A government sponsored ethics panel has recommended that Germany scrap its laws banning incest between consenting adult siblings

A government sponsored ethics panel has recommended that Germany scrap its laws banning incest between consenting adult siblings. By a vote of 14 to 9, the Deutsche Ethikrat last week endorsed a paper entitled Inzestverbot that held the “fundamental right of adult siblings to sexual self-determination is to be weighed more heavily than the abstract idea of protection of the family.” Responding to a decision by the European Court of Human Rights that upheld a ruling by a Saxon court that held the state had the duty to separate physically a brother and sister who had four children together (two of whom were born disabled), the Ethikrat said the risks of genetic mutation for children born from incestuous acts of sexual congress could not outweigh the right to free sexual expression. “The criminal law (against incest) is not an appropriate means of protecting a taboo. It is not designed to enforce moral standards, but to preserve the individual from harm,” a member of the panel told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. A spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government told the German press they would not be acting upon the panel’s advice.