Category: Circumcision

Delicate Decision: Post 1 of 4

On Monday the Los Angeles Times offered a typical analysis of infant male circumcision. There are many points to address from this story, so I’ve broken them up into multiple posts. (Posts 2, 3, and 4.)

Point one:

Dr. Peter Kilmarx, chief of epidemiology in the CDC’s division of HIV/AIDS prevention, says the CDC is looking at how the findings apply here. “The early opinion from the consultants — and not the position of the CDC, which involves a peer review process and public comment — is that, given all the previous data on circumcision plus the recent HIV African studies, the medical benefits of male infant circumcision outweigh the risks and that any financial burden barring parents from making this decision should be lifted,” he said.

Nationalizing health care will no more end routine infant male circumcision in America than the elimination of Medicaid funding has ended it in the states where Medicaid no longer pays for the unnecessary procedure. There is a political constituency that strongly supports imposing this on children. Until the universal principle that each individual owns his or her body is codified into law for males the way the Female Genital Mutilation Act now protects female minors, medically unnecessary circumcision will continue. And the state will pay for it when parents can’t (or won’t). Any protection of the individual based on entrenching an existing, or establishing a new, collective will fail.

Here’s a half-point in which I doubt Kilmarx understands the missing half:

“The procedure is so ancient, and steeped in cultures, I’m not surprised that the rate of adult circumcision in civilized countries doesn’t track with medical evidence,” Kilmarx says. “But as scientists, we don’t solely rely on what other countries do as a guideline.”

But as Americans, we don’t (mustn’t) solely rely on what science tells us as a guideline. Ethics matters. The rights of the individual matter, particularly the healthy individual. There is a hierarchy for decision-making concerning surgery on children. Kilmarx, among many, does not start at the beginning (i.e. medical need). That leads to mistakes, as clearly shown by the million-plus unnecessary infant circumcisions performed every year in America.

More analysis of this article and the CDC’s obtuse approach can be found here and here at Circumcision and HIV.

Science requires evidence that faith can’t provide.

This British article on circumcision demonstrates several typical lapses in critical thinking. These lapses are usually based in a refusal to consider that actions against children are subject to ethical concerns. That fits these examples. First:

One part of the country that is moving quickly in this direction is Walsall, where the local hospital now offers a weekend male-circumcision clinic. “We have a large Muslim community here,” says Dr Sam Ramaiah, director of public health for Walsall Primary Care Trust, “and we wanted to provide local children with a service that is safe and secure. The procedure takes place in hospital with local anaesthetic and is done by a trained surgeon. The advantage is that there is care available in case of complications and, if necessary, the child can stay in.”

The possibility of complications demands that circumcision be medically indicated based on need when the patient can’t consent. It may be more civilized to offer this service so that children may have their genitals cut in a “safe” environment, but it is not civilized. And it’s not equal; the same concession is not made to parents for cutting the genitals of their female children. Ethics – morality – requires more than good intentions and a clean operating room.

Next:

“If there was any hint that there was a physical or psychological problem it would have been suspended centuries ago, something that has happened to other practices in Judaism. And indeed things have changed already. Nowadays we will use only mohelim [people who perform ritual Jewish circumcision] who are doctors. We always use anaesthetic cream. If there is anything that indicates that we should delay the circumcision we will delay it,” [Rabbi Jonathan Romain] says.

The ethical demand from a lack of medical necessity indicates that we should delay the circumcision, so clearly Rabbi Romain is mistaken. But he mistakenly does not accept that fact, so I’ll move to his specific point.

“We’re modern, so we would not continue doing something harmful. We are incapable of it because we are modern. Someone, somewhere, would’ve stopped this if it was bad.” This idea is a typical fallacy that relies on an arrogance founded in the rejection of self-examination. It rejects the science of medicine as an ongoing quest, preferring instead an unstated belief that we know all we may know. Unfortunately, it also relies on knowing only what we want to know.

How long did medical science accept blood-letting as a cure? Have we mostly abandoned the practice now in favor of new understanding? Should men and women of science ceased progress by assuming that progress had reached its pinnacle?

