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Health


DNA TESTS ARE UNCOVERING THE TRUE PREVALENCE OF INCEST

People are discovering the truth about their biological parents with DNA—and
learning that incest is far more common than many think.

By Sarah Zhang

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: The Herald Sun; courtesy of Steve Edsel.
March 18, 2024
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Listen to this article

00:00

17:28

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

When Steve Edsel was a boy, his adoptive parents kept a scrapbook of newspaper
clippings in their bedroom closet. He would ask for it sometimes, poring over
the headlines about his birth. Headlines like this: “Mother Deserts Son, Flees
From Hospital,” Winston-Salem Journal, December 30, 1973.

The mother in question was 14 years old, “5 feet 6 with reddish brown hair,” and
she had come to the hospital early one morning with her own parents. They gave
names that all turned out to be fake. And by 8 o’clock that evening, just hours
after she gave birth, they were gone. In a black-and-white drawing of the
mother, based on nurses’ recollections, she has round glasses and sideswept
bangs. Her mouth is grimly set.




The abandoned boy was placed in foster care with a local couple, the Edsels, who
later adopted him. Steve knew all of this growing up. His parents never tried to
hide his origins, and they always gave him the scrapbook when he asked. It
wasn’t until he turned 14, though, that he really began to wonder about his
birth mom. “I’m 14,” he thought at the time. “This is how old she was when she
had me.”

Steve began looking for her in earnest in his 20s, but the paper trail quickly
ran cold. When he turned 40, he told his wife, Michelle, that he wanted to give
the search one last go. This was in 2013. AncestryDNA had started selling
mail-in test kits the previous year, so he bought one. His matches at first
seemed unpromising—some distant relatives—but when he began posting in a
Facebook group for people seeking out biological family, he got connected to a
genetic genealogist named CeCe Moore. Moore specializes in finding people via
distant DNA matches, a technique made famous in 2018 when it led to the capture
of the Golden State Killer. But back then, genetic genealogy was still new, and
Moore was one of its pioneers. She volunteered to help Steve.

Within just a couple of weeks, she had narrowed down the search to two women,
cousins of the same age. On Facebook, Steve could see that one cousin had four
kids, and she regularly posted photos of them, beautiful and smiling. They
looked well-off, their lives picture-perfect—“like a storybook,” Steve says. The
other woman was unmarried; she didn’t have kids. She was not friends with her
immediate family on Facebook, and she had moved halfway across the country from
them. One evening—a Saturday, Steve clearly remembers—Moore asked to speak with
him by phone.

She confirmed what he had already suspected: His birth mom was the second woman.
But Moore had another piece of news too. She had unexpectedly figured out
something about his biological father as well. It looks like your parents are
related. Steve didn’t know what to say. Do you understand what I mean? He said
he thought so. Either your mom’s father or your mom’s brother is your father. A
sea of emotions rose to a boil inside him: anger, hurt, worthlessness, disgust,
shame, and devastation all at once. In his years of wondering about his birth,
he had never, ever considered the possibility of incest. Why would he? What were
the chances?



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In 1975, around the time of Steve’s birth, a psychiatric textbook put the
frequency of incest at one in a million.

But this number is almost certainly a dramatic underestimate. The stigma around
openly discussing incest, which often involves child sexual abuse, has long made
the subject difficult to study. In the 1980s, feminist scholars argued, based on
the testimonies of victims, that incest was far more common than recognized, and
in recent years, DNA has offered a new kind of biological proof. Widespread
genetic testing is uncovering case after secret case of children born to close
biological relatives—providing an unprecedented accounting of incest in modern
society.


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The geneticist Jim Wilson, at the University of Edinburgh, was shocked by the
frequency he found in the U.K. Biobank, an anonymized research database: One in
7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who
were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child.
“That’s way, way more than I think many people would ever imagine,” he told me.
And this number is just a floor: It reflects only the cases that resulted in
pregnancy, that did not end in miscarriage or abortion, and that led to the
birth of a child who grew into an adult who volunteered for a research study.

Most of the people affected may never know about their parentage, but these
days, many are stumbling into the truth after AncestryDNA and 23andMe tests.
Steve’s case was one of the first Moore worked on involving closely related
parents. She now knows of well over 1,000 additional cases of people born from
incest, the significant majority between first-degree relatives, with the rest
between second-degree relatives (half-siblings, uncle-niece, aunt-nephew,
grandparent-grandchild). The cases show up in every part of society, every
strata of income, she told me.

