any way to get the health of the baby checked now at this stage?
Regards,
Answer ( 1 )
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If your sister is pregnant by her husband, then you have absolutely nothing whatsoever to worry about.
Whatever you have been told, or whatever you have read, has given you some false impressions. If you had made your sister pregnant, there would have been a slightly raised possibility of her baby having some form of handicap, either physical or mental, or sometimes both. Children born as a result of incest are usually born as perfectly normal healthy individuals. However, you need to understand something about genetics. Every single person on the planet will have some abnormalities within the coding of their DNA strand. All children are the mixture of 2 people’s DNA. Genetic defects can be cancelled out because only one set of DNA may have an abnormality at any particular point along the DNA strand. With 2 people who are closely related, there is an increased risk that a genetic abnormality may occur at the same point in both strands of DNA, making that abnormality dominant, and may result in a defect of some kind. This doesn’t usually happen, but in close blood relationships, there is an increased risk of this occurring.
Please understand, I am not a genetic expert, just somebody who has read about these things, and paid close attention to documentaries on the subject. Unless your sister is married to someone who is a close relative to her, then their chances of producing a child with some kind of problem are no greater than those of any other married couple.
So if her husband is responsible for her pregnancy, there is nothing for you to worry about, but if you got her pregnant, there is a slightly increased possibility that the child could have something wrong with it, but that is by no means a foregone conclusion.