Being a doctor requires ethics, but even in the absence of ethics, science provides the answers to the objective questions. Removing the foreskin is an objective change in the genitals. Cutting is objective harm. (Rabbi Romain proves this, since anesthetic cream would be unnecessary if cutting wasn’t objective harm.) When there is no medical indication for doing cutting, all that remains is the subjective evaluation of the benefits versus the costs of genital cutting. The doctor (and parents) are not qualified under any circumstance to conclude in favor of cutting when the child’s genitals are healthy. All arguments regarding benefits are irrelevant.

Our gender discrimination permits this immoral argument.

Following on previous entries regarding female genital mutilation, John Tierney updates the conversation with an opinion from Dr. Fuambai Ahmadu, “a native of Sierra Leone, who grew up in America and then went back to her homeland as an adult to undergo the rite along with fellow members of the Kono ethnic group.” I’m not impressed with Dr. Ahmadu’s reasoning.

I also take note of readers’ concerns about consent. While I have serious issues with the concept of consent and how it is applied asymmetrically to African practices of female genital cutting, I do agree with Rick Shweder that a possible way forward would be to consider limiting certain types of genital cutting to an age of majority, for instance, the age at which a girl can consent to marriage, abortion or to cosmetic surgery. A minor procedure can be allowed for girls under the age of consent, as is the case with infant male circumcision. Defining what such a minor procedure would entail and what might be the appropriate ages of consent is an important step that must include the voices of the “silent majority” of women who are affected.
…

The way forward is to look for solutions that would empower women (and men) to choose what to do with their own bodies. …

My position is “pro-choice” on any form of female and male genital modifications (with the exception of minor cuts, such as circumcisions of male and female prepuce discussed above) and a complete rejection of the motto “zero-tolerance of FGM”. …

That’s an interesting notion of choice. Dr. Ahmadu conflates the prerogative of a cultural group¹ to exclude those who do not conform to its rituals with permission to require inclusion through involuntary participation among those who reject its rituals. This ignores the real issue, the use of force on a healthy, non-consenting individual.

Pro-choice should mean what it implies, which is complete consent or refusal. There are no other valid competing interests on the individual when critiquing elective genital surgery. If the person agrees, for whatever reason, it is his or her choice. If the person does not agree, for whatever reason, it is forced. If the person cannot consent, for whatever reason, the assumption must be that he or she would not. Force violates his or her rights as an individual to self-ownership. Permitting force relegates the body part(s) under consideration to property status, possessed without limitation by another. That can never be right.

Introducing subjective qualifications (i.e. minor cuts) is then a diversionary tactic based on a relativist notion of what people should not mind based on the good opinion of others. It is not a principle that recognizes the individual. It rejects a coherent conception of human rights.

Dr. Ahmadu’s minor is my major. Her blessing of my forced circumcision as a cultural rite is irrelevant to the point of offensiveness. I believe in choice. She believes in choice, unless force is necessary to achieve her outcome.

Post Script: Dr. Shweder contributed a comment to the discussion suggesting a curious denial of some of the earlier counterpoints made throughout the threads. I offered a new rebuttal here.

¹ Do not read this as a synonym for government. No government has such authority, nor do citizens possess a right to use government to exclude citizens from society.

Can we frame the debate objectively?

In response to this Will Wilkinson entry and this Kerry Howley entry on the liberty arguments for (economics) and against (morality) legalized prostitution, Ross Douthat goes off the rails with a strange question of how prostitution as sex work differs from molestation and incest. It’s as ridiculous as it sounds. Read Mr. Wilkinson’s response, with all the obvious goodness such a question demands.

Instead, I want to focus on this one sentence from Mr. Douthat’s entry:

If you think that sex, by virtue of being bound up not only culturally but biologically with emotional attachment on the one hand and reproduction on the other, is a unique kind of physical act, one that’s intimate by its very nature in a way that, say, preparing dinner isn’t, then it makes sense to assign a hierarchy of moral value (and moral stigma) to different kinds of sexual activity – most likely with monogamy at the top, serial monogamy somewhat lower, promiscuity lower still, and activities that treat sex as a commodity to be bought and sold somewhere near the bottom.

