Inspired by a public conversation between a rabbi and a medical ethicist, in this article, I will take a strong stance against the practice of routine neonatal circumcision in the United States. I’ll begin by outlining the central moral question at stake, will trace the history of circumcision and its origins in paranoid fears about masturbation, debunk the claimed medical benefits, describe the sexual harm in detail and end with suggestions as to how to preserve the rights of the child.
Brief Context
I was prompted to write this by an entry for the Impossible Conversations competition held by Letter. A $2500 prize will be awarded to the correspondents who are able to have the most civil, productive discussion of an important topic on which they have a major disagreement. (See the end of this article on how to enter.) The on-going letter exchange on circumcision, between medical ethicist Brian D. Earp and theologian Rabbi Josh Yuter, is a strong contender. I’ll be using their conversation as the jumping-off point for a deep dive into the subject. Their full correspondence can be found here. I’ve written about our aims at Letter in more detail here.
Defining Harm and Wrong
Brian outlines his position in his opening letter: “It wrongs a person, regardless of their sex or gender, to cut their genitals without their informed consent, unless there is a relevant medical emergency.” Josh agrees that, at heart, “the essential moral wrong is violating a person’s bodily autonomy without their consent.” Their conversation, he suggests, should focus not on potential medical benefits, nor on the special significance of circumcision for Jews, nor even, as Brian puts it, on “whether or not it causes them (net) physical or emotional harm.” The fundamental question is consent. However, as Josh points out, “all societies have limits on individual consent.”
Compulsory vaccination of infants is one example. Could circumcision be analogous, something imposed on individuals for the good of society? People often cite the World Health Organisation’s circumcision campaign in Africa as an example of this. I believe this campaign is extremely ethically and medically questionable (see below)—but if neonatal circumcision did significantly reduce prevalence of HIV, this might be an acceptable trade off.
Josh raises this point more generally, by suggesting that consent could be overridden by moral considerations that “could be religious based on certain traditions (i.e. to fulfil a supernatural will), or may even be social (e.g. essential for group cohesion).” Brian argues that genital autonomy is a fundamental human right that takes precedence over everything except medical necessity:
Almost everybody, regardless of their cultural or religious upbringing, believes it is a serious moral wrong to touch, cut, or otherwise interfere with a person’s genitals without their consent … it is one of the worst things you can do to a person—one of the most profound ways of disrespecting their personal boundaries, over which they ought to have final say.
We can find similar arguments in their strongest form in the controversial chapter on rape in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. Pinker questions the shibboleth that rape is about power, not sex by arguing, among other points, that the horror of rape lies not in the physical harm caused—victims might be completely uninjured—but in the fundamental wrong done to the person. Even having no memory of the event—because it took place in early childhood or the victim was unconscious, had dementia etc.—does not mitigate the ethical infringement in the slightest.
The burden of proof here should be on the advocates of non-consensual handling of another person’s genitals. This is often forgotten in debates about circumcision, in which opponents of the practice are expected to prove that it causes sexual harm and has no medical benefits. Both correspondents acknowledge this, but Josh believes that there can be valid non-medical reasons for altering someone else’s genitalia and that our common moral intuitions about genital autonomy may be flawed. I’m looking forward to seeing how this conversation continues. Meanwhile, I’d like to make my own case.
The Masturbation Panic
Did you make fornication with yourself, took your manly member in your hand, and so slide your foreskin and move [it] with your own hand so as by delight to eject seed from yourself?
—Eleventh-century confessional text, cited in Robert Darby’s A Surgical Temptation
Routine medical circumcision of infants and boys first became popular in late Victorian England. Though never a majority practice, it was widespread among the British middle and upper classes from the 1890s until the 1940s. From the UK, the vogue spread to the other Anglophone countries. The practice remained very popular until the mid-1970s in New Zealand, Canada and Australia. The US continues the practice: in America, around 50–60% of male infants are still routinely circumcised (down from a high of 85%). In 2007, the World Health Organisation estimated that one in three men have been circumcised worldwide—but the majority are Muslims, circumcised for religious reasons (see also here). The US is the only developed western country that routinely performs non-religious circumcision on infants. Since the practice was adopted from Britain, to understand its origins we need to trace its history in the mother country.
Prior to the Victorian era, few westerners were circumcised. In classical Greece and Rome, the intact male body was considered an object of beauty and circumcision thought of as a mutilation; the Catholic Church explicitly banned the practice for Christians in 1442; westerners often associated it with the outlandish heathen customs of Jews and Muslims; and scare stories of Christian captives forcibly circumcised by Barbary pirates abounded. For opinion on the practice to experience such a dramatic reversal from revulsion to enthusiasm took an emergency. Early advocates hoped that it could prevent a practice they believed threatened the fabric of society: masturbation.
“The heinous sin of self-pollution,” as a bestselling medical treatise calls it, was held responsible for a litany of diseases from whooping cough to cerebral palsy. The 1896 Medical Record warns of “infantile convulsions, hip-joint disease, kidney disease, paralysis, eczema, stammering, dyspepsia, pulmonary tuberculosis, constipation, locomotor ataxia, rheumatism, idiocy, insanity, and lust,” while another popular medical source describes the consequences as “debility of body and of mind—infecundity—epilepsy—idiotism—extreme wretchedness and even death itself.” In an attempt to prevent masturbation, many penises were cauterised, blistered, burnt with acid—and circumcised. The imaginary disease of spermatorrhea—unwanted ejaculations—was likewise held responsible for a world of ills and treated with the insertion of needles through the perineum and into the prostate, with catheterization of the urethra and bladder with a caustic solution of silver nitrate and, later, with circumcision.
Like their predecessors in the more sex-positive seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most early advocates of circumcision recognised that the foreskin was a source of exquisite erotic sensation, the locus of “such tender and sensible flesh, that nature hath there established the throne of sensitivity and pleasure.” As Robert Darby has shown in his detailed study, A Surgical Temptation, there was almost unanimous agreement on this point, from both enthusiasts and detractors.
It is only since the sexual revolution of the 1960s that advocates of circumcision have begun to claim that removing the foreskin does not affect sexual pleasure. Until that time, almost everyone agreed that it does—that was one of the main reasons why they championed it.
There is a misconception that, since Victorian Britain was a patriarchal society, its denizens’ well-known anxieties about sex led them to police and pathologise female sexuality, while allowing men free rein. In a traditional society, many argue, moral double standards encourage men to oppress women for perceived faults they themselves indulge with impunity. There is some truth to this: the consequences of being pronounced a fallen woman—a category that included many rape victims—were more dire than those of being thought a libertine. But this presents a vastly oversimplified picture. The Victorians observed that men, on average, are more motivated by sex than women—and many of them found the male sex drive debasing and bestial and attempted to suppress it, especially in children, who are easiest to control. Men were encouraged to regard their natural desires as sinful and pathological. Wrestling with his homosexuality, John Addington Symonds, for example, confesses that he “treated the purely sexual appetite … as a beast to be suppressed and curbed, and latterly to be downtrampled by the help of surgeons and their cautery of sexual organs.” He found many doctors all too willing to assist him.
The release of semen was thought to debilitate men; sex was considered depleting, even within marriage; false analogies were made between arousal and irritation, the contractions of orgasm and epileptic fits; the natural sleepiness that follows climax was likened to nervous exhaustion. Natural sexual impulses were demonised—no wonder an integral part of the normal male genitalia was considered, by some, “a source of annoyance, danger, suffering and death.” In an age without reliable contraception, fears of overpopulation, stoked by Malthus’ 1798 Essay, probably also contributed to the desire to curb male lust.
Contemporary commentators did not understand the nature of the male sex drive or its vital evolutionary purpose. Its mechanisms are neurological and hormonal. It cannot be significantly dampened by reducing the touch sensitivity of the penis or removing the foreskin. To my knowledge, there is no evidence to suggest that men who have been circumcised are less motivated by sex, more likely to remain chaste, less inclined towards sexual violence or less likely to masturbate. The Victorians were trying to control the impulses of men’s minds by castigating their bodies. They administered ever more extreme corporal punishments in their efforts to control male desire—a totally futile endeavour.
The contemporary purity movement was equally obsessed with keeping the mind free from impure thoughts and the body free from dirt. Following John Snow’s discovery, in 1854, that drinking water contaminated with sewage caused cholera, the Victorians carried out major urban sanitation projects, clearing slum districts, in which poverty and overcrowding provided ideal conditions for the spread of epidemics. Many doctors believed that, like cities, bodies had pockets of squalor where filth could fester, breeding disease.
