An American father adopts an Asian daughter. He loves her just the way she is except for her eyes. They make her look sleepy. So he, a plastic surgeon himself, arranges for a blepharoplasty, minimal surgery that will make her eyes rounder. It’s just a small cosmetic procedure, but the results are stunning, and the father is happy. Now his daughter can be a part of her Caucasian family with eyes that approximate theirs.
Does the prospect of the well-meaning father shaping his daughter’s eyes (a true story) make you uncomfortable? If it does, what happens when I draw a comparison between “Asian eye surgery” and male circumcision? Do you protest, as some of my students did, that they’re not the same thing? If so, why is circumcision different. Is it, unlike eye rounding, medically necessary or beneficial? Is it different because a scalpel is applied to the penis and not the eyes? Is it unique because, unlike eye rounding, circumcision has roots in the Hebrew Bible as a covenant between Abraham and his god?
Circumcision is the most common surgery in America, but it raises important questions about the rights of children, parental control, and the duty of doctors to do no harm. For some, these questions are not abstract. Consider the Intactivist Movement, whose members believe, at the broadest level, that humans should be allowed to make their own decisions about their bodies. They envision a world in which no child, girl or boy, is mutilated in the name of “culture, religion, profit, or parental preference.” At Union Square in Manhattan this month, the side of an Intactivist truck displayed photographs of young men holding photographs of themselves as children, along with the words “Circumcision: I Did Not Consent.” The movement has momentum. Later this year, a feature-length documentary directed by Brendon Marotta called “American Circumcision” is due for release. Its purpose: “to start the national conversation our culture needs to have about circumcision.”
What’s the big deal, you might think. Shouldn’t Muslim and Jewish communities —and millions of American families — be allowed to shape their children as they please? Maybe you think circumcision is a vital cultural practice. Like clitoridectomy, it shows you are part of a group.
The truth is, there is risk in circumcision and little benefit. No medical society in the world recommends the procedure as necessary. None of the data in its favor are conclusive, but the risks are very real. For centuries now, advocates have made claims for circumcision. For medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, circumcision damages the penis just enough to “counteract excessive lust.” In 1860, The Lancet, a medical journal, promoted it as a preventative to masturbation. Today, some say urinary tract infections are fewer in circumcised boys (who rarely have such infections), as is penile cancer (a rare condition). Brian Morris, archenemy of the prepuce, even claims a foreskin will predispose you to stroke and heart attack.
Circumcision is a social surgery that many American parents agree to. In the rest of the world, circumcised men are the minority. Most European parents don’t see the point of needlessly mutilating their boys’ erogenous tissue. Babies have died or contracted herpes or other infections. Not surprisingly, even American parents are increasingly deciding not to circumcise.
A defenseless infant cannot consent to a permanent alteration of his penis. We wouldn’t tattoo a baby, so why would we cut of a part of his body? Parents routinely expose their boys to the actual harm of surgery for cosmetic or cultural reasons — an unnecessary surgery that is covered in New York, at $500 to $1,000 dollars a slice, by Medicaid.
Physicians have a duty not to harm children. Parents have a duty to regard them, as law professor John A. Robertson’s put it, not as “owners of their children’s personhood,” but as “trustees of their children’s separate welfare.”
by Eric Trump, Valley Views Published 3:22 p.m. ET July 24, 2017
Eric Trump teaches bioethics at Vassar College and is writing a book on organ transplantation. Contact him at [email protected]
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/story/opinion/valley-views/2017/07/24/parents-sculpting-children/464812001/
“Circumcision” is genital mutilation. I was mutilated and refused to do it to my sons. If more American men could face the truth about what was done to them this foolishness would stop over night.
Whether it’s eye rounding, ear piercing, or genital normalization, a procedure should abide by medical ethics.
Any intervention may be ethically imposed with only proxy (parental) consent IF waiting for the patient’s own rational informed consent would lead to net harm, and WHEN less-destructive options are exhausted. Cutting the genitals of healthy male, female, or intersex children fails this test decidedly.
If circumcision was actually a medical issue, there would first be a diagnosis of defect, damage, or disease. The non-destructive remedies attempted and their outcomes would be documented in each case before jumping to the drastic last-resort step of amputation. But MALE is not a diagnosis. Most of the world does not cut healthy babies.
Circumcision is BUTCHERY, plain and simple and don’t let some doctor tell you otherwise. .Why do so many of them do this to innocent young male babies if it weren’t profitable for them? This BULLS**T of it’s cleaner is just that, BS. With the use of soap and water during one’s normal daily bathing routine, retracting your FORESKIN is easily done and taught as part of bathing like ‘potty training’ Think about it. I’m lucky to have escaped the butcher with a knife. In the gay community, sometimes there’s a preference for cut or UNCUT men. One guy I dated a while ago suggested I get “cut”, despite the fact I retract my ‘SKIN every time i shower. I told him if he didn’t like me the way I ‘am he could go to hell and how far he could “stick it”. He was cut drastically and I figured he was jealous of what he’d been robbed of so early in life when he couldn’t consent., but that’s his insecurity, not mine, thank God!
“The truth is, there is risk in circumcision and little benefit.”
The article does not mention that circumcision removes quite a lot of erogenous tissue and thereby greatly reduces sexual sensation. That is the central issue. It is the main reason why circumcision of infants or children is completely unethical.
A circumcised man is a sexual cripple. He will never experience the real thing.
The article, like many articles about circumcision in the popular press, hints at this but does not dare state it outright for fear of invoking guilt in parents or offending readers’ religious sensibilities or medical dogma. I wish editors had more courage–stating the whole truth is the essential first step in ending this barbaric practice.
Girls and Boys deserve the same protection to Genital Mutilation as:
It is mostly done to a minor without his/her consent
It Is irreversible
It is risky
It is painful, most of the time is done with out anesthesia.
It decrements pleasure
It modifies genital functionality and natural protection.
It does modify the genital aesthetics.
In seldom case is medically required.
Hygiene excuses are lame as all the body parts requires simple cleaning by water and soap.
#Intactivist