Bobbi Kristina and Nick Gordon (Source: Instagram)
Late Whitney Houston’s daughter, Bobbi Kristina married her adoptive brother Nick Gordon earlier this month, and although they are not blood relatives, their new union is still considered incestuous.
Incest, while appalling to most, is something that has occurred time and time again, from the royal Hapsburg family to the residents of Central Afrika. It was a tactic used to maintain the purity of royal bloodlines as well as a means to preserve groups of people. Incest is not characteristic of one region or class of people it is a form of reproduction that contributes to human survival.
Authors of Telling Incest by Janice L. Doane and Devon L. Hodges discuss how the first Afrikan American novelists recounted the incidents of incest that plagued the community and led to the further marginalization of the Blacks facing socioeconomic issues. Incest is often attributed to being the cause of dysfunctional homes riddled with drug or alcohol abuse, over crowding, illness, poverty or a lack of intelligence. According to Megan Morris of She Knows Entertainment, during the divorce between Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, Brown wrote this sworn statement: “Whitney took Bobbi Kris without my prior knowledge or consent, and moved to Orange County, California, where Whitney received treatment for her drug addiction… Although I was having severe financial problems, I did all I could to see my daughter.”
The splitting of Bobbi Kristina’s parents, her mother’s drug abuse as well as her family constantly being under the scrutiny of the media contributes to her dysfunctional childhood environment void of secure relationships.
Self esteem issues and problems in forming healthy relationships are a known result of these types of bonds. There are also health risks that are involved when those in incestuous relationships procreate. When ready to begin procreating, individuals look for partners that can offer the best genetic traits to pass on to their offspring. When two unrelated individuals procreate, their children have a larger gene pool of traits. This increases the likelihood that the stronger more desirable genetic traits will be passed on to the child. When two individuals who are blood related procreate, the gene pool is smaller, and it is more likely that defective genes will be passed on to children since the DNA is identical. Parents, children and siblings share about 50 percent of their genes while cousins share about 12.5 percent.
DNA testing is now used to determine the likelihood that a child might have two related parents by identifying chunks in the child’s DNA that show that the mother and father contributed identical genes.
Let’s say the father carries the gene for a certain disability, and the mother also carries the gene for that disability, it is more likely that the child will have that disability than if the parents were unrelated. While there is still a chance that parents who are unrelated both carry the same defective gene, the chances of that are less than if the parents share 50 percent of their genes. This can be illustrated by the study of Czechoslovakian children in which mothers had a child with someone they were related to and with someone they were not. The data shows that 42 percent of children that had parents who were related suffered severe birth defects or had a premature death while another 11 percent were developmentally impaired. In the group of children who were fathered by an unrelated male only seven percent had birth defects.
While Bobbi Kristina and her husband Nick Gordon are not blood related, they grew up with each other and violate the Westermarck effect that says, “People who live in close domestic proximity during the first few years of their lives become desensitized to later sexual attraction.”
Will Bobbi Kristina and Nick Gordon’s marriage lead to the acceptance of incestuous relationships? Will possible mental and developmental health defects not be considered? Only time will tell what the members of our society decide.