William Morton’s discovery of anaesthesia in 1846 and Lister’s development of germ theory in the 1860s facilitated major advances in surgery, which had previously been terrifying, agonising and extremely dangerous. Using the new anaesthetic and aseptic techniques, surgeons excised supposedly vestigial body parts—such as tonsils, adenoids, teeth and even colons—which they believed might harbour germs, as a preventative measure. Easily accessible, the foreskin was an obvious candidate for prophylactic removal. Despite its practical uses in surgery, germ theory was little understood by many doctors. Older theories persisted: among them the idea that disease could occur spontaneously, as dirt trapped in bodily nooks and crannies—such as beneath the foreskin—fermented. Naturally, then, circumcision was adopted as a preventative measure against venereal disease, until the link between foreskins and syphilis was disproven.
In the 1930s, as paranoia over the ill effects of masturbation began to subside and doctors were becoming much less inclined to view the male sex drive as intrinsically pathological, circumcision became less popular. The medical debate turned to whether or not it prevented other diseases. Even at the height of the craze, only around a third of Brits had been circumcised, making comparative studies easy. Since the operation was not without serious risks, some British surgeons had always remained opposed. Douglas Gairdner’s widely read 1949 paper in the British Medical Journal, “The Fate of the Foreskin,” successfully debunked many of the claims made by proponents and emphasised the risks of death and deformity. Gairdner’s arguments were to carry the day.
A Cure in Search of a Disease: Medical Circumcision in the US Today
What dreadful thing will happen if a baby’s prepuce [foreskin] is left entirely alone?
—R. Ainsworth, British Medical Journal, 1935
Meanwhile, however, the practice had been exported to the US. Early American proponents, like their British counterparts, viewed circumcision as an effective means of dulling penile sensation and hence preventing masturbation. John Harvey Kellogg considered it a remedy for masturbation in boys—he suggested burning girls’ clitorises with carbolic acid for the same purpose. He even advised against using anaesthetic: “as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment.”
But, even when attitudes towards sex liberalised, Americans didn’t abandon the practice. Instead, advocates switched rationale. After the sexual revolution of the 1960s, when reducing erotic feeling was considered a bad thing, suddenly circumcision was claimed to have no effect on sensation—instead, it was said to be more hygienic and to reduce the risk of certain illnesses.
Circumcision is a surgical anomaly: it involves the removal of healthy tissue from an especially vulnerable patient group—new-borns—without consent and without imminent medical necessity. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)’s much criticised—and now officially expired—policy statement on circumcision from 2012 is therefore curiously worded:
Existing scientific evidence demonstrates potential medical benefits of newborn male circumcision; however, these data are not sufficient to recommend routine neonatal circumcision. In circumstances in which there are potential benefits and risks, yet the procedure is not essential to the child’s current well-being, parents should determine what is in the best interest of the child.
“Existing scientific evidence demonstrates,” the statement confidently begins, only to undercut that with the vagueness of “potential benefits” and data which are “not sufficient” to recommend the practice. The surgery is prophylactic, recommended on a just in case basis, and the responsibility for this irreversible medical decision is delegated to the parents.
The language implies that parents are often called upon to decide whether to submit a child to medically non-essential surgical bodily modifications—yet this seems to be a relatively rare occurrence. For example, a parent cannot schedule an appendectomy unless her child has appendicitis or is considered at high risk because of an abnormal CT scan. According to Harvard Medical School, inflamed or enlarged tonsils can cause conditions like sleep apnea, “which can be serious and lead to health and behavioral problems.” Yet, even in the case of recurrent infections, they recommend tonsillectomy only in extreme cases, stressing that “the decision should not be taken lightly.” Parents can opt to have a child’s wisdom teeth extracted prophylactically, but the way the decision-making process is described is tellingly different from the AAP’s justification for circumcision: “we must rely on the clinician’s experience and expertise in recognizing the likelihood that pathology will develop and his or her ability to communicate this in realistic terms to the patient.” The emphasis is on weighing up the possibility of future medical harm—not on respecting the cultural preferences of parents. Asking parents to make major clinical decisions without clear guidance from doctors places an impossible burden on them and is an unconscionable way for the medical community to shirk responsibility.
Four main conditions that circumcision is said to protect against are usually cited by the procedure’s advocates: phimosis, urinary tract infections (UTIs), HIV/AIDS and penile cancer.
Pathological phimosis is an uncommon condition in which the foreskin is uncomfortably tight and cannot easily be retracted. Treatment options include steroid creams or other ointments, which have around 90% effectiveness, and only occasionally may surgery be necessary (but even then, it is a minor surgery called preputioplasty—which preserves as much of the foreskin as possible—that is normally indicated, rather than wholesale circumcision). Physiological phimosis, however, is not a medical condition at all, but a natural stage of development. In early childhood, the foreskin adheres tightly to the penis, like a fingernail to its bed, forming a protective sheath. The adhesions attaching foreskin to glans gradually dissolve until, at some point between birth and puberty—and, in almost all cases, by the age of eighteen—the organ becomes loose, mobile and easily retractable, a process speeded along by children’s natural tendency to fondle and explore. If the foreskin is prematurely, forcibly retracted, it can cause tearing, bleeding and scarring and may make the child more susceptible to infections. The AAP has been widely criticised for failing to adequately describe penile anatomy in their guidelines and it seems likely that many American doctors and nurses, unfamiliar with the intact penis, may be continuing to cause injury by forcibly retracting boys’ foreskins or advising parents to do so.
Urinary tract infections are far more common in girls than in boys. Only around 1% of boys will have a UTI before age ten and most will not go to develop subsequent infections. This means that it takes one hundred circumcisions to prevent one—probably easily treatable—urinary tract infection. UTIs can be treated with antibiotics and usually clear up within a week.
Studies of heterosexual female-to-male transmission of HIV conducted on adult African men showed an absolute reduction in risk of 1–2%, though the studies were stopped early and there was no long-term follow up beyond twenty-four months (see also here). Some critics have expressed concern that, if circumcision is touted as preventing HIV, the circumcised men may neglect to use condoms, putting them and their partners at greater risk (the evidence for this so far is mixed). Given that, even if circumcised, you still need to practise safe sex to be protected, the operation does not seem like a very effective measure, even in the African context—and HIV from heterosexual contact is very uncommon in the US. In any case, these adult sexual concerns are irrelevant to infants.
Penile cancer is a rare disease, mostly affecting older men with severe hygiene problems—for example, those experiencing homelessness—who have neglected to seek treatment for early symptoms. Since neither penile cancer nor heterosexually transmitted HIV are likely to impact children, anyone concerned about these risks could be circumcised as a consenting adult.
The objection that an intact penis is intrinsically unhygienic is a frivolous reason for surgery. The female genitalia have a lot more flaps, folds and creases; the vagina produces natural secretions ranging from clear slippery liquids to thick, sticky blood and is rarely odourless. In the west, we do not advocate surgery to try to correct this “problem”—and rightly so. Genital organs do not need to be sterile and to prevent them from becoming overly pungent, you only need to wash.
Hygiene is often cited as the reason why the Israelites—desert dwellers with little access to water—advocated circumcision, and given as a good reason to imitate them. However, this motive is never mentioned in the Torah or midrash. In fact, the early Jews’ ignorance of germ theory and sepsis made the operation extremely dangerous, especially for new-borns, whose immune systems are not yet fully developed. Traditional practices like tearing the foreskin with a fingernail and metzitzah increased the risks. Rabbinical commentary suggests that deaths from post-circumcision infections were common in earlier periods. Circumcision was undertaken for spiritual reasons, in spite of the health risks, not as a health practice.
Teeth require much more elaborate care than penises and are highly prone to decay, which can have serious sequelae—caries has been implicated in heart disease and periodontitis is dangerous in pregnancy—but most dentists are extremely reluctant to perform extractions. Caps, crowns, root canals and other treatments are employed to preserve as much as possible of even a diseased or rotten tooth; uncomfortable and costly braces and Invisalign are used to reposition aesthetically challenging or obstructive teeth. We do not usually remove teeth prophylactically, despite our species’ well known love of sugar and susceptibility to caries. It seems therefore odd to suggest removing a body part which can be cleaned in a few seconds, by retracting and rinsing with water.
Sexual Sensation
I believe that the intention of the rite [of circumcision] was to … advance … the chastity of the race by blunting mechanically the sensibility of the organ of sexual appetite.
