Our aim
To provide up to date and accurate information about the
medical, legal, ethical, cultural and historical aspects of
male and female circumcision.
Our policy
We are opposed to unnecessary genital surgery on children
and others incapable of giving informed consent to medical
treatment. |
|
| |
|
Circumcision in Australia
Today the vast majority of Australian boys grow up happily with the bodies that nature gave them. Although circumcision was common from the 1920s to the 1960s, medical authorities have been discouraging and advising against the practice since the 1970s, and it is now pretty much a thing of the past. Most parents want their boys to be as happy and healthy as possible, and they know that leaving their penis to develop naturally is the best way to secure these outcomes.
Despite this, a few die-hard enthusiasts for circumcision keep popping up in the media, full of alarmist claims about the terrible risks of retaining the foreskin. This propaganda is contrary to the advice issued by responsible medical bodies such as the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and is intended to confuse and mislead parents, and scare them into demanding circumcision for their boys. Most doctors are opposed to circumcision and will not perform the operation without genuine medical need (a rare situation). The fanatics have given up trying to influence responsible medical and scientific bodies; instead, they aim to use the popular media to frighten parents into putting pressure on doctors to agree to their demands.
Circumcision was a Victorian medical fad which should have gone out with neck-to-knee bathing costumes, blood-letting, frontal lobotomies, and the idea that children should be seen and not heard. The practice survived because it became deeply entrenched in the culture of English-speaking countries, and seen as normal, or at least acceptable: few people came to regard it with the same revulsion as they would look upon surgical alterations to the genitals of girls. As the original justifications for early circumcision were discredited, the fanatics kept coming up with new reasons for doing it: if it wasn’t to stop masturbation, it was to provide immunity against syphilis; if it wasn’t syphilis, it was cancer; if it wasn’t cancer, it was UTIs … And so on. Australia inherited circumcision from Britain in the late nineteenth century, and by the 1930s about half of all Australian boys had part of their penis cut off soon after birth. Although Britain abandoned routine infant or neonatal circumcision in the 1940s, the practice continued here until the 1970s, when paediatricians recommended against the procedure. The practice has been in decline ever since and now affects only about 12 per cent of Australian boys.
Australia largely abandoned medically unnecessary circumcision in the 1980s, and did so with very little fuss, but in the late 1990s the issue suddenly became controversial. The main reason for this are the efforts of a few die-hard circumcision enthusiasts influenced by propaganda from the USA and other cultures where routine male circumcision is the rule. They make strident, aggressive and implausible claims for the protective effect of circumcision against a number of diseases which have defied normal control strategies, such as HIV-AIDS, and as a means of preventing trivial penis problems in infancy. Circumcision advocates attempt to exploit public fears of AIDS and cancer by demanding universal circumcision of male infants as a public health measure. They offer the feeble and misleading analogy that amputation is just like immunisation, and thus a harmless and effective medical intervention which should be made compulsory.
The main objective of this propaganda is to halt the decline of routine or medically unnecessary in the USA and revive the practice in Australia and Britain. A few Australian GPs and other practitioners also exploit these fears as a business strategy.
The aim of this website is to provide the public with information about circumcision in Australia and to keep it up to date with both local and international developments in research and understanding. We also aim to support Australian medical authorities, especially the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and the Association of Paediatric Surgeons, in their commendable efforts to protect boys from unnecessary interference with their genitals. We hope to bring facts, historical perspective, reason and ethics into the debate over the routine circumcision of normal male infants and boys.
ON THIS SITE
Circumcision in Australia
Statements by Australian medical organizations
Personal accounts of circumcision injury
Legal and ethical issues
Research
Links
Contact us
Our logo
 Our
logo is an engraving by the English poet William Blake - an illustration
from his verse "The Gates of Paradise" (1793), with the
title "Aged Ignorance". The accompanying verse reads:
In Aged Ignorance profound,
Holy & cold, I clip'd the Wings
Of all Sublunary Things,
And in the depths of my Dungeons
Closed the Fathers & the Sons.
We believe that these words have a profound relevance to the attempts
by medical reactionaries to keep the practice of routine male circumcision
alive in Australia and other English speaking countries. They do
embody aged ignorance; their manner is both holy and cold; the distress
of boys who have been circumcised against their will is similar
to the despair of those shut up in a dungeon; and the handing down
of this cruel practice from wounded father to wounded son is a reminder
that thoughtless habit has the power to curb personal freedom and
shut out the light of knowledge.
Disclaimer
This site does not purport to provide medical advice. If you are
seeking medical advice you should consult a properly qualified physician.
|
