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In ancient Greek mythology, incest abounded: it was quite common for gods to have strange sexual relations with their siblings, fathers, mothers, aunts and uncles. Although the ancient Greeks were no strangers to incest, they did not have the word incest. There is no shortage of words to describe strange sexual relationships, such as "μmτροκοίτης" (metrokoites), which means a man who sleeps with his mother, to "θυγατρομιία" (thugatromixia), that is, the act of sleeping with one's own daughter. However, there is no word that can be directly translated as "incest". This relationship is euphemistically called γαμος ανοσιος (gamos anosios) or γαμος ασεβης (gamos asebes), which literally means "unholy union".
We get from the Romans what the modern term "incest" calls it, which derives from the Latin "incestum". "Incestum" literally means something impure and therefore refers to a series of sexual activities that are considered to violate moral, religious, or legal boundaries.
Although later generations were interested in the idea of incest in ancient Greek and Roman cultures, and there is evidence that incest could be legally practised in certain circumstances, the overall perception of such inter-family relations remained negative. Sexual relations between parents and children are often universally condemned.
This is also the epitome of the tragedy of Oedipus, where accusations of incest are often enough to ruin a person's reputation. Although the ancients were not aware of the possibility that incest could lead to genetic mutations, they did realize that the offspring of two blood relatives seemed to be born with weakness. Thus, Socrates condemned sexual relations between parents and children, although the age difference was the main reason for his concern.
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When Steve Edsel was a child, his adoptive parents kept a book of newspaper clippings in their bedroom closet. Sometimes he asks to see, poring through the headlines about his birth: "Mother abandons son, flees hospital," Winston-Salem Journal, December 30, 1973. The mother, who was mentioned by the media, was only 14 years old at the time, "5 feet 6 inches (about 1.67 meters) tall and had reddish-brown hair." On the morning of the incident, she arrived at the hospital with her parents. All the names they provided were later proven to be fake. By 8 p.m. that night, a few hours after she gave birth, they were gone. According to a black-and-white sketch of the mother drawn by the nurse in hindsight, she wears round glasses, bangs and a closed mouth. The abandoned boy was sent to foster care with a local couple named Edsey, who later adopted him. Steve knew his experience from a young age. His adoptive parents never tried to hide his birth background. It wasn't until he was 14 years old that he really began to wonder about his birth mother. "I'm 14," he thought at the time, "that's when she gave birth to me." "When Steve was in his 20s, he began to look for her in earnest, but the clues were soon broken. When he was 40 years old, he told his wife, Michelle, that he wanted to make one last attempt. That was in 2013. At the time, AncestryDNA Genetic Testing started selling mail-in test kits, so he bought one. At first, his pair seemed hopeless – they were both distant relatives.
© The Herald Sun; courtesy of Steve Edsel
But when he began posting in a Facebook group looking for a family, he reached out to a genealogist named CeCe Moore. Moore excels at finding people through long-distance DNA pairing, a technique that became famous in 2018 for helping catch the "Golden State Killer." But at that time, genealogy was still new, and Moore was one of the pioneers. She volunteered to help Steve. In just a few weeks, she narrowed her search to two women about Steve's age. On Facebook, Steve can see that one of the cousins has four children, and she often posts pictures of them, and the children look beautiful and smiling. They lived in abundance and looked perfect — "like in a fairy tale," Steve said. The other woman is unmarried and has no children. She doesn't connect with her immediate family on Facebook and has moved far away from them. One night — it was a Saturday that Steve vividly remembers — Moore asked to speak with him on the phone. She confirms Steve's pre-existing suspicions: his birth mother is the second woman. But Moore also brought another piece of news. She unexpectedly discovers some information about Steve's biological father: Your parents seem to be related by blood. Steve didn't know what to say for a moment. You know what I mean? Your biological father is either your mother's father or your mother's brother. A strong emotion surged through him like a wave: anger, sadness, low self-esteem, disgust, shame, and a sense of destruction. In all the years he had doubts about his birth, Steve never thought about the possibility of incest. How so? What are the odds?
--- 1975, around the time of Steve's birth, a psychiatric textbook put the odds of incest at 1 in 1 million. But this figure is almost certainly grossly underestimated. The stigma of openly discussing incest often involves child sexual abuse has long made it difficult to conduct research on the subject. In the 80s of the 20th century, feminist scholars argued,[1] based on the testimonies of victims,[1] that incest was far more prevalent than people believed. In recent years, DNA testing has provided a whole new kind of biological evidence. Extensive genetic testing is uncovering case after case of children born to close relatives, providing unprecedented data for incest in modern society. Jim Wilson, a geneticist at the University of Edinburgh, was alarmed by the frequency of incest he found in the U.K. Biobank, an anonymous research database: According to his unpublished analysis, about 1 in 7,000 people are killed by a first-degree relative (a person's biological parents, Brothers and sisters who have the same biological parents as him, as well as his children. Editor's note) – i.e., brothers and sisters, or parents and children. He told me: "This number is far beyond a lot of people's imagination. And this number is only a lower bound: it only reflects the cases that led to the pregnancy, and does not include data on miscarriages or abortions, as well as the voluntary participation of the child who led to the birth of the child when he grew up.
