Blood test for marriage...
I've never heard of this before. Why would they need a blood test in order to get a marriage license?!
shareBlood tests are to insure that neither spouse is carrying an STD, and they've been around since the days when premarital sex was less common than it is now, and some STDs were incurable or extremely difficult to cure. Oscar Wilde was cured of his syphilis by ingesting mercury. It worked, but would you like to swallow mercury?
Blood tests are meant to safeguard the health not only of the spouses, but also of any children they have. A woman who has gonorrhea can transmit it to her baby as it passes through the birth canal, and the baby can go blind if it doesn't receive silver nitrate eyedrops--which is now standard treatment for a hospital-born baby.
As an adult, Helen Keller made her living by lecturing on blindness and raising funds for blindness-related research and charities. Her speeches were considered scandalous because she was frank about the relationship between infant blindness and STDs. She had not lost her own sight that way, BTW; she was born normal, but went blind and deaf after an illness at the age of 19 months.
There are states which don't require blood tests for a marriage license, and Google can probably tell you which ones. However, if you contemplate marrying someone who insists on getting married in one of those states, it's worth asking why. It sounds as if s/he has something to hide.
That's outdated information. Virtually no states require blood tests. Nor was testing strictly for STDs. There are hereditary diseases that can be detected via blood tests, such as sickle cell anemia or thalassemia. Blood tests can insure that two carriers of such diseases know the risks of having children together. Getting the defective chromosome from both parents can be fatal. Testing also screens for rubella, but that's not a major problem.
shareForgive me for sounding stupid but I thought Helen Keller was deaf, blind and mute.
Dragonzord! Mastodon! Pterodactyl! Triceratops! Saber Toothed Tiger! Tyrannosaurus!
You're not stupid. She was all of those, although she learned to talk as an adult. She did it by placing her hand on the face of her constant companion, first Annie Sullivan, then two other women after Annie died. When they spoke, she felt the facial muscles they used, and she did the same.
She also said that if only one of her senses could be restored to her, she'd choose hearing over sight. (People would actually ask her that.) But as a career path she chose to concentrate on blindness prevention, probably because the cause of many cases of infant blindness was known, and was preventable; and there's no comparable disease that causes deafness.
The cause was gonorrhea, which an infected mother could pass to her baby during birth. It was preventable by men's not tomcatting around with infected women and then having sex with uninfected women. As an unmarried woman, she wasn't supposed to know there even was such a thing as sex. By speaking frankly, she attracted more attention than someone else might have.