Of course it makes sense to assign that hierarchy if that’s what you think. But not everyone thinks that. Perpetuating individual liberty demands more than caving to a squishy notion of universal disdain for an activity. Even, and perhaps especially, when one finds activities at the bottom of that hierarchy morally repugnant.

The validity of arguing for the legalization of prostitution does not hinge on the moral argument with regard to selling sex. It is acceptable to believe that an activity is morally unacceptable, yet to acknowledge that two consenting adults may engage in that activity because they are not harming others. Or more precisely, if they are harming anyone, it is only themselves, voluntarily. That question of liberty is at the core of this debate, not the moral defensibility of prostitution.

Free to engage and should engage are different concepts. Ms. Howley and Mr. Wilkinson argue only the former. This (implicitly) injects into the debate the truth that all tastes and preferences are subjective. It sets such subjectivity aside and leaves the legal question only to evidence of objective harm.

For fairness, Mr. Douthat posits in an earlier entry that sex work is by definition self-abuse, justifying a legal prohibition. The posts he responds to in the above links address that argument.

**********

Of course, since it’s apparently okay to ask questions unrelated to the topic, let me ask a question: Why is it automatically self-harm worthy of prohibition for an individual to sell sex, even when it’s voluntarily sold, yet it’s reasonable to permit parents to surgically alter the genitals of their healthy sons – who may or may not approve of such permanent, physical alteration – as Mr. Douthat suggested last year in defense of infant circumcision?

The answer to how one person can hold two incongruent opinions rather obviously rests in a willingness to use personal, subjective tastes and preferences to inform the legal code of a diverse, secular, civil society. It’s the same central planner impulse that resides in every individual who seeks to dictate which freedoms are abhorrent.

Since I’m off on the tangent, in that entry, Mr. Douthat states:

Proponents, like myself, point out that even saying the word smegma is really disgusting. Again, I think we pretty much win the debate right there, without even getting into the whole HIV question.

I get the tongue-in-cheek nature of the comment, whether he meant it or not. I think he did because I think he views circumcision as inconsequential. (Remember subjective tastes and preferences?) But any understanding of human biology demonstrates the stupidity of such an argument. Female genitals produce smegma, as well. We do not cut female minors for that reason. Or, more to the point, we do not permit parents to cut their daughters just because they, the parents, are disgusted by the mere mention of the word. We manage to find the correct reasoning to prohibit that. But for males, parents can use only the mere mention of smegma as an excuse to cut. Or they can reject even that reason and order it because it’s fun to check “yes” on the consent form. The law is based on our conditioned beliefs rather than facts.

Just as it is with prostitution.

Parents as middle-man is an interesting twist on proxy.

This article demonstrates the view many people have when they make their child’s decision to circumcise him (or her) absent any medical need.

According to a press release from the Ministry of Health, the sessions for children who wish to be circumcised will be held during the first-term school break from March 18 to March 30, 2008.
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Parents or guardians who wish to acquire these services for their children can directly contact…

Parents aren’t imposing their preferences, they’re merely acting as agents for their children’s wishes. That may make people feel better, but it doesn’t change the action from wrong to right.

Liberty is the center.

In what will probably be my only post on Eliot Spitzer’s sex scandal, I’m not going to talk much about his sex scandal. I just don’t care about the sleaze. His hypocritical moral thuggery speaks for itself, although I’m perfectly happy to witness every libertarian rip him. I’m just not willing to pretend that this will in any way assist the return of individual liberty to the legislative process surrounding consensual, victim-less transactions of subjectively-questionable morality¹. At best, I’m willing to consider that it might discourage politicians from private misbehavior. Upon reflection, and before completing the previous sentence, I accepted that Spitzer’s fall will discourage nothing. The hubris of politicians to preen in public crusades while mucking around in the filth in private is going nowhere. In other words, this is just another sex scandal that will, at most, ruin Spitzer’s political career.

