Circumcision of minors “an assault”, says Swedish Paediatric Society
Shock, horror, amazement: Male health report fails to mention circumcision
Non-therapeutic circumcision violates rights of the child, says Ombudsman
JAMA censors circumcision critics
Circumcision programs as American cultural imperialism?
More American madness: Tattoos on a boy are criminal, circumcising him is just dandy
No such thing as "male circumcision"
Africa: Circumcised men more likely to have multiple partners and forget the condoms
Circumcision of young boys for religious and non-medical reasons ought to be banned in Sweden, according to the Swedish Paediatric Society (Svenska barnläkarföreningen, BLF). In a statement submitted to the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen), the society called the procedure an assault. “We consider it to be an assault on these boys,” Staffan Janson, chairman of BLF's committee for ethical issues and children’s rights, said to newspaper Göteborgs-Posten (GP). Removing a boy’s foreskin for reasons other than medical necessity is controversial in Sweden. After discussing the matter for several years, BLF has now concluded that the procedure ought to be banned on the grounds that the children are unable to form a decision in the matter. According to BLF and Staffan Janson, circumcision is an attack on boys’ bodily integrity. “It’s such a complicated and difficult question, but even so, we've decided that this is a procedure to be done away with,” Janson said. “It’s a mutilation of a child unable to decide for himself.”
Source: The Local - Sweden’s Newspaper in English, 19 February 2012
A report on male health in Australia by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare does not consider circumcision to be of the slightest relevance to male health problems, nor to the promotion of male health. The report, The Health of Australian Males (July 2011), runs through the major problems and issues facing men and boys in Australia and does not mention circumcision even once. According to the report, the most serious health problems experienced by males in Australia relate to nutrition, exercise, smoking, weight, mental problems such as depression, and violence. What any reasonable person must conclude from this significant silence is that “lack of circumcision” (that perverse expression so beloved by circumcision promoters) is not a factor in the health problems experienced by Australian men, and that more circumcision will do nothing to improve male health.
Click here for full coverage of the AIHW report
The Slovenian Human Rights Ombudsman has found that medically unnecessary circumcision of boys was a violation of the rights of the child. The statement posted on the Ombudsman website concludes: “Parents are primarily responsible for the development of children’s health, but also they must in all cases take into account the child's interest as a guide in decision making. Also, in deciding their rights [they] are limited by the rights of others, in this case, therefore, their children .... The right to religious freedom does not justify interference with the right to physical integrity of another person, so we believe that circumcision for non-medical reasons, may only be [with] the child’s consent, subject to the conditions provided for by law on patients’ rights, therefore, usually after 15 years of age.”
Read the full statement on bioethics and human rights page
Last October the Journal of the American Medical Association published an opinion piece by Aaron Tobian and Ronald Gray, “The medical benefits of male circumcision”. It said nothing new, and was no more than a rehash of tired old assertions, fortified by more recent evidence from medical experiments on Africans that circumcision (of adults) could reduce a male’s risk of acquiring HIV during heterosexual intercourse with an infected (female) partner. This, apparently, was enough to justify – indeed, require – universal circumcision of infants in the United States. The fact that the World Health Organisation recommendations on this matter referred to circumcision (of adults, not children) only as an adjunct to AIDS control, and then only “in countries and regions with heterosexual epidemics, high HIV and low male circumcision prevalence” (i.e. conditions not found in the United States) seems to have escaped their notice.
As you might expect, this poorly-argued effusion attracted a flood of critical comment, and you might also have expected that JAMA would have published at least a substantial selection of these in the interests of open-minded scientific debate. Not a bit of it! Showing very clearly where his sentiments lie, the editor published only 2 of the dozen or so critical letters submitted, followed by 2 letters supporting Tobian and Gray, plus a lengthy response in which they reasserted their case. We are deeply shocked by JAMA’s blatant suppression of opinions contrary to those of the editor, and in an attempt to break through the censorship we are making a selection of the letters available on our site. Readers can make up their own mind about who has the better of the argument.
Read the censored letters here.
The AsiaSentinel newspaper has warned that U.S.-inspired and funded circumcision programs in underdeveloped countries could be seen as American cultural imperialism.
