Not too long ago, researchers estimated the frequency of incest at one in a million. The age of easy DNA testing, however, has revealed a troubling truth: It's far more common than thought, writes Sarah Zhang in the Atlantic. One researcher who studied the UK Biobank suggested that 1 in 7,000 people in the database were born to parents who were first-degree relatives, meaning they were siblings or a father and daughter. Consider, too, that the figure "is just a floor," notes Zhang, given that it represents only pregnancies that resulted in birth. In writing about "one of the most universal and most deeply held taboos," Zhang frames it through the story of a man named Steve Edsel. Around age 40, Edsel decided to try to track down his birth mother, who had abandoned him after giving birth in a North Carolina hospital under a fake name at age 14.
The field was relatively new in 2013 when he used an AncestryDNA kit and, with the help of genealogist CeCe Moore, learned that his father was his mother's older brother. There was no happy family reunion in this case—Edsel's mother has spurned his offers to reconnect, though he has met biological cousins—but it led to Moore starting an online support group administered with the help of Edsel and his wife. While Edsel's was one of Moore's first incest cases, she now knows of more than 1,000 (including four in the same week she spoke with Zhang earlier this year). Read the full story, which also delves into the health risks faced by the children of incest and finds that while the risks are real—shared recessive genes are a topic of concern in the support group—"plenty ... are perfectly healthy." (Or read other longform recaps.)
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