—Anonymous letter to the Lancet, 1874
The foreskin is frequently dismissed as a flap of skin. Yet skin varies greatly in its haptic qualities. The skin of the fingertip is far more sensitive than that of the elbow; the skin of the clitoral hood is more responsive to touch than that of the heel. The mobile skin system of the foreskin is richly supplied with blood vessels and nerves, including a dense network of fine touch receptors. It may also serve to protect the skin of the glans from thickening and keratinising due to constant exposure and friction.
Despite the foreskin’s profusion of nerve cells, pro-circumcision activists frequently argue that the operation results in no loss of erotic sensation. Of course, erotic feelings are, like other qualia, difficult to quantify and compare. There are strong indications, however, that feeling is reduced in circumcised men.
First, studies using objective methods to measure sensitivity thresholds have consistently shown that the foreskin is the most light-touch sensitive part of the penis. Removing the foreskin obviously eliminates any sensation that would be experienced in that excised tissue, with its particular sensitivity to light touch.
Additional evidence for greater sensitivity in the uncircumcised is behavioural. This is anecdotal evidence, but it should not therefore be dismissed, as it comprises observational data of a kind we happily use to make deductions in other situations. For example, if we see someone scratching lightly we conclude she has a slight itch. If we see her scratching hard and repeatedly, digging her nails in, we assume she feels a strong itch or irritation. Likewise, if we compare the masturbation techniques of circumcised versus intact men (see here for an illustrative video of the latter), we note that the former generally grasp the penis more firmly and rub much faster and harder. This strongly suggests that more pressure is required to achieve the same level of sensation. We also note that uncircumcised men do not usually opt to touch the glans directly. Instead, they generally manipulate the foreskin itself, often holding it lightly between two fingers and a thumb and moving it backwards and forwards over the glans. This would be an inexplicable choice if the foreskin were merely an obstruction. This behaviour implies that the feel and/or movement of the foreskin enhances sensory pleasure.
It is also possible to guess at the sensitivity of our sexual partners from their physical and verbal responses. While individuals clearly vary a lot, direct experience and the testimony of those who have sex with men reveal certain patterns. Some lighter touches, which elicit delighted responses from intact men, are barely felt or even go unnoticed by those who have been circumcised. More pressure is required to spark pleasure: the threshold is higher. Like the clitoris, the glans in intact men can also become overly sensitive and, as with the clitoral hood, touching through the foreskin dials that feeling down from discomfort to pleasure.
During penetrative sex, intact men can often also enjoy gentler, slower movements, while circumcised men require more vigorous and sustained thrusting to maintain erection. This can be a disadvantage for female partners, since many women report that they get most pleasure from stimulation of the external clitoris. Gentler actions that allow the lovers to rub their pubic areas together during intercourse can be very rewarding for both parties. Also, not everyone enjoys being on the receiving end of sustained forceful pumping actions and this can be frustrating for the lovers, if the man has been circumcised and needs very strong movements to remain sufficiently stimulated. I mention these details because female preference is often cited as a justification for circumcision. Nevertheless, the primary consideration here should be the sexual experience and wishes of the man—about which we can know nothing while he is an infant.
Heterosexual circumcised men frequently argue that they do not wish to be more sensitive because that would lead to premature ejaculation, leaving their female partners unsatisfied. This implies that sensitivity is a volume dial and that the only variations are up or down. It seems likely, however, that different degrees of firmness may produce different sensations, just as being tickled feels different from receiving a deep tissue massage. Dr Ali Amjad Rizvi has described sex without a foreskin as like “listening to a symphony orchestra without the string section”: the light touch receptors produce a distinct timbre of pleasure. In addition, while it is possible to reduce sensitivity—by using condoms or desensitising gels or masturbating to orgasm before sex—it’s very difficult to increase it. Sensitivity varies among individuals and tends to decrease with age: those with a naturally slightly less sensitive glans, as well as older men, may particularly benefit from remaining intact.
Circumcised men are frequently resistant to the idea that they may be less sensitive than the intact. No one wishes to feel sexually inadequate or lesser—nor should they. Imagination, creativity, empathy, tenderness—all of these make an enormous difference in our experience of sex. Even in casual encounters, we generally relate to each other as people, not as mere collections of anatomical parts. Women vary greatly—arguably more than men—in our sexual responsiveness: some enjoy multiple orgasms, others have difficulty reaching orgasm at all. But penises and vaginas are attached to people. For caring people, finding ways to pleasure each other is a loving game. We explore our partners’ needs and preferences: we don’t judge them. Always, we must work with what we have and respect the needs and wishes of the individual partner. Comparisons are especially odious in sexual relationships.
One common argument made in favour of circumcised penises is that some people prefer their appearance. This seems counterintuitive. Equipped with a foreskin in all primate species, the male sexual organs have co-evolved with their female equivalents over millennia and their appearance may even have been partially shaped by female choice. Distaste for foreskins may be the result of unfamiliarity with intact penises among American women in particular and of the prevalence of pornography. It can be easier to see what is going on without a foreskin partially obscuring the view and, in porn, of course, visual considerations are more important than the pleasure of the participants. That some are repulsed by the natural appearance of the human body and prefer surgically altered to intact genitalia seems troubling and can reflect sexist or misanthropic attitudes. But consenting adults should choose their sexual partners using whatever criteria they wish. However, imposing cosmetic surgery on an infant because of adult preferences seems perverse.
The Rights of the Child
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and the daughters of life’s longing for itself.
—Kahlil Gibran, “On Children.”
I often hear the argument that, since an infant retains no memory of his circumcision, he cannot be said to suffer. This implies that suffering is an entirely future-based phenomenon and that we cannot suffer in the moment. Yet a baby’s high-pitched screams, struggles and sometimes catatonic silence all suggest that he can and does experience pain. We don’t use this reasoning to excuse any other torture inflicted on children. Also, can we be sure that such a traumatic experience never has detrimental long-term effects, even if it is not consciously remembered? If one of a child’s first experiences on entering the world is to be strapped down and subjected to excruciating pain, can we be certain this will never have any effects on his emotional and psychological development? Some research suggests adverse consequences. It seems both prudent and humane to err on the side of caution here.
What About Those Who Enjoy Their Circumcised State?
Many circumcised men feel perfectly happy with their penises. They have no memory of any trauma, no direct means of comparison. They cannot tell what they might have felt had they been intact—and are delighted by what they are able to feel now. For many, sex is a joyful experience. That’s wonderful. The problem is those who aren’t happy: the men who are conscious of their reduced sensation and sexual possibilities, who have scarring, adhesions or deformities as a result of botched circumcisions or who are resentful at the violation of their bodily autonomy. Circumcision is irreversible. The remaining skin can sometimes be stretched to provide the appearance of a foreskin, but nerve cells cannot be regrown. If you are intact, you have a choice. You can be circumcised painlessly, under anaesthetic, as an adult: a low-risk procedure in the west. But if you have been cut, you have no choice. You cannot be uncircumcised.
Circumcision is not, in itself, a mutilation. Some men choose to have it done in adulthood—though, tellingly, this is an unusual choice. Some natal male trans women even choose to have the entire penis removed, during gender reassignment surgery. These are valid options for informed, consenting adults. But no one should have the right to remove healthy genital tissue or to manipulate your sexual organs against your will or without your consent. We should perform irreversible surgeries on children only when the child’s life, health or full development are threatened. Children’s bodies are not the property of their parents, to be modified to reflect our desires or values. Most parents agree—but many have been misled by the medical profession or have not fully thought through the ways in which forced circumcision violates these principles.
All this also applies to children of religious parents. The right to bodily integrity is a human right and, like all human rights, it is lodged in the individual, not the group. A Jewish or Muslim boy should enjoy as full human rights as any other child. As adults, they may decide to be circumcised as a religious sacrament. But this must be their free choice. Circumcision is said to be a covenant between god and man, signed on the body: how can an agreement be valid when one of the parties was coerced and did not even know what was happening? This genital modification is deeply meaningful to many Jewish and Muslim men, as a spiritual practice and marker of identity and it can and should remain so for those who wish—but it should be delayed until the person concerned is old enough to freely choose it.
Circumcised fathers may want their sons to look like them. Wanting your children to resemble you is a deep-seated and natural urge. But, for most parents, there is an even stronger wish: to see their child happy. Why risk permanently altering his body in a way he may come to resent and which you may later regret? He can always opt to be circumcised painlessly, in adulthood, under anaesthesia. Why not give him the freedom of choice you were denied?
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83 comments
The practice of genitally mutilating any child of any sex is pure evil & must be abolished forever. I resent the fact “Dr.’s” genitally mutilated my penis as a baby in a bizarre blood\flesh sacrifice ritual to the cruel & evil Abrahamic “God”. I will forever stand with the Darkside & nature in defiance of this evil being, the Yang\solar power has proven itself evil over & over again.
