Study: Circumcision Rates Falling Fast In U.S. : NPR:
"'Just the fact that they insist on referring to this as 'genital mutilation' tells you that they're refusing to recognize whether there may be any medical benefit to the procedure.'"
Who are you to say that God was wrong about the foreskin?
Original Realmtography (Part 2)
2 years ago
Intactivists don't refuse. Whether there are or not medical benefits, it is still mutilation in every sense of the word. And the many harms far out weigh any "possible" benefit. See the Royal Dutch Medical Association (knmg) on Circumcision. Representing 46,000 members, they say circumcision should be illegal across the board. This is who NPR should interview!
ReplyDeleteNPR wholly disregards the most important point of circumcising boys. Their right to self and determination. It is clearly a violation of human rights. Those that believe in equality of law and equality of the sexes will support MGMbill.org.
Circumcision is not "chosen by" children, it is imposed on them. It is a permanent modification of the body which is not welcome by all.
New claims that it is efficacious in providing [limited] protection against HIV should not blind us to the fact that cutting off part of a child's penis is flagrant breach of his fundamental human rights.
Assuming that your child is going to become a promiscuous sex fiend and punishing him on that assumption by amputating parts of his genitals is not only disrespectful to the child but admission of being incapable of parenting.
"Children are entitled to an “open future,” with no options foreclosed that could not wait for the child’s expressed preference.
Courts pay undue deference to parental discretion - cultural and religious – at the expense of the child’s human rights." (11th Symposium on Circumcision)
All children, whether female, intersex or male should be allowed to make a personal choice about whether or not to have genital surgery when they are of sufficient age and maturity to make that choice.
I chose circumcision young and experienced lots of lost sensation, by breadth and depth. The main penile functions and varied foreplay are gone for good.
Biggest mistake of my life that now I inform others, so call me a restoring intactivist. No longer fringe groups!
http://www.norm.org/frenular.pdf foremost penis expert Dr. John Taylor's Frenular Delta
http://www.circumstitions.com/Sexuality.html Sorrells et al. Fine-touch pressure thresholds in the adult penis
http://knol.google.com/k/the-ridged-band-of-the-human-prepuce# The Ridged Band of the Human Prepuce
http://www.norm.org/lost.html "The Lost List" What is lost to circumcision and what can be restored.
Dear Dr. Douglas Diekema,
ReplyDeleteI read the NPR article covering you and heard your interview. I was aghast. First, that you are a bioethicist that never brought up the ethics of male circumcision. Second, you touted only pro-circumcision rhetoric. Third, you included name calling intactivists "emotional". And forth, you put down parents who choose not to circumcise.
Further you have said doctors need to be honest with parents about circumcision yet in the same breath you lied by not saying there are harms intrinsic to circumcision. Harms that are recognized and published by the Royal Dutch Medical Association on Circumcision. All in all, you either are not up to date on circumcision or you have an agenda to circumcise regardless of all the facts. You can not or are not objective. Either way you should step down from the AAP's Task Force on Circumcision.
Sincerely, Frank McGinness
(restoring and I chose circumcision: intactivist)
"Who are you to say that God was wrong about the foreskin?"
ReplyDeleteIn putting it there, in ordering it be cut off, or in rescinding that order (Gal 5:2)? You can enlist God on either side.
But either God or (more likely) evolution gave it ~20,000 specialised nerve-endings, like those of the fingertips or the lips, a thin layer of muscle, arteries (that can easily leak enough blood when cut to kill a baby), veins and a unique rolling action, ideal to heighten sexual function and pleasure. Rather a complex, specialised and functional structure to go putting on humans just to be cut off hours later, don't you think?
Douglas Diekema (Chair of the AAP's Bioethics Committee) misrepresents Intactivists. Our arguments are logical and ethical. We do not "insist on referring to circumcision as 'genital mutilation'" (though its passes all the duck tests). "Male genital cutting" will do - the term used by Diekema's committee when it was flirting with allowing minimal female genital cutting, until Intactivist protest made it back down.
ReplyDeleteHis medical arguments are specious: by circumcisionists' own figures, 99.1% of circumcisions to prevent UTIs are wasted, 99% on boys who will never get them, and 0.1% on a boy who gets them though circumcised. Meanwhile ~4% of girls get UTIs and are treated without surgery. It is Dr Diekema's stress on the seriousness of some UTI while ignoring its rarity that is an appeal to emotion.
Neonatal genital cutting is a human rights issue. Whose body is it? This is not "a decision parents have to make" and in the rest of the English-speaking world it is not offered - in the rest of the developed world, it never has been, with no epidemics of foreskin-related maladies. It would not even be legal to cut any other normal, healthy, non-renewable, functional part off a boy baby's body; the exactly corresponding part of a girl gets special legal protection; and of course to circumcise an unwilling man would be a felony. Parents lavish care on their baby in order that he will grow up to be an autonomous man. That man has every right to determine the fate of his own genitals.
Dr Diekema is on record as saying "the request of a parent or surrogate decision-maker is never sufficient to justify a particular clinical intervention" so how can he now say "male circumcision is a decision that families should make on their own"? As the old rhyme has it, "Doctors should attend the sick, and leave the well alone."
Wow, lack on comments on the more important issues.
ReplyDeleteTwo words: Who cares? It's just foreskin, people. Besides, I'm glad my parents decided to have a circumcision for me; otherwise my manhood would of looked like a weird anteater. Plus, you're more prone to have infectious diseases without foreskin reduction.