The Failure of Orthodoxy to take a Stand Against Male Genital Mutilation

RileyG said:

Yikes!

I have no further comment.

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"The bodily pain caused to that member is the real purpose of circumcision...

The fact that circumcision weakens the faculty of sexual excitement and sometimes perhaps diminishes the pleasure is indubitable. For if at birth this member has been made to bleed and has had its covering taken away from it, it must indubitably be weakened.

The Sages, may their memory be blessed, have explicitly stated: It is hard for a woman with whom an uncircumcised man has had sexual intercourse to separate from him. In my opinion this is the strongest of the reasons for circumcision."

- Maimonides

Considering that last paragraph, it is no wonder that studies have reported circumcised men have unhappier marriages.

Lukaris said:

There is a lot to sift through here and the TAW sub forum activity has decreased over the last couple years. I have questions about how allegedly complicit Evangelical Christian groups are in matters of female mutilation/circumcision in the US.

I was born in 1964 in Northeast Pennsylvania and our area became a little economically backward in the post WW2 era We were still linked to the New York to Philadelphia metro corridor & not isolated. In my life I have known people who have suffered abuse, died of suicide, homicide etc. I am thankful for my life & it has been ok and I am not oblivious to things around me.

It is hard to comprehend how bad male circumcision is, how pervasive female genital mutilation has been m, transgenderism etc. all of these years. I am not denying these but trying to comprehend how connected they have been to past death & suffering is difficult. These classifications don’t seem to match much with past travails & were mostly unknown.

I know it’s a different world in the 21st century but how connected is the past to present properly understandable?

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Thank your for your thoughtful replies. I am, on the other hand, generally very frustrated over this issue.

The practice of both MGM and FGM came out of anti-masturbation hysteria of the 19th century and gained force by the end of the 19th century. Britain did away with FGM and MGM on the basis the medical claims being fraudulent and the practices harmful. (MGM is still legal, but cannot be done through their single-payer healthcare service since the 1940's - anyone who want it has to find and pay out of pocket at a private clinic - same with most of the Commonwealth of Nations. This caused rates of MGM to drastically drop down to the single digits.) However, America has not fully banned FGM. MGM in America is still common - at about 49%. Due to the procedure not being consider medical, it is Medicaid fraud for Medicaid to pay for circumcision (which is enforced selectively depending on state.)

I have read that evangelical parenting books recommended FGM into the 1970's and I would have to go digging to find specific titles. If you criticize circumcision the response always turns to Abraham - which, to me, indicates that there is underlying religious notion it should be done to gain standing before God. I think the Judeo-Maga values of evangelicalism is so obsessed with the 'chosen people' of the ethnostate Israel that circumcision is, to some degree, popular.

Lukaris said:

I know it’s a different world in the 21st century but how connected is the past to present properly understandable?

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Personally, I think, very understandable. If only because I am hyperliterate with a large capacity to remember information that I consumed quickly.

I think a critical aspect of 'discerning the times' is intellectual history and memetics.

"Abstract ideas are really (the) same as notion; ‘Logical’ conclusions are the same as spirits." - C.S. Lewis (from a manuscript fragment.)

You can work it back through both angles. A 'logical' conclusion being as a spirit has a personally knowable aspect to it which can be judged by such things as conscience. A dissenter doesn't need to run the whole chain of the development of ideas to react by conscious and oppose something - the merits of something can simply be visible if there isn't an attempt to not see it.

Some parents in the moment of the overwhelming-ness of having a child have fraud perpetuated against them. Anecdotes and surveys say that parents who don't circumcise are repeatedly hounded by nurses and doctors to have the procedure done - averaging up to 8 times - rather than Hospital staff simply accepting that consent was already denied in the paperwork. Other times the consent for circumcision is just hidden in paperwork and parents are surprised to find out their child was circumcised. Others listen to doctors or nurses misleading them. The issue is, of course, circumcision makes doctors a lot of bank. It is a multi-billion dollar industry. By failing to put the child's interest first, the physicians and staff are also breaking their medical ethics requirements (and, therefore, also the the law.)

Speaking of medical ethics - a family member of mine was circumcised as an adolescent because of medical malpractice. His condition was entirely treatable with topical steroid cream. The failure to provide alternatives to a procedure is, by itself, malpractice. Yet, he only advised the most invasive and most lucrative option.

Yet, the reasons why people consent to have it done to their children are strange. The most common one is "so that way he'll look like his father."
An aesthetic reason which is not about the good of the child, but about the interests of the parent. This dereliction of parental duty - as they have the legal and moral responsibility to place the interests of the child above their own.
Or normative reasons - they just assume that it's normal, don't even think about the surgical procedure which could kill their infant and just do it.