I hate these cretins that harm children & animals so much I would gladly wipe them all out, my life means nothing to you?! Your lives mean nothing to me either, my biggest regret in life is not being able to snatch the life out of the butcher that harmed me as an infant. If the old geezer was still alive I’d gladly go to prison or even get lethal injection to see the life drain out of his evil eyes.
Sadly enough for me the creep is already long dead & gone:( In order to have a truly modern society, any harms against children & animals must be outlawed, there is no other way…
What you are referring to is False Yang. True Yang would protect the innocent and not harm them. It’s a corrupt form just like how False Yin would be like how crybullies pretend to be victims to gain sympathy while they are literally the instigators and the ones victimizing other people. The evil and corrupt always cloaks itself in righteousness but it’s just a thin veneer covering over injured ego and malice.
I’m going by the millenia of history where “yang” cultures have obliterated the yin cultures of ancient times, things like the Conquistadors, Manifest Destiny, the Salem Witch “trials” just to name a few instances, plus the Bible where genocide was perpetrated upon yin people by the so called yangs\forces of light.
Just because we don’t grovel before the cruel & evil Abrahamic “God” doesn’t give you the right to attack us & wipe us out. Nor does it mean you have the right to harm chldren’s body’s & sacrifice innocent animals to an evil “God”.
This is OK to you?!
You Have to Kill
This is what the Lord of hosts has to say: ˜I will punish what Amalek did to Israel when he barred
his way as he was coming up from Egypt. Go, now, attack Amalek, and deal with him and all
that he has under the ban. Do not spare him, but kill men and women, children and infants, oxen
and sheep, camels and asses. (1 Samuel 15:2-3 NAB)
Cursed be he who does the Lords work remissly, cursed he who holds back his sword from blood.
(Jeremiah 48:10 NAB)
The Danites Kill the Next Town (Joshua 19:47 NAB)
Kills Some More (Jeremiah 15:1-4 NLT)
Promises More Killing (Ezekiel 35:7-9 NLT)
Destruction of Ai .so the entire population of Ai was wiped out that day“ twelve thousand in all.
For Joshua kept holding as the LORD had commanded Joshua.
Killing at Jericho
When the people heard the sound of the horns, they shouted as loud as they could. Suddenly, the
walls of Jericho collapsed, and the Israelites charged straight into the city from every side and
captured it. They completely destroyed everything in it “ men and women, young and old, cattle,
sheep, donkeys“ everything. (Joshua 6:20-21 NLT)
A killing frenzy in the Abrahamic world !!!
Apparently, circumcision can rewire the infant brain. As a long-term believer in the plasticity of the brain, it seems a no-brainer: an infant whose only previous discomfort has been birth itself is suddenly introduced to the sharp, traumatic pain of circumcision at a time when his brain is just forming. This article agrees:
http://www.starshipearththebigpicture.com/2015/03/13/study-circumcision-permanently-alters-the-brain-researchers-threatened/
Although the website itself may seem a little dodgy, one can google Dr. Tinari. I’d be curious to know if his experiment has been replicated, or at least attempted. Regardless of its validity, one cannot deny that the practice is barbaric and unnecessary.
That story was exposed as a likely fabrication some time ago: http://circfacts.org/debunking-corner/#debk4 Intactivists have a history of making up bogus stories of circumcision harm. You should not be so quick to believe everything you read in the internet.
I don’t care about some story being “fabricated” or not, i only care how genital mutilation has harmed myself & others. You only show you’re some kind of weirdo too, being so “concerned” with whether or not children’s genitals are being destroyed in some bizarre religious ritual or not.
Don’t be a circumfetishist, try being normal for once in your life. There is no scentific reason to harm any child’s genitals, you defending the harm makes you a creep too. Cut your own junk up if you want to & leave the rest of us alone.
Long overdue. There’s simply no reason for this practice to continue. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/male-genital-mutilation-a-gross-breach-of-baby-s-bodily-integrity-1.545566
Agreed!
The basic problem here I think is to suggest that an infant’s body and their autonomy over it is the same thing as an adult’s body and their autonomy over it. It is this conflation that allows us to begin serious attention to the matter at hand given the salient paragraph:
“Almost everybody, regardless of their cultural or religious upbringing, believes it is a serious moral wrong to touch, cut, or otherwise interfere with a person’s genitals without their consent … it is one of the worst things you can do to a person—one of the most profound ways of disrespecting their personal boundaries, over which they ought to have final say.”
And so we come back to the eternal question: “Who is a person?”
Let us then acknowledge that the salient paragraph appears almost absolutely true for adults, but hardly ever true for infants, or else we would need to ask their permission for a diaper change and wipe. As we bring the argument forward as the child ages, it is that decision which falls more in favor of the adult person. Clearly the adult interest in pleasurable sexual function draws attention to what might have been were all left au natural.
It seems to me that things fall back to the cultural interests and desires of the parents and that there can be no consideration, absent a significant health risk (to be defined) that should outweigh their decision to circumcise or not. These are matters that we have decided over time that fall most specifically to the mother. To make an exception to this, given a proper view of the rights of {the unborn, infants, children} all non-adults is to open a warehouse of worm cans.
Shouldn’t I have had a right to remain uncircumcised falls in line with such questions as:
– Shouldn’t I have had a right to be breast fed?
– Shouldn’t I have had a right for my mother to be in good health?
– Shouldn’t I have had a right not to be fed meat?
Worms.
Cobb, these are false analogies. While, yes, parents are permitted to care for their children, they are NOT permitted to harm them. Parents do not own their children’s bodies. For example, you can, of course, change your young daughter’s nappy and clean her. If fact, you must. You have a duty of care and should keep your child clean, feed her, look after her health etc. You may not, however, put your penis inside her vagina. Nor may you cut off her arm or put out one of her eyes. You don’t have a right to harm her.
Parents are permitted to handle their children’s genitals in order to care for them but NOT in order to harm them. This is a crucial difference—THE crucial difference here.
You say you don’t consider it mutilation if it is done with permission to a consenting adult in order to spare their feelings for what I think you find unequivocally harmful. I think a parent’s consideration might weigh as much as an adult’s feelings. But I understand and respect the purist position. Might we agree that this applies to ear piercings? Or at the very least have some culturally neutral scale of ‘harm’? I mean cutting off an arm is much more harmful than scarification most would agree. How would one measure what I think you consider not so physically harmful but psychologically harmful in your hedge against those of us already harmed? Are there standards for this?
There may be argument regarding standards, but ear piercings is not one of them, but a straw man argument, not at all a valid comparison. There is no amputation of the earlobe, and it is not irreversible,
The standard present here today absolutely clear unless one chooses to ignore it. It is that of personal bodily autonomy.
If we seek further, we can cite law granting women protection against FGM (20 years now), then extrapolate that out to cite the fourteenth amendment demanding equal protection under the law. However, there is no standard that can be cited granting a parent the right to permanently alter a child’s genitalia.
I accidentally pressed “dislike” on your comment, DJ Roukin. Actually, I agree with it completely.
I don’t consider it mutilation if an informed consenting adult chooses to alter his or her own genitals. (However, in the case of the African adult men, arguably, those undertaking the procedure are misinformed and therefore their consent is compromised—this is medical malpractice on the part of the WHO.) Also, if someone tells me he or she had genitals altered as a child and is happy with that as an adult, I won’t argue. I don’t want to attempt to force people who feel happy with their genitals to see themselves as mutilated. But that does not give those people the right to damage the genitals of other children.
I don’t think it’s helpful to scold well-meaning but misinformed parents. I blame the medical profession for behaving in clear contravention to the Hippocratic oath. We should also refrain from ear piercing, scarification and other ritual and cosmetic practices that produce permanent or near permanent results without urgent medical need. On the scale of these things, circumcision is MUCH worse than ear piercing, but less harmful than removing an arm. This does not justify circumcision. Not medically necessary and permanently harms the child? Don’t do it.
Your parents should not have a final say in whether your body is whole or unharmed. The parents should NOT deliberately harm their child nor should doctors be complicit in doing so.
I consider circumcision physically harmful in all cases. In some cases, it is also psychologically harmful (perhaps not always—that is hard to measure).
False equivalency. No comparison made in that argument parallels permanent alteration of one’s genitals, and there is no standard whatsoever, governed by any law that permits such. In fact, there is law protecting women from such practice as genital alteration (decided by others, including parents), but it is simply not extended to males, which teeters on a clear violation of the equal protection clause present in the 14th.