Instead, I want to examine Kip’s response to Glenn Greenwald’s question on the matter. First, Greenwald’s question:

[A]re there actually many people left who care if an adult who isn’t their spouse hires prostitutes? Are there really people left who think that doing so should be a crime, that adults who hire other consenting adults for sex should be convicted and go to prison?

To which Kip replied:

Actually, the “need” to criminalize prostitution is one of those rare worldviews that unites radical conservatives (“morals,” “social fabric,” etc.) with radical liberals (“oppression of women,” “the powerful exploiting the powerless,” etc.).

While the Vast Center-Wing Conspiracy just shrugs it off.

I think that’s spot-on. Our society’s puritan response to sex is not exclusively a trait of social conservatives. That belief may be more prevalent on the right, and I think it’s more explicit there, but it appears in various forms on the left. As Kip highlights, only the reasoning is different. The revulsion is identical.

There’s no reason for me to comment on that with an entry of my own rather than a comment on Kip’s original entry, so allow me to expand where I think his logic applies. Since I’m writing it, my thought process applies to genital mutilation. There is a comparison to be made in the mistaken logic applied based on gender. As it applies to female genital mutilation, I’d write the comment like this:

Actually, the need to criminalize female genital mutilation is one of those rare worldviews that unites radical conservatives (“anti-Islam,” “nationalism,” etc.) with radical liberals (“oppression of women,” “the patriarchy²,” etc.).

While the Vast Center-Wing Conspiracy just understands that the individual’s right to be free from unnecessary harm is all that’s necessary to denounce and prohibit female genital mutilation.

Although the conclusion is the same, the approach matters. The Vast Center-Wing Conspiracy relies on the principle rather than its own subjective interpretation of what is right and wrong. It leaves open the idea that the individual could choose something different, but leaves open only the idea that the individual should choose.

With male genital mutilation, I’d write the comment like this, with the obvious reversal of the original prostitution argument on criminalization versus legalization:

Actually, the “need” to legalize male genital mutilation is one of those rare worldviews that unites radical conservatives (“parental rights,” “conformity,” “religion,” etc.) with radical liberals (“parental rights,” “women’s sexual preferences,” “women’s sexual health,” etc.).

While the Vast Center-Wing Conspiracy just understands that the individual’s right to be free from unnecessary harm is all that’s necessary to denounce and prohibit male genital mutilation.

I am not making the claim to the prevalence of these world views or that they approach a tipping point close to a majority. But I have encountered every one of them in person and on the Internet. And politicians (and courts) accept every one of them.

Still, the central point remains. Those who rely on principles of individual liberty arrive at the same conclusion, which is equal treatment (i.e. protection) for all people, regardless of gender. There is a foundation that isn’t open to political whims and/or faulty personal character. This Center-Wing Conspiracy grasps the point of a civil society and acts to make it reality.

Everyone else just pretends that his or her personal, subjective tastes and preferences for a traditional practice should apply to everyone. There is no concern that the other individual might not choose the same³. There is no recognition that, if he or she chooses differently, he or she is not automatically wrong. There need not be any delusion or coercion.

The difference between principle and ideology is important.

¹ Paying for sex? Not immoral. Paying for sex with someone other than one’s spouse? Not necessarily immoral. Paying for sex with someone other than one’s spouse when that spouse has not/would not agree to such marital terms? Immoral. Each person is entitled to his or her own private shades of gray.

² As if males can’t be the victim of the patriarchy. As if women can’t be the instigator in “the patriarchy”. (Any look at the scope of FGM advocates demonstrates the fallacy in that belief.) The only thing I know for sure is that when I see the patriarchy in a debate, I stop to question the receptivity of all participants to the complete, objective set of facts informing the debate. With the FGM debate, this receptivity is generally very low.

³ A common argument in favor of permitting genital mutilation of male infants is “if you don’t like it, don’t do it to your kids.” These people miss the point because they don’t rely on any principle.

Root for individual liberty and America will succeed.

