National Health Service Seek Nurses Specializing in Advising “Close Relative” Marriages in Muslim Community Despite Known Genetic Health Risks

You can’t make this stuff up. A Manchester NHS Trust has advertised an ‘exciting new job opportunity’ for a close-relative marriage nurse – to help cousins who are having children together.

The role – now closed for applications – was shared earlier this year in a bid to enable ‘informed reproductive decision making’.

The ideal candidate is described as fluent in Urdu and someone who ‘values diversity and difference’.

NHS In UK Seeks Nurses for Cousin-Marriage Progeny

By: Hugh Fitzgerald, March 15, 2026:

In low-trust societies, the practice of cousin-marriage ensures that property will not devolve to a stranger, but remain within the family. Muslim societies are low-trust, so the percentage of cousin-marriages is staggeringly high. Cousin-marriages have dreadful consequences: many of those who are born from such marriages have congenital illnesses, for which there are no cures and are tremendously expensive to treat, in order to ameliorate the resulting condition. The National Health Service (NHS) in the U.K. is spending more and more money on the children produced by cousin-marriages. Yet the British government does nothing to discourage the practice, despite the certainty of congenital illnesses and the human misery that results for the Muslim families involved, and the ever-increasing expenses of treating the children with those illnesses, an expense borne by the British taxpayer.

Now the NHS, instead of discouraging cousin-marriages — particularly high among Pakistani migrants in the U.K. — has been advertising for nurses who specialize in dealing with the progeny of “cousin-marriages.” One such ad asks for “cousin-marriage nurses who value diversity.” More on this seeming acceptance of the practice can be found in this article from several weeks ago: “Another NHS trust posts ‘exciting’ job ad for cousin-marriage nurse who ‘values diversity,’” by James Saunders, GB News, February 10, 2026:

A Manchester NHS Trust has advertised what it called an “exciting new job opportunity” for a nurse specialising in “close-relative” marriage support.

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The position, which has now closed, aims to help cousins having children together through “informed reproductive decision-making”.

Job requirements made it clear the trust wanted someone fluent in Urdu and who “values diversity and difference”.

As part of the role, posted by Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, the nurse will help parents “make informed choices in a culturally sensitive empowering way”.

Cousin marriage is prevalent among communities in Britain like those of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage – and has been the subject of serious warnings over safety.

Earlier this year, top Tory Richard Holden told GB News how cousin marriage “is an issue bound up with serious health implications, closed communities, and the isolation of the vulnerable”.

But recent NHS guidance has described concerns about disease risks from cousin marriages as “exaggerated” and “unwarranted” – and has even told midwives about the “benefits” of the practice….

Just think of that. So afraid is the NHS of offending Muslims, so desirous of showing that it is not “racist” or “Islamophobic,” that it deliberately downplays the danger of such cousin-marriages, and has even told its midwives about the “benefits”of the practice. There are none. It can only create more misery both for the parents and for the progeny in these cousin-marriage situations.

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The guidance suggests health risks “should be balanced against the potential benefits… from this marriage practice.”

These, it claims, include “economic benefits” alongside “emotional and social connections” and “social capital.”…

The economic benefit is only this: whatever property the husband and wife bring to the marriage, it will remain within the extended family to which they both belong. And there may be “emotional and social connections” if they are already so connected with each other’s families. But what are those compared to a lifetime of suffering, and likely early death, to the progeny of such a marriage?

No matter how harmful cousin-marriages turn out to be for the children who result, no matter what misery the practice brings the Muslim families involved, no matter the huge expense to the British taxpayers who pay for the NHS, the government doesn’t dare to try to stamp out the practice, lest it be called — so unfairly — “racist” or “Islamophobic.” The truly “racist” thing to do is to fail to discourage the practice, or ideally, to halt it altogether.

By recruiting nurses who specialize in treating “inter-family couples” — a delicate way to describe cousin-marriages — the NHS appears to be prepared to tolerate the practice, when it ought to be moving heaven and earth to get the practice outlawed. For cousin-marriage has nothing to recommend it; it leads to a catastrophic increase in congenital illnesses that have no cure and are expensive to treat; the cost of such treatment threatens to cost the NHS so much that it has come close to bankruptcy; it has had to severely cut its expenditures on treating conditions that, unlike congenital illnesses, can be cured. The NHS has to decide what it cares about most: helping Muslims to understand the consequences of cousin-marriage so that such marriages can be avoided, or avoiding the predictable criticism, if it does the former, that it is “racist” and “Islamophobic.”