The “cultural interest and desires of the parents” is also an invalid argument as first, most parents are far to ill informed to make a valid decision. In fact, most people, as I see here, are ill informed as to the benefits of the intact penis, only inundated by auspicious studies put forth by those who either hold predjudic in favor, or stand to gain from the industry.
Anaheim, California
March 3, 1989
We recognize the inherent right of all human beings to an intact body. Without religious or racial prejudice, we affirm this basic human right.
We recognize the foreskin, clitoris and labia are normal, functional body parts.
Parents and/or guardians do not have the right to consent to the surgical removal or modification of their children’s normal genitalia.
Physicians and other health-care providers have a responsibility to refuse to remove or mutilate normal body parts.
The only persons who may consent to medically unnecessary procedures upon themselves are the individuals who have reached the age of consent (adulthood), and then only after being fully informed about the risks and benefits of the procedure.
We categorically state that circumcision has unrecognized victims.
In view of the serious physical and psychological consequences that we have witnessed in victims of circumcision, we hereby oppose the performance of a single additional unnecessary foreskin, clitoral, or labial amputation procedure.
We oppose any further studies which involve the performance of circumcision procedures upon unconsenting minors. We support any further studies which involve identification of the effects of circumcision.
Physicians and other health-care providers do have a responsibility to teach hygiene and the care of normal body parts and explain their normal anatomical and physiological development and function throughout life.
We place the medical community on notice that it is being held accountable for misconstruing the scientific database available on human circumcision in the world today.
Physicians who practice routine circumcisions are violating the first maxim of medical practice, Primum non nocere, “First, Do No Harm”, and anyone practicing genital mutilation is violating Article V of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
Citation:
Declaration of the First International Symposium on Circumcision. Adopted by the First International Symposium on Circumcision, Anaheim, California, March 3, 1989.
http://www.cirp.org/pages/intactivist/declaration/
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Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu (1905 – 1999) — born Israel Ehrenberg — was a British-American anthropologist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Montagu
THE ASHLEY MONTAGU RESOLUTION
TO END THE GENITAL MUTILATION OF CHILDREN WORLDWIDE
A Petition To The World Court, the Hague
http://www.nocirc.org/symposia/fourth/prescott.html
100% co-signed, Edward.
Rituals can include singing, dancing, and certainly also religious devotions, but no operations on the body of a child (child is human under 18 years).
Everyone has a right to intact genitalia. Here, children are dependent on our protection. We as the adults in this world must enforce that a child under the age of 18 years, girl or boy, is protected from any form of genital cutting. And of course boys deserve the same protection as girls. Male circumcision is MGM, male genital mutilation.
We should not cut or circumcize (i. e. mutilate) genitals, neither of male nor of female human beings. Male circumcision is male genital mutilation. Concerning the sensitivity (corpuscles respectively free nerve ends of the types: Merkel, Ruffini, Vater-Pacini, Meissner), the male foreskin has its equivalent not in the female (clitoral) foreskin, but in the clitoris itself.
As is well known, Islamic institutions such as the Indonesian Fatwa Council (MUI – Majelis Ulama Indonesia) do not call the “mild” forms of girls’ circumcision a mutilation (FGM). We see that differently. Even the least invasive form of girls’ circumcision has to be overcome, worldwide. There’s no such thing as ‘mild’ FGM. FGM = FGM Type I, II, III, IV (WHO | Classification of female genital mutilation).
Let us fight against FGM, female genital mutilation. But also circumcision is an archaic ritual mutilation that has no justification whatever and no place in a civilized society. So let us fight for intact genitals of both girls and boys and of both women and men.
Information and education remain an important weapon against HIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS is lifestyle-related. Behaviour change is important – not circumcision. Behaviour change means: fidelity after marriage, and the use of condoms. CONDOMS protect against HIV, circumcision does NOT.
It is not ok to protect the LITTLE boys and to mutilate the older boys. Ban the circumcision of all males under the age of 18 years old.
Edward von Roy, despite what you believe, medical circumcision is not forced on “older boys” nor do they consider it a mutilation of the penis. There are so many “older boys” choosing to undergo circumcision that many metropolises have clinics which fully cater to the procedure.
If circumcision was a “mutilation” of the penis, it would greatly impede or cause the penis to no longer function at all. Male circumcision in no way compares whatsoever to the removal of a female’s clitoris and only would if the entire penis were removed.
It ceases to amaze how many people do not seem to read, study anatomy and physiology. It’s also mind boggling many women don’t know where their clitoris is located but that’s another wearying subject.
The Frenular Delta
A New Preputial Structure
Ken McGrath – Senior Lecturer in Pathology, Faculty of Health Studies, Auckland University of Technology
http://www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/mcgrath1/
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Fine-touch pressure thresholds in the adult penis.
Sorrells ML, Snyder JL, Reiss MD, Eden C, Milos MF, Wilcox N, Van Howe RS.
The glans of the circumcised penis is less sensitive to fine touch than the glans of the uncircumcised penis. The transitional region from the external to the internal prepuce is the most sensitive region of the uncircumcised penis and more sensitive than the most sensitive region of the circumcised penis. Circumcision ablates the most sensitive parts of the penis.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17378847
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Male circumcision and sexual function in men and women: a survey-based, cross-sectional study in Denmark
Morten Frisch, Morten Lindholm, Morten Grønbæk
International Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 40, Issue 5, October 2011, Pages 1367–1381
https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/40/5/1367/658163
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“[B]y taking off the most sensitive part of the penis, we are really interfering with the way nature designed sex to be.”
Morris Sorrells, M.D.
https://www.doctorsopposingcircumcision.org/for-professionals/sexual-impact/
That is in inherently false statement. Please cite the data validating the claim that “so many older boys are choosing to undergo circumcision”.
Once that is done, please demonstrate how that, in any way, justifies the routine mutilation of baby genitals.
Further, before you propose to lecture others as to their lack of knowledge in the area of anatomy, perhaps you should do some study so as to fully understand the function of the foreskin.
FGM
Arab: khitan al-inath (ختان الإناث) “female circumcision”,
or: khitan al-banat (ختان البنات) “circumcision of the daughters”,
other terms:
ḫafḍ (خفض) or ḫifaḍ (خِفَض), (literally “lowering” or “deepening”),
Dawoodi Bohra (Shia muslim sect) khatna,
Indonesian: sunat perempuan (khitan wanita)
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FGM and Islam
Shia view
Shiite religious texts, such as the hadith transmitted by Al-Sadiq, state that „circumcision is makruma for women“ (noble but not required). FGM is performed within the Dawoodi Bohra community in India, Pakistan, Yemen and East Africa. In 2017 two doctors (Dr. Jumana Nagarwala and Dr. Fakhruddin Attar) and a third woman connected to the Dawoodi Bohra in Detroit, Michigan, were arrested on charges of conducting FGM on two seven-year-old girls in United States.
Sunni view
Different schools of Islamic jurisprudence have expressed different views on FGM. The Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence views it as makruma (noble but not required). The Hanbali school sees it as sunna (good practice), some Clerics see it as obligatory (wajib). For the Hanafi school it is preferred, and for the Shafi’i school FGM is obligatory (wajib).
Hadith.
The Prophet said to Umm Atiyya, or: to Umm Habiba:
أشمِّي ولا تنهَكي
ašimmī wa-lā tanhakī
[Cut] slightly and do not overdo it
Or Muhammad said:
اختفضن ولا تنهكن
iḫtafiḍna wa-lā tanhikna
Cut [slightly] without exaggeration
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Islamic Law on Female Circumcision
(…) The Arabic word bazr does not mean “prepuce of the clitoris”, it means the clitoris itself (cf. the entry in the Arabic-English Dictionary). The deceptive translation by Nuh Ha Mim Keller, made for Western consumption, obscures the Shafi’i law, given by ‘Umdat al-Salik, that circumcision of girls by excision of the clitoris is mandatory. This particular form of female circumcision is widely practiced in Egypt, where the Shafi’i school of Sunni law is followed.
https://answering-islam.org/Sharia/fem_circumcision.html
Iona, you took much time and effort on the history of male circumcision and I respect your condensed educational masterpiece which fit into an article and then added your careful conscientious two-cents. Bravo!
The only thing lacking on the subject is statistical information that doesn’t seem to yet exist and that is: the number of adult men who elect to undergo circumcision and how they rate penile sensitivity after the procedure; female stats regarding pro and con of experiencing circumcised/uncircumcised; stats regarding same sex opinions (which the original homosexual author expressed negatively affected his penile sensitivity and function seemingly also influenced by what his many uncircumcised homosexual friends were telling him—dramatically accusing his medical circumcision as a “mutilation”)
In the medical field, many men seek circumcision as adults and report favorably after the procedure but it is extremely rare for a male to seek medical help for a “reversal” or medical procedure to stretch the foreskin.