© Warren Umoh on Unsplash
In the past, most people who had this experience might never have known who their biological parents were, but nowadays, many people have accidentally discovered the truth after taking the AncestryDNA and 23andMe tests. Steve was the first case Moore dealt with involving blood parents. She now knows that there are more than 1,000 similar cases, the vast majority of which are first-degree relatives and the rest second-degree relatives (such as half-siblings, aunts, uncles, grandchildren). These cases come from all income strata of society. Neither AncestryDNA nor 23andMe directly tell customers about incest, so the more than 1,000 cases Moore is aware of have come from a very small number of testers who have investigated deeply. For example, their DNA data is uploaded to a third-party genealogy website to analyze what is known as a "continuous homozygous fragment" (ROH), a long homozygous genotype produced by the inheritance of the same haplotype from a common ancestor. Editor's note). For a while, a well-known genealogy website told users to contact Moore as soon as they found anyone with a high ROH. She would call them one by one to explain the important meaning of the term. Inadvertently, she became the custodian of what may be the world's largest database of incest-born people.
© Medical News Today
Moore told me that in the vast majority of cases, incest is usually between a father and a daughter, or a brother and sister, which means that the resulting child is likely to be evidence of sexual abuse. She has no place for people caught up in this shock to seek refuge, and she is not a professionally trained therapist herself. Still, after seeing so many of these cases, she wants people to know that they are not alone. In 2016, Moore eventually created a private, invite-only Facebook support group, and she also made Steve and his future wife, Michelle, admins. In the search for Steve's biological mother, the relationship between the three of them becomes intimate due to the emotional shock they experience together. One day in January, Michelle (who is also Moore's part-time assistant) told me that she had spoken to four new people that week, all of whom had high enough ROH and parents who were first-degree relatives. She used to be scared of the calls. "I stutter when I speak," she told me. But not anymore. She told those who were feeling nervous over the phone that they could join a support group of people who had been through the same reality, or they could talk to her husband, Steve.
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When Steve first found out about his biological parents 10 years ago, he had no support group to turn to, and he didn't know how to deal with his strange emotions. He was really happy to have found his biological mother. He never looked like his adoptive parents, but in the photos of his biological mother, he could see his eyes, his chin, and even the natural smile on his face. But also due to the appearance of his biological mother, he became extremely angry for a while. He had no way of knowing the circumstances of the conception at that time, and his DNA tests alone could not determine whether his mother's brother or his mother's father was responsible. But given her age, Steve felt it couldn't have been consensual. The bespectacled 14-year-old girl who disappeared from the hospital remained in his mind like this, even though he himself had grown up, married and became an adoptive father. He had a strong desire to protect the young girl back then. As much as he wanted to see his birth mother in person, he feared that she might not want to know him. Considering that she had moved so far away and had little contact with her family, perhaps she had been trying to escape them all her life. As a devout believer, Steve prayed for this and decided to write a letter by hand. In the letter, he briefly described his life, attached some photographs, and expressed his love for her. In the letter, he did not mention that he already knew about his parents. To ensure that the letters would be delivered safely, he opted for registered mail and kept the receipts. She never replied. But Steve knew she had received it: the post office had sent him a green receipt that she had signed when she received the letter, and he looked at her signature for a long time — her real name, written by her own hand. At the age of 40, he finally touched something his mother had touched for the first time. He put the receipt in his Bible. Steve never blamed his mother for abandoning him in the hospital, and learning something about his biological father allowed him to better understand her situation. But this fact also made him doubly confused about his identity. Does that mean he had some kind of defect in his DNA from the moment he conceived? In a later podcast, he admitted that he felt like garbage, "like something someone just threw away." The first six months of his life were the most difficult of his life.
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Incest between close family members is one of the most prevalent and ingrained taboos in human culture. A common biological explanation is that children born to consanguineous parents are more likely to have health complications because their parents are more likely to be carriers of the same recessive mutation. From the 60s to the 80s of the 20th century, some studies of dozens of children born with incest [2][3][4] showed high rates of infant mortality and congenital disorders.