The problem here is a lack of basic humanizing discernment. "Would I be willing to go through that (unanaesthetized surgery on my genitals)?" If a parent asks that of themselves then empathy answers "no." A large amount of the baby's blood is lost during the procedure. It is common for babies to turn blue from oxygen deprivation during the procedure.

There is a deep willfulness to be ignorant of what occurs. It is one thing to be lied to, it's a different thing not to think to ask.

Maimonides taught that circumcision should be done as early as possible while "the father's love and affection for [the child] is not yet so strong; for the love of the parents for the child increases by his presence in their sight, and grows with the years of his life." Guide for the Perplexed, Part III, Chapter 49

Love indicts the practice more than it defends it. It is, in a word, unloving.

And that, in particular, is the spirit which should be known. The history becomes, in a sense, irrelevant.

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On the other side of this knowing, history is evidentiary. You can trace out the fruits of a thing. You can see where errors appeared and continue.

Foucault wrote what he called 'archaeology of ideas.' Some of these, like Madness and Civilization, are quite well done and good.
He gives the example of a patient with Cotard's Delusion saying, syllogistically, "People who are dead do not need to eat. I am dead. Therefore, I do not need to eat." Delusion is not particularly a loss of the reasoning faculties, but in prerational falsehoods which have been accepted as true.

This applies to societies. There are moments where delusions enter into a whole people and control them as a spirit. Persons in society must be vigilant.

People walk around thinking that which dead men told them that they should think. Most of what people think is not substantially different from the idea of a ghost. The impacts spread through time - just like genetics. We can trace biological ancestry genetically and intellectual ancestry memetically. Memetic diseases have an etiology.

Lukaris said:

Honestly, I don’t know. The American Academy of Pediatrics indicates that male infant circumcision is beneficial overall. It is to be rejected for female infants in all cases. This has been my general understanding. All I can think is that greater awareness of choice should be provided for people in general. Circumcision outside of infancy seems like it should be rejected.

Circumcision: A Parent's Choice

Since circumcision is not essential to a child's health, parents should choose what is best for their child by looking at the benefits and risks. Circumcision may be more risky if done later in life, so parents should decide before or soon after their son is born if they want it done. Learn more...

www.healthychildren.org

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The AAP stated; "benefits of newborn male circumcision outweigh the risks but the benefits are not great enough to recommend universal newborn circumcision.”

2 of the 8 members of the AAP Circumcision Task Force, Douglas Diekema and Andrew Freedman, both who were on the AAP's committee stated the guidelines "health benefits outweigh risks" was a legal compromise rather than a purely medical recommendation, intended to protect the practice from bans amid cultural and legal pressures.

Andrew Freedman described circumcision as a non-therapeutic procedure with no communicable public health benefits, suggesting the AAP should not be involved in recommending it.

Douglas Diekema stated he could no longer honestly say the benefits outweigh the risks, noting the policy was shaped by the need to avoid outlawing a practice important to religious communities.

I would link you to the European criticism of the AAP's guidelines;

Here are major extracts debunking the AAP's claims;

"Using reasonable European estimates cited in the AAP report for the frequency of surgical and postoperative complications (∼2%), for every 100 circumcisions, 1 case of UTI may be prevented at the cost of 2 cases of hemorrhage, infection, or, in rare instances, more severe outcomes or even death. Circumcision fails to meet the criteria to serve as a preventive measure for UTI, even though this is the only 1 of the AAP report’s 4 most favored arguments that has any relevance before the boy gets old enough to decide for himself."

"According to the AAP report, between 909 and 322 000 circumcisions are needed to prevent 1 case of penile cancer. Penile cancer is linked to infection with human papillomaviruses, which can be prevented without tissue loss through condom use and prophylactic vaccination. It is remarkable that incidence rates of penile cancer in the United States, where ∼75% of the non-Jewish, non-Muslim male population is circumcised, are similar to rates in northern Europe, where <10% of the male population is circumcised. As a preventive measure for penile cancer, circumcision also fails to meet the criteria for preventive medicine: the evidence is not strong; the disease is rare and has a good survival rate; there are less intrusive ways of preventing the disease; and there is no compelling reason to deny boys their legitimate right to make their own informed decision when they are old enough to do so."

