Last week's revelation was published in a magazine called The New Day — a passionate incestuous romance between a 51-year-old British woman and her 32-year-old American son.

Kim West was studying in California when she had a child out of wedlock. She gave him up for adoption and turned to England. Nearly 30 years later she learned that her son Ben Ford wanted to contact her.

When they met, they immediately felt an overwhelming sexual attraction. Ben ended up abandoning his wife and moving in with his mother. They live together and are considering having children.

Post-adoption romance is a poorly-understood but well-documented phenomenon. In 1980s an American adoption counsellor, Barbara Gonyo, coined the term "genetic sexual attraction" (GSA) for these passionate feelings. Two British psychologists interviewed several people in the grip of GSA who all described "a romantic ‘falling in love', intense and explosive, sudden and almost irresistible".

Since incest is not only taboo but illegal in most jurisdictions, people are reluctant to discuss it. However the psychologists estimated that such feeling are present about 50 percent of the time when siblings and parents are reunited. Their article was published 20 years ago in the British Journal of Medical Psychology (later renamed Psychology and Psychotherapy), so it is possible that the number of cases has increased.

In fact, as a sympathetic columnist for The (London) Telegraph pointed out, the use of anonymous sperm donation could cause a huge increase in the prevalence of GSA. Children can contact their biological parents as soon as they turn 18 in the UK, so numbers are bound to grow as "genetic orphans" seek out the parents they have never seen. She concluded that:

"Those who succumb to GSA are not sickos, or freaks, but victims who desperately need help and understanding. Their feelings are not controllable, but with scientific research and support, we can give them some degree in control over this devastating affliction." Continue reading

• Michael Cook likes bad puns, bushwalking and black coffee. Currently he is the editor of BioEdge, a newsletter about bioethics, and MercatorNet.

In part, this is a result of a misunderstanding.

We often think that the primary reason to ban incest is to prevent genetic abnormalities or other harm to children who might be conceived.

When there are so many options available by which to prevent such harm, this reasoning seems less and less intelligible.

Incestuous couples could simply refrain from having children, for example, or use assisted reproduction technology to conceive healthy ones.

The lack of intelligibility does not mean that there is a wave of defenders of incest attempting to break the taboo, although there are some.

But it does offer an opportunity to reconsider why incest is a bad thing for a society to tolerate.

And in doing so we might recognize that the problem to which incest gives rise has infiltrated our society by other means, posing a major threat to the health and stability of our families.

The Philosophical Case Against Incest

In the Supplement to his Summa, Thomas Aquinas discusses questions of consanguinity.

After asking whether consanguinity is an impediment to marriage by virtue of the natural law, he gives three reasons that it is.

Interestingly, none of these reasons makes reference to difficulties with offspring.

Rather, Aquinas holds that incest is contrary, first, to the order of relations that should exist between parents and their children.

A daughter cannot relate in the appropriate ways to her father both as father and as spouse, for example.

Aquinas's third reason is that incest is contrary to an "accidental" end of marriage: the binding together of humankind and the extending of friendship. Continue reading

Sources

• Public Discourse
• Image: Fair Observer

"Well personally, I don't think they [the State] should. However, it's a matter of almost no significance because it just doesn't happen."

Whyte said that this was his are his views, not ACT views and not policies.

Asked by the New Zealand Herald to comment Whyte said he was "very opposed" to incest.

"I find it very distasteful I don't know why anybody would do it but it's a question of principle about whether or not people ought to interfere with actions that do no harm to third parties just because they personally wouldn't do it."

"I don't think the state should intervene in consensual adult sex or marriage, but there are two very important elements here - consensual and adult".

"I wonder who does believe the state should intervene in consensual adult acts?"

On Thursday, speaking on RadioLive Mr Whyte admitted he had regretted the comments published in an article on The Ruminator Website, because he had "let the Party down."

Source

• The Ruminator
• The New Zealand Herald
• The New Zealand Herald
• Image: 3News

Bishop Hugh Gilbert of Aberdeen questioned why equality would not extend to "nieces who genuinely, truly love their uncles" and why men could not have two wives.

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