I fully expect to vote for myself in November, if I bother to vote at all. But just for fun, I’m researching some of the Libertarian Party candidates. On my first look – in this case, Wayne Allen Root – I’m not so thrilled. Consider some of his positions:

I support the Line Item Veto. I will push relentlessly and tirelessly to make this a crucial part of the President’s arsenal to fight the deficit, cut waste, and balance the budget.

Saying how he intends to achieve this is important, since it explains his understanding of the government process. However, he does not say how he intends to do this, so I will not assume his preferred path for achieving this. But I will suggest Article 1, Section 7 of the United States Constitution as a starting point:

Every bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a law, be presented to the President of the United States; if he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the objections at large on their journal, and proceed to reconsider it.

This requires the President to address each bill in its entirety. He may not isolate the pieces he likes from the pieces he detests. The only valid approach to the line item veto is a Constitutional amendment.

My preference on this is simple. The Congress should narrow the focus of bills it presents to the President for approval. A defense bill shouldn’t have education issues attached, for example. The President should reject every bill that doesn’t meet this test until Congress begins legislating in this manner. This isn’t perfect because Congress gets leeway in how narrow it defines a topic, but it is an immediate solution.

Next, Mr. Root offers this:

I support gay rights and civil unions. Gay marriage however is not a federal issue. It is a States’ Rights issue only.

This raises two problems. First, the 16th Amendment forbids the states from denying “to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Marriage, as a civil contract, is an individual right to enter into a voluntary agreement. It is not a group right belonging to two people. Such an idea is absurd, given our understanding of individual liberty, but it also assumes that two people share a right before they meet. Whoever you will marry shares this right with you. That’s ridiculous. Defining the individual right to contract down from the right to enter into a contract with another competent, willing individual to a right to enter into a contract with another competent, willing, opposite-sex individual is anti-individual liberty. That incorrectly achieves equal at the expense of liberty.

Second, states rights appears multiple times in Mr. Root’s positions. No government has rights. Governments have powers. These powers are granted from the people, not because the government has a legitimate claim to them, but because the people trade some amount of liberty in exchange for specific outcomes. I trade my “right” to harm to protect my right to remain free from harm. Government does not grant rights. It protects inherent rights.

In other words, it is little consolation to be oppressed by my neighbors through my state/local government instead of my countrymen in another state through our federal government. This sort of nonsense appears multiple times in Mr. Root’s positions. It’s the same fallacy made by Ron Paul in too many of his positions. (Remember, Ron Paul is not a libertarian.)

Here’s one last position from Mr. Root:

I support the separation of church and state. However I also believe in tolerance for rights of religious Americans too. I believe in school prayer, God in our pledge of allegiance and on our currency. To remove these religious symbols would be to deny the rights and freedoms of religious Americans. I would also protect the rights of those who do not believe in God or religion to not participate in any public prayer or religious activities.

This is troubling. Removing these religious symbols from the private sphere would be to deny the rights and freedoms of religious Americans. To remove them from the public sphere denies nothing.

School prayer is fine, in a private school. That is not what is up for debate. Arguing otherwise suggests dubious integrity. Mention of God in our pledge of allegiance, as legislated by Congress, is problematic. We do not have a private currency, and the government actively seeks to stamp out such efforts, so “In God We Trust” on U.S. currency is a violation of the First Amendment. While the latter two are minor in scope, if not principle, none of the three are valid in government as public requirements. They have nothing to do with tolerance for individual rights.

I do not wish to suggest that there is a libertarian purity test based on policy recommendations. I don’t; I think that fallacy is counter-productive. However, I think there is a valid libertarian purity test on thought process. If Mr. Root argues for legislation to grant the line item veto, he ignores the Constitution’s text. Where Mr. Root argues for states’ rights, he misses the point of individual liberty and government of, for, and by the people. Where Mr. Root argues to overlook Congressional indifference to the First Amendment in favor of “tolerance”, he abandons the reasoning for a Constitution. None of these positions rely on libertarian principles, which is a valid criteria for judging a candidates credentials.

To clarify, the big libertarian test right now seems to be Iraq. Most libertarians agree that our experiment in Iraq is a mistake. It is a preemptive war without justification based in national security. Unlike Afghanistan, a legitimate war of self-defense, Iraq carried no such immediate threats to U.S. security.