"According to the AAP report, there is evidence that circumcision provides protection against 2 common viral STDs: genital herpes and genital warts. However, the evidence in favor of this claim is based primarily on findings in RCTs conducted among adult men in sub-Saharan Africa. For other STDs, such as syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia, circumcision offers no convincing protection. The authors of the AAP report forget to stress that responsible use of condoms, regardless of circumcision status, will provide close to 100% reduction in risk for any STD. In addition, STDs occur only after sexual debut, which implies thatt he decision of whether to circumcise can be postponed to an age when boys are old enough to decide for themselves. "

From a public health perspective, what seems to be the AAP technical report’s most important argument ist hat circumcision may reduce the bur-den of heterosexually transmitted HIV infections in the United States. ThreeRCTs in Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa suggest that circumcision in adulthood may lead to a noticeable reduction in risk of heterosexual HIV acquisition in areas with extremely high HIV prevalence. Specifically, the African RCTs seemed to show that adult male circumcision halves heterosexual men’s (but not women’s) risk of HIV infection in the first few years after the operation from 2.49% to 1.18% in high-endemic areas where viral transmission occurs mainly through heterosexual intercourse. This evidence, however, is contradicted by other studies, which show no relation-ship between HIV infection rates and circumcision status. However, there is no evidence that circumcision, whether in infancy, child-hood, or adulthood, is effective in preventing heterosexual transmission in countries where HIV prevalence is much lower and routes of trans-mission are different, such as Europe and the United States. Sexually trans-mitted HIV infections in the West occur predominantly among men who have sex with men, and there is no evidence that circumcision offers any protection against HIV acquisition in this group. The African findings are also not in line with the fact that the United States combines a high prevalence of STDs and HIV infections with a high percentage of routine circumcisions. The situation in most European countries is precisely the reverse: low circumcision rates combined with low HIV and STD rates. Therefore, other factors seem to play a more important role in the spread of HIV than circumcision status. This finding also suggests that there are alternative, less intrusive, and more effective ways of preventing HIV than circumcision, such as consistent use of condoms, safe-sex programs, easy access to antiretroviral drugs, and clean needle programs. As with traditional STDs, sexual trans-mission of HIV occurs only in sexually active individuals. Consequently, from an HIV prevention perspective, if at all effective in a Western context, circumcision can wait until boys are old enough to engage in sexual relationships. Boys can decide for them-selves, therefore, whether they want to get circumcised to obtain, at best, partial protection against HIV or rather remain genitally intact and adopt safe-sex practices that are far more effective. As with the other possible benefits, circumcision for HIV protection in Western countries fails to meet the criteria for preventive medicine: there is no strong evidence for effectiveness and other, more effective, and less intrusive means are available. There is also no compelling reason why the procedure should be performed long before sexual debut; sexually trans-mitted HIV infection is not a relevant threat to children.

"COMPLICATIONS
As mentioned in the AAP report,theprecise risk and extent of complications of circumcision are unknown. It is clear, however, that infections, hemorrhages, meatal strictures, and otherproblems do occur. Incidental deaths and (partial) amputations of the penis have also been reported, but exact figures are not available. Although some studies suggest that circumcision can lead to psychological, pain-related, and sexual problems later in life, population-based prospective studies of long-term psychological, sexual, and urological effects of circumcision are lacking. It seems that the authors of the AAP report consider the foreskin to be a part of the male body that has no meaningful function in sexuality. However, the foreskin is a richly innervated structure that protects the glans and plays an important role in the mechanical function of the penis during sexual acts. Recent studies, several of which were not included in the AAP report (although they were published within the inclusion period of1995–2010), suggest that circumcision desensitizes the penis and may lead to sexual problems in circumcised men and their partners. In light of these uncertainties, physicians should heed the precautionary principle and not recommend circumcision for preventive reasons."

"Circumcision fails to meet the commonly accepted criteria for the justification of pre-ventive medical procedures in children."

"There is growing consensus among physicians, including those in the United States, that physicians should discourage parents from circumcising their healthy infant boys because non-therapeutic circumcision of underage boys in Western societies has no compelling health benefits, causes postoperative pain, can have serious long-term consequences, constitutes a violation of the United Nations’ Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and conflicts with the Hippocratic oath: primum non nocere: First, do no harm.

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"I also have spoke at length about the illicit sexual proclivities of those who created the research studies the AAP is working with. This information has been circling from some time - more than a decade, there have been peer-reviewed articles about these proclivities, and there have no accusations of libel or defamation as far as I'm aware. These being motivational bias, alongside financial bias, on the Sub-Saharan studies - which have been discredited through higher quality research.