Although this is anecdotal, women are vocal about the differences (comedienne Amy Schumer comes to mind) but how they feel loved by a man is more important than the size of the penis or circumcision matter; yet, while unencumbered, more often prefer circumcised male lovers.
Pew Research and the Gallop Poll do not offer any stats but it would be interesting. There most likely exists information in medical records how many adult men choose to undergo circumcision as well as showing the numbers of adult men seeking foreskin stretching but I bet the former far exceeds the latter.
Rx: Thank you. Very few men opt for circumcision in adulthood, though, of course, there are some. This is not relevant here, however, since we are not talking about choices people make after the age of consent. We are talking about a neonatal procedure.
I did mention the preferences of some American women in the article. I have not seen stats on this, but, as you point out, no doubt many American women have never seen an intact penis and are therefore uncertain how they would feel about it. This will shift as the prevalence of circumcised men in the US drops from its current 90% (since only around 60% of the current cohort have been circumcised, this drop will happen within this generation). This is not a reason to circumcise anyone born now, who will grow up in a very different America, in which plenty of women will have encountered the intact male body. Not to mention that the son may also grow up to be gay, or may decide to live outside the United States and may have non-American lovers. The tastes of American women who grew up without seeing a foreskin will probably be irrelevant by the time those boys are grown.
Some men are using stretching techniques (I don’t have the stats) and there is a lot of interest in Foregen. However, these cannot replace nerve cells lost. I link to an article about foreskin replacement above. I don’t know who the “original homosexual author” you are referring to is.
Because I live in America and based on shared conversations with family, friends—even glib co-workers—also, taken from personal experience, your mistaken opinion that “no doubt many American women have never seen an intact penis” is laughable and a bit delusional but that’s understandable if one believes everyone living in America was born in America or that the country is of only one culture, religion. Iona, the whole world of people live in America, more so the increasing cultural diversity is found in cities. It’s all good.
U.S. male circumcision stats are high because it’s based on educated research information which physicians are still able to share with parents before making a decision to perform circumcision. If unfounded reasons for bias persist, it will impede the right to have evidence-based knowledge during the decision-making process.
Vaccines don’t cause autism, the world is spherical, not flat; male circumcision is a choice and if chosen has many evidence-based health benefits.
MM – Can you cite studies that show that Americans (high circumcision rate) are healthier than Europeans (low circumcision rate), due to the difference in circumcision rates?
Graham Richards, I found a study that explains something important but could not find any study which could specifically answer your intelligent question.
Statistics from reputable organizations such as cdc.gov; ecdc.europa.eu; and who.int help to function as a connect-the-dot approach to also explaining why sexually transmitted disease, HIV/AID populations, and life expectancy stats show America is currently doing poorly in health matters connected to sexually transmitted disease in comparison to Europe.
This old 2012 article found at hopkinsmedicine.org foreshadowed America’s increasing std stats based on commentary from Arik Marcell, MD, MPH, “Benefits of Infant Circumcision.” Says (Dr. Marvell), John Hopkins adolescent medicine specialist, “Benefits extend into adulthood.”
“A recent John Hopkins study (Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine”) online, Aug. 20) goes further. Declining rates of U.S infant male circumcision will lead to dramatically high rates of sexually transmitted diseases and related cancers in men and their female partners, researchers warn, and up to more than $4.4 billion in avoidable costs if circumcision rates in U.S. now averaging 55 percent (down from 76 percent in the 1970s and 1980s), drop to levels now seen in Europe (around 10 per cent on average) over the next decade.”
He cannot, because they do not exist. I’ve looked…and that alone invalidates the “health risk” argument that is so often put forth so as to avoid the autonomy discussion.
Let the numbers speak for themselves:
The World Health Organization who.int “People Living With HIV By WHO Region”, 2017: America: 3.4 million
Europe: 2.3 million
Africa: 25.7 million
Compare above numbers at this site ncbi.nlm.nih.org Estimation of Country-Specified and Global Prevalence of Male Circumcision at ncbi.nlm.nih.org
Which details information at length the correlation between numbers of HIV in populations of males who are uncircumcised. It gives a history showing a decrease of HIV, STDs, cancer and other maladies since usage, practice of MC.
Numbers speak better than words and the above research reports are the best sites to cite but realize it’s useless to bring into discussion when some people have made up their minds and choose to defend their personal opinion in an emotionally defensive tantrum.
These numbers don’t reflect my opinion. I’ve already stated in another comment an opinion that I’m against unsterile practice of MC (performed on a male at any age).
Those fanatically opposed can’t bear to accept statistics which show the correlation but I’m interested in knowing what is in the best health for males and closed-minded, stubborn opinion doesn’t facilitate discussion, promote understanding or help in finding answers.
You still haven’t read the article you are commenting upon. Doesn’t this strike even you yourself as odd? It certainly strikes me as bizarre behaviour for someone supposedly arguing on scientific grounds.
No matter how many times you try to troll by commenting that I did not read your essay in which my main concern is offered in my first post is: you do not offer balanced research but instead choose to set up the entire article by your own biased beliefs.
Iona, you did an interview with Earp on podcast. It’s clear you only value, are resolute to push his opinions because they align with yours. By choosing to only give focus to a religion’s value concerning MC for your essay is like comparing apples to oranges. An opposing research study author would give balance and makes more sense.
The assumptions you and your other trolling friends spew toward my commentary exhibit crow eating behavior and make further sharing of information impossible.
You were kind to other commenters who brought up FGM (because they were in alignment with your beliefs) but when I brought up an anatomical comparison which had nothing to do with FGM, you retort back that your essay had nothing to do with the topic.
Iona, you wrote an essay which does not help find answers but mainly incites. It is skewed by your own feelings, beliefs which you might be surprised many may not agree. Even worse, your essay attracted extremists both for and against you.
I’m not a straw man for appreciating contrasting research studies like Earp’s of which I may find strong error amongst evidence-based material presented. But you, as a writer and podcast interviewer, will gain more respect if you can put your biases aside as well as offer invitations to other people’s contrasting insights you may not agree with on the subject of MC because it might even serve as a learning curve, present information you never considered, help broaden your view to better inform.
I’m done with you and your trolling friend’s assumptions, false accusations, sour defenses as it does nothing to further discussion. Also, the Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down format needs to be omitted or changed because the way it is now, one person alone can push a feedback choice over and over again making it a really stupid and useless tabulation source.
You still haven’t read the article. I can tell because you are making claims about the essay which would be debunked on a single, cursory reading. At first you claimed I only used Wikipedia for reference (I don’t cite Wikipedia at all—-of course not: this is a fact checked article in the science section). Then that I talk about FGM in the article—-I don’t. Then that I don’t cite NCI and AAP (I do). Then that I only use one reference (there are multiple references). And finally that I focus on religious circumcision (which I mention, once, in passing– the article focuses on routine “medical” neonatal circumcision in the US).
Pause and ask yourself why you don’t just read it.
PS The “anatomical question” you brought up about the clitorises of women you’ve known is absolutely and completely irrelevant.
Your argument is quickly breaking down the way it does when one cannot viably argue the contention on the board, and straw men abound.
The contention on the board is one of choice, or the argument against no-natal circumcision…and there is, so far, no viable argument that you have put forth on this matter that would justify your position, let alone the continuation of this practice.
Again, attacking the speaker, or attempting to marginalize her with such as (your argument is laughable) is reducing this discussion to the level of adolescent banter in a school yard. Don’t do that.
I wonder, given the depth and breath of this essay if some broadly implemented surgical reform is capable of establishing the issue in the forefront of thoughtful parents and all other interested parties. To be blunt, if our common cultural morals consider it taboo to subject anyone to involuntary touching of genitals are we likely to be more rational about our undoing of the custom, behind our backs as it were in a decision by the medical community?
I think we’d be much better off surfacing the information in the context of our social norms and expectations, and that admittedly is a great deal more difficult to do, than to get consensus among practitioners, researchers and ethicists. Who then will have the ultimate responsibility? Well, it must be the individual. That means from my point of view that the most important boat to be lifted is that of a specific male rite of passage. Consequently the same seriousness has to be taken in consideration of why we don’t have one.
But where I’m afraid my logic really goes, given that I don’t consider my own circumcision to be such an imposition, is to all manner of birth customs. In my family, all us children were assisted out with the use of forceps whose marks on our faces had to be explained. But even more horrid to my sensibilities is the rise in cesarean section for no apparent reason. I don’t mean to throw dead cats on the table, but how are we ever to get a men’s movement to reconcile this ethical gap given our social environment?
