Speaking of unpleasant medical procedures, I found it very hard to take my kids to get vaccinated. It hurts them, they don’t understand why, and then they feel sick for a few days. The nasty old dtp shot caused significantly more distress in my kids than any traditional circumcision I’ve witnessed. I did it anyway. Even worse, I lived in NYC and was required to have my kids tested for lead ona regular basis. It’s hard to stick the veins of a toddler, and an anxious mother doesn’t help. Fortunately, their dad was willing to take them to those appointments.
“It makes me squeamish and uncomfortable” is not a good basis for medical decisions.
It causes severe unneccesary pain to the baby. It removes an arguably useful body part that the vast majority of the world’s men possess and feel no need to get rid of when given the choice. Maybe your morality differs from mine, but I believe that it’s wrong to cause severe unnecessary pain to other human beings, especially to babies. European doctors are condemning this practice as unethical.
I’m happy that you’re circumcised. I hope you continue to be happy with it. From the bottom of my heart, I truly mean that. But if you use the fact that you personally are happy with it to justify performing the procedure on a child who can’t consent to the procedure, then I am going to have to disagree with you. I also disagree with you if you dismisss the feelings of unhappily circumcised men as being invalid. We have the same right to express our opinion as you do.
Weird. Because you are very very totally comfortable talking about it. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
So based on that logic we should be circumcising everything. Human males. Bovine males. Perennial plants with an elongated stem, or trunk, supporting branches and leaves males.
I think that’s a very smug, elitist attitude you are displaying. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a video presentation on a subject.
Holy crap, it’s astonishing how wrong you are about this. There’s a lot more depth to this issue than can be covered in 30 seconds! Not everyone has the temperament to read academic literature on this topic. I’m trying to get this message out to the masses.
I actually have linked to essays, statements from European medical organizations, and peer reviewed scientific literature in previous threads. The pro-circumcision folk have largely ignored that. Now that I’m putting forth the option to watch a very well made, award winning documentary on the subject that covers the issue from both sides, the pro-circumcision people are ignoring that too. You’re a bunch of cowards.
And do you think vaccines are necessary? I don’t. I think they are valuable, but they are absolutely not necessary and billions of people live successful lives before they were invented. And that old DPT vaccine made my daughter’s entire thigh swell and turn red as if she had an enormous bee sting, and then she felt sick for a couple of days. She cried a lot more from that than my son did from his bris, for sure.
So maybe it’s okay to cause unnecessary pain to a baby if the benefit outweighs the pain?
I understand that you don’t see a benefit. But that’s the point where we disagree: over the costs and benefits. Not over whether a parent has the moral right to inflict pain on their child for the benefit of the child. Because unless you are a lot nuttier than I think, you agree that a parent is not acting immorally in having their infant vaccinated.
There are some bizarre attitudes on display in this thread. Never before have I seen a harmful practice defended on the grounds that it’s fine if you do it to babies. America is a bizarre place. Play classical music to your stomach to help cognitive development, then casually introduce the baby into the world with a bout of torture and mutilation as if that will have no long term effects.
Genocide? Jews and Muslims die if they aren’t circumcised?
As pointed out in the circumcision thread, a significant part of the Jewish Norwegian population doesn’t circumcise. They didn’t seem to have died, or to not consider themselves Jewish. In the same thread, it was also pointed out that many Jews, even in Israel, aren’t terribly convinced by the concept, and mostly circumcise to please the family.
Others would just have to get on board with those who already don’t feel a compelling need to circumcise their children.
Not even counting that not all Jews are religious.
Besides accusing me of being a racist mass murderer, you’re mostly just following the screams of people who states that somehow Jews and Jewish culture will disappear overnight if they can’t anymore ritually mutilate children genitals. As proven by the previous example, they can pretty much stop genital mutilation of babies and keep being Jews. It’s totally absurd to assume that forbidding circumcision would result in a cultural destruction, let alone genocide.
But of course, clamoring racism, genocide, religious oppression and whatnot is a good way to diabolise people when you feel the absolute need to mutilate non consenting children genitals in the name of your bronze age god because it’s tradition, and tradition is so so much more important than the basic rights of children to bodily autonomy. It’s also easier to answer “he wants us all to disappear” than to actually find compelling argument to explain why, in 2018, it’s totally fine to cut non consenting children genitals.
It is both child abuse and an human rights violation. As I pointed out many times, if circumcision wasn’t already usual and accepted in your culture, but instead was something done by some minority of immigrants coming from a remote place, there’s absolutely no way, given our current moral values, that it would be tolerated.
Also, this minor procedure can and does have extremely bad outcomes for some of the children involved. And has exactly zero benefit except making the parents happy with themselves.
That’s not a medical decision, that’s a religious decision. Parents definitely can be prevented from making decisions that are potentially harmful for their children and have zero benefit for them.
I’ve zero sympathy for arguments along the line of “my god said so so I must be allowed to do it”.I don’t give a shit what your imaginary bronze age god is supposed to want. If you want to cut your own penis, do so. Someone else’s penis isn’t yours to cut.
It does cause harm. That people prefer to stay ignorant of it and to grasp at straws to defend their blood ritual on babies is blatantly obvious but doesn’t make it right.
And that’s why we keep pointing at such a form of FMG that is also a minor surgery, pretty much equivalent to circumcision and which…will currently land you in jail if you do it on your baby girl, no kind of FMG, regardless how minor, being allowed in our countries.Because contrarily to you, most people are uncomfortable with the idea of allowing even minor genital mutilations on baby girls. It gives them a pause. You know why? Cultural reasons. Allowing minor genital mutilation on baby boys is our cultural tradition, so everybody feels it’s mostly fine and mostly unimportant, we’re accustomed to the idea. While minor genital mutilations on baby girl is something that is done only by these backward ignorant foreigners who have zero respect for bodily autonomy as we do, so everybody feels it’s wrong and important. It’s totally illogical and indeed you’d be consistent in wanting to allow it. But most people won’t be comfortable with this kind of consistency.
So, if you want to do something to advance your views, I suggest that you agitate for allowing the removal of the clitoral hood on baby girls. It will end the current oppression of a cultural minority that is currently ongoing with parents and practitioners being jailed. I’d be very interested in watching the reaction of bystanders when you’ll picket a court of law to in such a case.
Not all of the people here disagreeing with you are pro-circumcision, you know. Some of us just think your obsession with it is rather unhealthy, to say the least.
I want to be fair and say, I feel that way about my clitoris. I do not want anything to happen to it. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable to at least want to have this conversation about cutting penises, because if I had a penis, I imagine I wouldn’t want it to be cut either.
That said, it’s obvious there are other issues such as cultural problems (the association of ending circumcision with ending Judaism or other religious groups; and I can’t deny this is one of those “first step” issues for that) but it does seem that non-religious circumcisions are the majority.
I’ve said it elsewhere, I think, but I’d be comfortable with needing a religious exemption or authority to allow circumcision. No cutting whole parts like the clitoris or whole dick, (and yes this is about an equal conversion just trust me on that body part) off, or sewing things. Just small cuts, for a very minor number of people. And no doctors doing it in secret behind closed doors, to gentlemen or to ladies, without criminal charges.
If circumcision is really such a central part of some cultures, I’d rather it at least be monitored and done with official oversight and rules. It does seem ridiculous for so many people to do it “just because it’s done” or for some obscure cosmetic or vague health reason, not even because of a long-lasting cultural background.