Read: When a DNA test shatters your identity

Neither AncestryDNA nor 23andMe informs customers about incest directly, so the
thousand-plus cases Moore knows of all come from the tiny proportion of testers
who investigated further. This meant, for example, uploading their DNA profiles
to a third-party genealogy site to analyze what are known as “runs of
homozygosity,” or ROH: long stretches where the DNA inherited from one’s mother
and father are identical. For a while, one popular genealogy site instructed
anyone who found high ROH to contact Moore. She would call them, one by one, to
explain the jargon’s explosive meaning. Unwittingly, she became the keeper of
what might be the world’s largest database of people born out of incest.



In the overwhelming majority of cases, Moore told me, the parents are a father
and a daughter or an older brother and a younger sister, meaning a child’s
existence was likely evidence of sexual abuse. She had no obvious place to send
people reeling from such revelations, and she was not herself a trained
therapist. After seeing many of these cases, though, she wanted people to know
they were not alone. Moore ended up creating a private and invite-only support
group on Facebook in 2016, and she tapped Steve and later his wife, Michelle, to
become admins, too. The three of them had become close in the months and years
after the search for his birth mom, as they navigated the emotional fallout
together.

One day this past January, Michelle, who also works as Moore’s part-time
assistant, told me she had spoken with four new people that week, all of them
with ROH high enough to have parents who were first-degree relatives. She used
to dread these calls. “I would stumble over my words,” she told me. But not
anymore. She tells the shaken person on the line that they can join a support
group full of people who are living the same reality. She tells them they can
talk to her husband, Steve.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Steve first discovered the truth about his biological parents, a decade
ago, he had no support group to turn to, and he did not know what to do with the
strange mix of emotions. He was genuinely happy to have found his birth mom. He
had never looked like his adoptive parents, but in photos of her and her family,
he could see his eyes, his chin, and even the smirky half-grin that his face
naturally settles into.

But he radiated with newfound anger, too, on her behalf. He could not know the
exact circumstances of his conception, and his DNA test alone could not
determine whether her older brother or her father was responsible. But Steve
could not imagine a consensual scenario, given her age. The bespectacled
14-year-old girl who disappeared from the hospital had remained frozen in time
in his mind, even as he himself grew older, got married, became a stepdad. He
felt protective of that young girl.



As badly as he wanted to know his birth mom, he worried she would not want to
know him. Would his sudden reappearance dredge up traumatic memories—memories
she had perhaps been trying to outrun her whole adult life, given how far away
she had moved and how little she seemed connected to her family? A religious
man, Steve prayed over it and settled on handwriting a letter. He included a
couple of paragraphs about his life, some photos, and a message that he loved
her. He left out what he knew about his paternity. And he took care to send the
letter by certified mail, so that he could confirm its receipt and so that it
would not accidentally fall into anyone else’s hands.

She never responded. But Steve knew that she had received it: The post office
sent him the green slip that she had signed upon delivery, and he scrutinized
her signature—her actual name, written by her actual hand. At 40 years old, he
touched for the first time something his mother had just touched, held something
she had just held. He put the slip inside the pages of his Bible.

Steve had never faulted his mother for leaving him at the hospital, and finding
out about his paternity made him even more understanding. But the revelation
also made him struggle with who he was. Did it mean that something was wrong
with him, written into his DNA from the moment of his conception? On a podcast
later, he admitted to feeling like trash, “like something that somebody had just
thrown away.” Those first six months after his discovery were the hardest six
months of his life.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Across human cultures, incest between close family members is one of the most
universal and most deeply held taboos. A common explanation is biological:
Children born from related parents are more likely to develop health
complications, because their parents are more likely to be carriers of the same
recessive mutations. From the 1960s to the ’80s, a handful of studies following
a few dozen children born of incest documented high rates of infant mortality
and congenital conditions.



But in the past, healthy children born from incestuous unions would have never
come to the attention of doctors. As widespread DNA testing has uncovered orders
of magnitude more people whose parents are brother and sister or parent and
child, it’s also shown that plenty of those people are perfectly healthy. “There
is a large element of chance in whether incest has a poor outcome,” according to
Wilson, the geneticist. It depends on whether those runs of homozygosity contain
recessive disease-causing mutations. All of us have some of these runs in our
DNA—usually less than 1 percent of the genome in Western populations, higher in
cultures where cousin marriage is common. But that number is about 25 percent,
Wilson said, in people born from first-degree relatives. While the odds of a
genetic disease are much higher, the outcome is far from predetermined.