If we are missing, as men, a specific, even if physically minimal transition from the boy’s penis to the man’s penis because we have been deprived a piece of it, then the social implications go much further than an ethical loathing of heretofore primitive ideas about sexual acts themselves. The greater tragedy is the social lacuna of a male rite of passage similar to a woman’s first menses, even as clumsily as that might be handled.
Great article!
I find Josh’s notion that “consent could be overridden by moral considerations that “could be religious based on certain traditions (i.e. to fulfil a supernatural will), or may even be social (e.g. essential for group cohesion)”” rather shocking, especially coming from a Jewish person.
Throughout history, Jews have been put in ghettos, were discriminated-against, banned from forming congregations, exiled, and worse. All this was done against their consent (duh), and was justified on the basis of “fulfilling a supernatural will”, and/or as being “essential for group cohesion”. I doubt that Josh thinks that any of this was acceptable, yet he accepts the logic behind it. It’s easy to talk about overriding the consent of helpless others (i.e. 8-days-old babies), but a bit more difficult when you are the helpless one, and the powerful come for you.
Yes, indeed. There are many Jews who are now opposed to circumcision on ethical grounds and a movement to replace circumcision with a brit shalom ceremony, for boys and girls, which doesn’t involve cutting. For a strong anti-ritual circumcision take by a Jewish commentator, I recommend Leonard B. Glick’s book “Marked in Your Flesh.” Also check out the article “Foreskin is a Feminist Issue.” If you’ve read any midrash, you’ll know that Jews argue about almost everything theological (Josh Yuter, of the original correspondence, is squarely in that camp). Circumcision is the one thing almost never questioned, though. That can and should change.
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Let’s Cut Pomegranates Instead. Celebrating Brit Shalom. The First-Ever Book on Alternative Bris.
http://www.celebratingbritshalom.com/
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Beyond the Bris
(A community of Jewish people who are united in the belief that circumcising healthy children is harmful and unnecessary. Beyond the Bris was launched by Rebecca Wald 2010 as a unique forum for Jewish people who question male infant circumcision.)
http://www.beyondthebris.com/
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גונן על הילד
“ Gonen al HaYeled “
http://www.gonnen.org/
https://www.facebook.com/%D7%92%D7%95%D7%A0%D7%9F-%D7%A2%D7%9C-%D7%94%D7%99%D7%9C%D7%93-Protect-The-Child-390462047766120/
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Thousands of Parents Sail Against the Tide of Circumcision
Jewish World – March 11, 2010
“ Gonen al HaYeled “
http://www.jewishcircumcision.org/jewishworld2010.htm
http://www.gonnen.org/
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Jews Against Circumcision
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https://www.facebook.com/Jews-Against-Circumcision-165424110207450/
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Jewish Mother Works for an End to Circumcision
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV_3ynW3ukM
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CIRCUMCISION: A RABBI’S SON SPEAKS OUT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erm5xHO3o7s
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Non-Circumcising Families in the Jewish Community
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8q9qmp0qjng
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Jonah Lowenfeld: Little-known non-cutting ritual appeals to some who oppose circumcision. In: Jewish Journal. 2. August 2011
http://jewishjournal.com/los_angeles/community/94746/
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Brit Shalom information
Brit Shalom is a naming ceremony for Jewish families opting out of circumcision. It is not intended for boys who have previously been circumcised in a hospital. Brit Shalom can be similar to the naming ceremony traditionally used for baby girls, sometimes called Brit Bat (daughter). Other names for Brit Shalom include Brit Ben (son), Brit Rechitzah (covenant with foot-washing), Alternative Brit (or Bris) Naming Ceremony, Brit HaLev (covenant of the heart), Brit B’li Milah (covenant without cutting) and Brit Chayim (covenant of life). The ceremony may be performed by a Rabbi, Cantor, or experienced lay leader. Families may also create or adapt their own ceremony from existing samples or templates.
( page is maintained by Mark D. Reiss, MD )
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http://www.britshalom.info/
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Your entry shows that you’ve done some research. In fact, it’s probable you know more about natural male genitals than many U.S. health care professionals.
That being said, how did you rationalize that “Circumcision is not, in itself, a mutilation.”? Non-therapeutic infant circumcision is absolutely mutilation in every sense of the word. It ablates healthy tissue, which permanently damages, disfigures, and alters the functionality of the remaining sex organ.
I was circumcised as a newborn child for non-medical reasons. Every time I look down and see the scar on my genitals, I’m reminded of the crime committed against my will and without my consent. I resent my parents and will never trust them again. I despise the health care industry and all involved with infant circumcision. I hate religion and any “god” that commands their followers to mutilate their own children.
I am manually restoring my foreskin, though I will never be able to regain the tissue and parts that were stolen from me. I will never be able to feel sex like nature intended.
Even though I can nitpick and disagree with a few other points, it seems we agree that non-therapeutic infant circumcision is a massive harm and is always wrong. Thank you for the article, and being an advocate for baby boys, who have no voice and can’t defend themselves!
KT, I don’t consider it a mutilation if it’s undertaken willingly, by a consenting adult. I also hesitate to call it “mutilation” even in the case of neonatal circumcision, because I do not want to send the message that those who have been circumcised, without having any choice in the matter, are now mutilated. That seems so harsh—on them. Also some are happy with their bodies and I don’t want to insist they should not be.
Having said that, we are on absolutely the same page as to non-therapeutic circumcision being a massive harm and a wrong. And I completely understand why it feels like a mutilation to you. No one should have their genitals cut without their consent, unless in the case of urgent medical need. Full stop.
I understand your view and can’t fault you for being sympathetic to those cut against their will.
It may seem cruel, but I wish that all circumcised men would confront what happened to them and acknowledge their mutilation. This would be painful, but it would hopefully cause a decline in the number of fathers who choose to have their sons cut.
Yes, I see what you mean. I don’t want to make anyone who is happy with his penis feel unhappy. But there’s an awful lot of cognitive dissonance around this issue, and it causes many circumcised men, in their defensiveness, to deny the basic wrong done. But ideally we should be able to separate these two things—whether you’re a man or woman, circumcised or intact, happy with your state or not, we should all be able to oppose this on the grounds alone that it is a gross violation of patient consent.
If you have a moment, could you give your opinion on the exchange between Brian Earp and the rabbi? I read it, and I wish there had been more responses instead of suddenly ending.
It’s on-going! Click to subscribe and you can stay up to date with it as it develops. I don’t think I have much to add as yet. I’m waiting to see where the conversation takes them. Knowing both of them, I think it could be someplace interesting.
And yet no one has the same consideration to FGM, it’s decried as mutilation, even in the cases where it’s done to women who consent and ask for it, as I remember a recent case where two adult women were jailed for having FGM done, on themselves. Mutilation has a definition and circumcision definitely fits. Truth be told most surgery fits the definition in some way too, but the excuses of consent and/or medical need are used to well excuse these.
Mirriam Webster defines Mutilation:
1. an act or instance of destroying, removing, or severely damaging a limb or other body part of a person or animal
2. an act or instance of damaging or altering something radically
And Encyclopedia Brittanica:
Mutilation or maiming (from the Latin: mutilus) is cutting off or injury to a body part of a person so that the part of the body is permanently damaged, detached or disfigured.
Both of which do fit the definition of circumcision, a part of the body being removed/detached.
I consider it mutilation in both cases only if it was done against the person’s will or without their consent and the person himself or herself now considers his/her genitals mutilated. I wouldn’t tell a man OR woman who was happy with their genitals that I considered them mutilated. That’s such a harsh thing to say to someone.
6th General Assembly. It was observed that there have been attempts to dilute the terminology Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and replace it with the following: “Female Circumcision”, “Female Genital Alteration”, “Female Genital Excision”, “Female Genital Surgery”, and more recently “Female Genital Cutting” (FGC).