© Ravishly
But in the past, healthy children born of incest never went unnoticed by doctors. As widespread DNA testing reveals that more people have sibling or father-daughter parents, many of them are in perfect health. According to geneticist Wilson, "There is a great deal of chance as to whether incest leads to undesirable outcomes." It depends on whether the "continuous homozygous fragment" contains a recessive pathogenic mutation. All of us have some of these genes in our DNA, and typically, less than 1% of the genome in Western populations, and even higher in cultures where cousin marriage is more common. However, Wilson said that among people whose parents are first-degree relatives, the figure is about 25 percent. While the odds of genetic disorders are much higher, the results are far from certain. Still, the numbers make people curious. Steve was born with a heart murmur and needed open-heart surgery at age 13 and 18, although he didn't know why, and heart problems are one of the more common birth defects in the general population. He and Michelle were also never able to have children. Others in the Facebook group shared their struggles with autoimmune diseases, fibromyalgia, eye problems, and more, although these are often difficult to definitively link to incest. Health problems caused by incest can manifest themselves in a variety of ways, depending on the specific genetic mutation. "When I went to the doctor and was asked about my family history, I wondered: How much more do I need to dig in?" said Mandy, another member of the group, (I only use names so they can talk freely about their family and medical history). In any case, how much experience can an average doctor have with incest? After Mandy first learned that her biological father was her mother's uncle, she began to look for stories of people who had similar experiences. All she could find was "vulgar fantasies" online and medical journal articles about health issues. She felt very lonely. "I didn't have anyone to talk about," she recalled, "and no one knew what to say." When she found the Facebook group, she realized she wasn't the only one who had been going through it. Others, she saw, were also going through a process of denial, anger, negotiation, frustration, and acceptance. She didn't know exactly what was going on between her biological parents, but her mother was 17 years old at the time, and her mother's uncle was in his 30s. Although this discovery caused Mandy a lot of hurt, it also helped to reconcile Mandy with her childhood. Unlike Steve, Mandy was raised by her biological mother, who had previously believed that her mother's husband was her biological father. Her father mostly ignored her, and her mother was often fierce with her. She treats Mandy differently than her brothers. "At least now I have more answers to why," Mandy told me, "I'm not a bad boy and deserve to be loved." ”
© Verywell Mind
Kathy was also raised by her mother, although she realized early on that her father was not her biological father. They didn't match their blood type, and she had heard rumors about her mother and grandfather. Her mother's family was violent and chaotic, but she was close to her father's family, especially her grandmother. "They've always been my backbone," she told me. When Kathy undergoes a DNA test that confirms that her father is not her biological father, she has distanced herself from her biological family and accepted someone who does not share her DNA. In some ways, her experience is the complete opposite of that of adoptees like Steve, who is very eager to learn about his biological family. But the two became very good because of this. Steve was furious with his mother. She told him that she had been angry before, but that she had to put it behind her. "It didn't bring me and my mother any peace," she recalled. Nor can it change everything that happened years ago. Eventually, Steve succeeded in finding his biological father, albeit not through any particular means of genetic research. One day two and a half years after the DNA test, he logged into AncestryDNA and saw a match. It was his mother's older brother. From the website, he could see that his father - the uncle had logged in once, presumably seeing that Steve was his son, and then - even though Steve had sent him a message - never logged in again. By then, his initial anger had begun to subside. He still has deep sympathy for his birth mother. Michelle said her husband had always been a sensitive person — she used to make fun of him for crying while watching movies — but he had become more empathetic. The sense of worthlessness he initially struggled with has been replaced by a sense of purpose, and he and Michelle now spend hours a day talking to others on the support group. Steve still hasn't spoken to his birth mother yet. He tried to write to her a second time, sending a diary of his life—but she returned it untouched. He occasionally messages her on Facebook, sending photos of his children and his own puppies. Every year, he wishes her a happy birthday. She neither replied nor blocked him. When the diary is returned, Steve decides to contact his mother's cousin, another woman he initially thought might be his biological mother. He wrote to his cousin, mentioning his mom (but not his dad), and the cousin replied. She told him that she was close to his mom as a child, but she didn't know she had ever been pregnant. For her, it seemed that her cousin would suddenly "disappear" one day. A few months later, Steve felt that he could finally tell the truth about his biological father, and his cousin accepted him for who he really was. They met for the first time in 2017 when she visited a nearby town. Subsequently, she invited Steve and Michelle to Thanksgiving. Last year, she invited them again to a large family gathering. Steve's immediate family wasn't there, but her family was there, and they all knew about him, his mom, and his dad. They welcomed him with a hug and took a family photo together. "It felt like a relief," he told me. In this family, he is no longer an unspeakable secret.
Bibliography:
[1]www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674002708
[2]www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022347682803478
[3]publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/40/1/55/43627/CHILDREN-OF-INCEST
[4]karger.com/hhe/article-abstract/21/2/108/158742/A-Study-of-Children-of-Incestuous-Matings
/Sarah Georgia/Sarah Georgia
Translated by tamiya2
Proofreading/Bunny's Limbo microstep
Original/www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/03/dna-tests-incest/677791/
This article is based on a Creative Commons license (BY-NC) and is published by tamiya2 at Leviathan
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Leviathan
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