Still, these numbers make people wonder. Steve was born with a heart murmur,
which required open-heart surgery at ages 13 and 18, though he does not know for
sure the cause; heart defects are among the more common birth defects in the
general population. He and Michelle were also never able to have children
together. Others in the Facebook group have shared their struggles with
autoimmune diseases, fibromyalgia, eye problems, and so on—though these are
often hard to definitively link to incest. Health problems arising from incest
might manifest in any number of ways, depending on exactly which mutations are
inherited. “When I go to the doctor and they ask me my family history, I wonder:
How much do I need to go into it?” says Mandy, another member of the group. (I
am identifying some people by first name only, so they can speak freely about
their family and medical histories.) How much experience would a typical doctor
have with incest, anyway?

After Mandy first learned that her father was her mother’s uncle, she went
looking for stories about other people like her. All she could find were “gross
fantasies” online and medical-journal articles about health problems. She felt
very lonely. “I don’t have anybody I can talk to about this,” she remembers
thinking. “Nobody knows what to say.” When she found the Facebook group, she
could see that she was far from the only one like her. She watched the others
cycle, too, through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and
acceptance.



She does not know exactly what happened between her biological parents, but her
mother was 17, and her mother’s uncle was in his 30s. The discovery, for all the
hurt that it surfaced, has helped Mandy reconcile some of her childhood
experiences. Unlike Steve, she was raised by her biological mother, and she
believed her mother’s husband to be her biological father. He mostly ignored
her, but her mother was cruel. She treated Mandy differently than she did her
younger brothers. “At least now I have more of an answer as to why,” Mandy told
me. “I wasn’t a bad kid and unlovable.”

Kathy was also raised by her mother, though she had an early inkling that her
dad was not her biological dad. Their blood types were incompatible, and she
heard rumors about her mother and grandfather. Although her mother’s family was
violent and chaotic, she was close to her dad’s family, especially her granny on
that side. “They’ve been my rock,” she told me. By the time Kathy took a DNA
test confirming that her dad was not her biological dad, she had spent a
lifetime distancing herself from her biological family and embracing one with
whom she shared no DNA.

Hers was, in some ways, the opposite journey of adoptees such as Steve, who
wanted so badly to know his biological family. But the two of them have become
close. Kathy remembers how angry he used to be on his mother’s behalf. She told
him that she used to be angry too, but she had to leave it behind. “It’s not
going to bring me any peace. It’s not going to bring my mother any peace,” she
recalled saying. And it wouldn’t undo what had been done to his mother by her
father or her brother so many years ago.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the end, Steve was able to identify his biological father, though not through
any particular feat of genetic sleuthing. One day, two and a half years after
his DNA test, he logged in to AncestryDNA and saw a parent match. It was his
mother’s older brother. From the site, he could see that his father-uncle had
logged in once, presumably seen that Steve was his son, and—even after Steve
sent him a message—never logged back on again.



By then, his initial anger had started to dissipate. He still felt deeply for
his birth mom. Michelle says that her husband has always been a sensitive
guy—she makes fun of him for crying at movies—but he’s become even more
empathetic. The feeling of worthlessness he initially struggled with has given
way to a sense of purpose; he and Michelle now spend hours on the phone talking
with others in the support group.

Steve has still never spoken to his birth mother. He tried writing to her a
second time, sending a journal about his life—but she returned it unopened. He
messages her occasionally on Facebook, sending photos of grandkids and puppies
he’s raised. Every year, he wishes her a happy birthday. She has not replied,
but she has also not blocked him.

When the journal came back unopened, Steve decided to try messaging his mother’s
cousin—the other woman he’d initially thought could be his birth mom. He yearned
for some kind of connection with someone in his biological family. He wrote to
the cousin about his mom—but not his dad—and she  actually replied. She told him
that she and his mom had been close as children, Steve recounted, but she did
not know about a pregnancy. To her, it had seemed like her cousin one day “fell
off the face of the Earth,” he says. She agreed to read his journal, and the two
of them soon began speaking on the phone about their families.

Months later, Steve felt like he could finally share the truth about his
biological father, and the cousin again accepted him for who he was. They met
for the first time in 2017 when she was visiting a nearby town, and she later
invited Steve and Michelle to Thanksgiving. Last year, she extended another
invitation to a large family gathering. Steve’s immediate biological family was
not there, but hers was, and they all knew about him and his mom and his dad.
They greeted him with hugs, and they took photos together as a family. “It felt
like a relief,” he told me, like a burden had been lifted from him. In this
family, he was not a secret.


Sarah Zhang is a staff writer at The Atlantic.



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