The term Female Genital Cutting (FGC) does not reflect the accurate extent of harm and mutilation caused by all types of FGM. This terminology has been adopted by some UN specialized agencies and bi-lateral donors who have been influenced by specific lobby groups largely based in western countries. We note that these changes trivialize the nature of female genital mutilation and the suffering of African women and girls.
source: Declaration on the terminology FGM, 6th IAC General Assembly, 4-7 April 2005, Bamako
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Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices (IAC)
The sixth General Assembly of the Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices (IAC) was held in Bamako, Mali from the 4th to the 7th of April 2005.
https://www.28toomany.org/static/media/uploads/Thematic%20Research%20and%20Resources/Terminology/bamako_declaration_on_the_terminology_fgm__6th_iac_general_assembly_4_-_7_april_2005.pdf
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We would highlight that … FGM was adopted [by] consultation and consensus [among …] African experts [at] the first technical working group meeting held in Geneva in 1995 and gained … world-wide currency and acceptance. The Beijing conference also adopted and used … female genital mutilation. … FGM has been adopted and endorsed by the European Union [and] the African Union; [it] is currently utilized in all their documentation including the most recent Additional Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, on the Rights of Women [Maputo].
https://nofgm.org/2014/11/12/the-bamako-declaration-female-genital-mutilation-terminology-mali-2005/
You know that my point is not to minimise the harm done by the practice, but not to bully women who have already had it done to them. I usually use FGM as my terminology, because that’s the accepted term. Happy to use whatever words seem most appropriate and useful in each situation.
KT – I agree. The WHO defines 4 Types of FGM. Type 1A is a direct equivalent of male circumcision in that is removes the prepuce (or clitoral hood). Readers should know that the clitoris and the male glans are equivalent in that they are formed from from the same embryonic structure (the ambisexual genital tubercle) which diverges at about the 9 week point. Type 4 is far far less invasive than male circumcision and covers the least invasive pin prick to draw a tiny amount of blood. Note Well – that they are still referred to as FGM and are illegal in most countries.
Jews lived by their own rules for about three and a half thousand years. Now Iona came and decided to change these rules, 3500 years probably did not prove the Jewish right to exist and live the way they want.
Let me give you good advice, Iona. Formulate your ideas honestly and consistent:
Jews must follow your rules or to be wiped out. I’m not kidding… I’m sure, “wiped out” is the only solution you can implement – a lot of people before could not force Jews to follow other people’s rules.
Thus, fight for the Final Solution, why to hypocrite.
Good luck, dear Iona!
I don’t believe waiting a few years to be circumcised is the same thing as being killed in a concentration camp. But you are of course welcome to your opinion.
Jews will not obey your rules. And after you come more determined people to create the Brave New World. You pave the way for them, but are afraid to admit it
When my Jewish grandfather’s family was beaten, robbed, and sent to the camps in 1940 Romania, it was justified in terms of “”fulfilling a supernatural will”, and as being “essential for group cohesion””. The logic outlined by Iona, which refuses such justifications, is not inimical to Jews; rather, it’s the only thing that was proven to stop experiences such as my grandfather’s from repeating.
Dear Iona!
You consider my answer to you as the usual accusation of Antisemitism. I will try to explain what your mistake is. I was talking about something other.
You consider your moral standards universal. This is a common mistake of self-confident metropolitan wisenheimers or confined country bumpkins. Here they are the same.
Billions of people live, successfully or not, in other moral systems. China or India, Singapore or Somalia, Saudi Arabia or Japan. But until they do not try impose their moral standards on others, I don’t try to impose mine on them. In Iraq, Bush and ISIS tried this. We know the results. Are you sure you will achieve other?
The only way to develop culture is internal development, borrowing from other cultures, or death, natural or violent. If alien cultural norms are not acceptable to you, expel aliens from your community. But you ask that they obey your standards. «Judge not, that ye be not judged» is not about you. You are sure that you have the right to judge others who have not done you any harm, except that they are not like you.
You ask them in a soft and gentle manner. Alas, as one Russian writer said, after people in gray clothes people in black uniforms come. They do not ask. They beat and kill. We know that.
Therefore, you are much more dangerous than people in black uniforms. You open Overton window they come through.
That is why you are my real “innocent” enemy. You are guided by good intentions, but I know where way paved by good intentions leads.
PS. “Jewish grandfather” is a miserable argument. In a sense, we are all relatives, and Elizabeth Warren is definitely a Cherokee.
I don’t have a Jewish grandfather. I’m Parsi. Yes, I believe in universal human rights. Every person on earth deserves them—no matter which culture they are born into.
«I believe in universal human rights»…
Dear Iona!
If this pathetic statement is dictated by emotions, I forgive you. But if you are serious, I must conclude, I see the opinion of a self-confident narrow-minded dogmatist.
I hope that you are just too emotional, as well as those that put me dislikes. Although I’m afraid I’m too optimistic.
Human rights do not exist on their own. Strictly speaking, they do not exist at all. Human being is a social animal, and the rules of his life are imposed on him by the society (in the Stone Age, apostates were expelled from the pack and they were doomed to death).
Different packs, tribes and peoples have developed different moral systems due to different living conditions, different history and elementary randomness. Those who were fortunate enough to choose better systems succeeded, the losers disappeared.
The tribes living in the Amazon selva are there not by the will of the white colonialists. They were pushed to the selva by more successful tribes with more fortunate social systems.
BTW, to study the life of prehistoric people by studying the way of life of Amazon Indians is the same as studying human intelligence by analyzing the intellect of imbeciles. There is nothing racist in this statement. They just were not lucky.
Those who survived and succeeded to varying degrees succeeded only due to the better moral system, which is not at all interested in the comfort of an individual, but only in the success of society as a whole.
That is why the imposition of your moral standards and your “human rights” in your inevitably limited own understanding is completely unacceptable. You are no above others. Rather, you are much worse than others, interfering in their lives, brazenly condemning them and trying to destroy their way of life.
Again – You are not above others! Not an inch!
I can say this about many who expressed their opinion here, using primitive slogans and having no idea about the complexity of human existence. Their aggressiveness is generated by their stupidity.
I still hope you are smart enough and capable of self-reflection. I also hope that you are capable of critical thinking, which is mandatory for a scientist.
I urge you to seek mental health care for your own good and the good of everyone else around you.
Us n ‘ont rien appris, ni rien oublie 🙁 Fare thee well…
Funny that you focus on identity to rebuke an argument that wasn’t predicated on it, sir Anon. Now let me restate: your logic is the same one used by the oppressors of the Jews throughout the years. Your logic cannot even provide a coherent criticism of Hamas, Tsarist Russia, the expulsion from Spain, Kristallnacht, and I can go on forever. A rebuke would be to show how you can coherently criticize what happened to my grandfather. Instead, you go defending China, which is holding a million Uighurs in ‘re-education’ camps for having their own culture. But Ioana is the enemy, right.
And about the identity part: how about Jewish grandfathers and grandmothers? How about a Jewish father and mother (and a resulting circumcision)? And how about having served in a combat unit in the IDF, and having had 2 friends dying while fighting Hamas? Are those good enough credentials for saying that your logic is bankrupt?
Sorry, my answer was to Iona
Accusations of antisemitism or nazism are commonly faced by intactavists, those against infant circumcision – there are possibly some cases where these are true, but by and large intactavists fall into a few categories, 1) circumcised men who wish they were not, 2) intact men horrified at the idea that they could have lost a body part they enjoy by nothing more than parental choice 3) women who have done the research either before having a son or after and are now regret mothers.
Some have even questioned whether circumcision would be opposed by antisemities and nazis honestly, as circumcision status was actually used as a litmus test in WWII by the nazis.
Charges of antisemitism seem to have become a weapon, one that was used in 2012 in Germany when a court in Cologne found that circumcision violated a child’s rights and in no way actually legal – less than a year later new laws were created by the government to explicitly allow it. It was used just a few years ago in Iceland, a country with no significant Jewish population to speak of (in the 100s country wide) where over 85% of the population was in favour of such a ban – then their legislature abandoned it when the ADL made accusations.
Yes. Jews must follow our rules, or go back to Israel. If these savages wish to mutilate their children, then they should not be accepted in polite society, because circumcision is child molestation.
You can hardly be called more polite 🙂 More stupid – definitely
“Josh agrees that, at heart, “the essential moral wrong is violating a person’s bodily autonomy without their consent.”
This is the moral crux of the issue, and a powerful argument. However, in my experience, this argument gets used selectively to push for social change and ignored where the implications conflict with someone’s ideology. Many who accept this argument as it relates to abortion (or circumcision) reject or ignore the argument as it relates to other things, like anti-discrimination laws (the Masterpiece Cakeshop SCOTUS case being an obvious relevant example). Bodily autonomy means respecting someone’s right to live their life as they see fit even if one strenuously objects to that person’s decision. Bodily autonomy and respect for the individual are foundational principals on which free societies are built. It’s a shame to see these principals discarded so often today.
I support the cake bakers, but I think free speech and bodily integrity are not exactly the same thing. Thanks for reading, Kevin!
What a good article. It should be read by anyone considering a lifelong alteration to their baby’s penis.
Thank you, Graham!