"American exceptionalism takes many forms. One of the least noticed is the preference for circumcision of boys. Other than among Muslims and Jews, for whom it is a religious or at least traditional requirement, cutting off part of the penis is alien to most other cultures and usually only carried out for medical, or occasionally aesthetic, reasons. But the US is now trying to promote the practice in developing countries supposedly as a defense against AIDS. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is supporting its propagation and the World Health Organization is being urged to do the same. The theory is that circumcised men have a roughly 50 percent less chance of contracting HIV. Assuming that is the case, adult men may reasonably decide whether they are at risk and if so whether the loss of the penis foreskin and possible impact on sexual enjoyment is worth the lowering of HIV risk. But any such campaign carries with it the real danger that societies in Africa, where the AIDS prevention efforts are mostly focused, will result in the large scale circumcising of infants who have no choice in the matter." ... Read full story at AsiaSentinel
The Flap over Circumcision, AsiaSentinel, Friday, 03 February 2012
A recent case in Georgia, USA, involves a mother who agreed to her 10-year old son’s request for a small tattoo on his arm in memory of his brother, killed by a speeding car. She has been arrested and faces gaol under cruelty to children laws. This absurd incident has caught the attention of a thoughtful moral philosopher at the Oxford University Centre for Practical Ethics, Brian Earp, who wonders about the blatant double standard in American law and custom:
“The truly troubling part involves a deep inconsistency in Georgia law regarding parental consent in general. This point can be made by offering a stark point of contrast. It is perfectly OK, under Georgia law, for a parent to consent to the surgical removal of her son’s foreskin, before he is able to form words or express an opinion, in a medically unnecessary, irreversible procedure which (as I have argued elsewhere) is deeply immoral and should be banned. Tattoos? No way. Invasive, medically useless, nonconsensual genital surgery? Go right ahead. So what is going on here? How can it be that neonatal circumcision is OK, and taking your baby daughter to have her ears pierced is fine – but allowing your 10-year old to memorialize his brother in the form of a tattoo lands you jail?”
Read the full article at Practical Ethics
In another essay published last year, Brian Earp argues that circumcision of minors is immoral and ought to be legally prohibited.
An essay on the Australian site On-Line Opinion argues that the expression “male circumcision” is misleading and deceptive because it implies that circumcision is always the same. The author, medical historian Dr Robert Darby, suggests that circumcision is more like sexual intercourse: legitimate in some circumstances, as illegitimate as rape or sexual assault in others. His article concludes:
"Even if all the benefits of circumcision claimed by its promoters were true, they would only amount to a case that might persuade a cautious adult to elect the procedure for himself. The case was never sufficient to justify doing it to children without consent. Individuals are entitled to make their own choices about how they manage their health, and should not be deprived of normal body parts merely because somebody else thinks they would be better off without them.
"It may be justifiable to perform circumcision on adults who have given informed consent, and even on children who cannot give consent in situations of therapeutic necessity (i.e. to correct a pathology that has not responded to conservative treatment); and it is arguable that it is justified if the parents are devout, conscientious, practising adherents of a religion which holds that children must be circumcised. Like sexual intercourse, it depends on the circumstances: with the consent of a person above the legal age of consent, sexual intercourse is justifiable; without consent, or if the person is below the statutory age, it is sexual assault or rape. There is no reason why the rules for permanent bodily alterations, particularly in such a physically and psychologically sensitive area as the penis, should be less strict than the rules for sexual activity."
Read the full article at On-Line Opinion
From Africa there is ever-increasing evidence that men who have agreed to get circumcised because they have been told it will protect them from HIV infection believe they are immune. This is leading to an increase in high-risk behavior: increased promiscuity, multiple partners, more unsafe sex and failure to use condoms. As critics of the circumcision solution have warned from the beginning and emphasized on the rare occasions they have been allowed to get anything into print, such behavioural patterns are likely to increase the incidence of HIV infection, and at the very least must cancel out any benefits that might otherwise arise from the circumcision programs. As recent reports from Zambia, Kenya and Zimbabwe indicate, the much-vaunted circumcision programs are producing an epidemic of unsafe and high-risk sex, thereby defeating their own stated purpose.
Read full details on circumcision-condoms page
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