I agree with that analysis. I also think there are libertarians who disagree. I don’t mean “people who (mistakenly) call themselves libertarians” disagree. For example, Timothy Sandefur supports the war in Iraq on national security grounds. I disagree with his conclusion from the facts, but he is basing his support on his intellectually-considered conclusion within the framework of libertarian principles of self-defense. It’s okay to disagree with him. Such debate pushes us to a better conclusion, in general. But it would be idiotic to suggest that he is not a libertarian because of this policy recommendation.

As another example, I’m clearly against any circumcision of a child that isn’t based in an immediate medical need. That is a libertarian position focused on the individual’s right to keep his foreskin (i.e. his property) and his right to remain free from harm. Freedom of/from religion is also an individual right, with the child having a claim equal to his parents. It is an invalid excuse. There can be no libertarian disagreement on this.

When there is a medical issue, there can be a disagreement on whether that medical issue requires circumcision rather than some less invasive treatment. The answer requires judgment. I would seek out those less invasive treatments for a child before resorting to circumcision. I think ethics demand all parents and medical personnel do the same. But proxy consent in the face of legitimate medical issues for a legally incompetent individual is valid in libertarian principle, even when it leads to child circumcision.

The likelihood of having the perfect candidate without running for office myself is almost non-existent. Ultimately, the best we can hope for is a candidate who process information
through the correct filters. It’s too much to expect the same conclusion on every issue. It’s reasonable to expect the same respect for individual rights.

UNAIDS needs to rebuild its ethical framework.

Following on the last entry, UNAIDS issued another press release (pdf):

Two United Nations agencies have issued a joint call to boost protection of the human rights of people regardless of their sexual orientation or their actual or presumed HIV status.

In a statement, the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) urged “all governments to be vigilant in respecting and protecting the rights of individuals in this regard, in particular the rights of all to be free from murder, torture, violence, arbitrary arrest and vilification, regardless of their HIV status or sexual orientation.”

The bodies voiced their concern over reports of forced HIV testing, arbitrary detention on the basis of HIV status and the disclosure of one’s HIV status without consent.

Again, this is a noble goal. I agree with it. But UNAIDS fascinates me with where it draws its lines on human rights. Forced HIV testing is bad. Forced genital mutilation¹ is good. Taking a person’s blood, which the body will replace, is bad. Taking a male’s foreskin, which his body will not replace, is good.

What?

Does this have something to do with intent? Presumably governments are forcing HIV tests on people to facilitate persecution and/or exclusion. That’s inarguably bad, since individual liberty based on human rights is a valid principle. Presumably parents are forcing genital mutilation on their male children for its potential to prevent reduce the risk of female-to-male HIV transmission. Even if I assume this intention is Good&#153, condoms and behavior modification achieve better results. They are the specific, identifiable reasons why we must not abandon the fair and equal protection of human rights, regardless of gender. Yet, UNAIDS rebukes this understanding of rights in favor of fear and panic, with an additional nod to tradition².

Any idea that a right to remain free from unnecessary, unjustified force vests after some extraneous condition is met is invalid. I suspect UNAIDS would argue against that interpretation of its actions. Its actions argue against any other interpretation.

¹ But ONLY on boys; UNAIDS has ethics and how dare anyone who suggests otherwise.

² This argument strikes me as succumbing to fear. It’s easier to accept a human rights violation than it is to call it out and risk being criticized by those who practice the tradition. This is the coward’s path.

The number of X chromosomes should not matter.

The push for separate rights based on gender has never been so obvious.

Ten U.N. agencies have launched a campaign to significantly reduce female circumcision by 2015 and eradicate the damaging practice within a generation.

In a statement released Wednesday, the agencies said female circumcision violates the rights of women and girls to health, protection and even life since the procedure sometimes results in death.

That is, of course, a noble goal. But how is permitting encouraging male genital cutting any less worthy? (I’ll get to “health” in a moment.) Do boys not deserve the same respect? Does every boy facing the circumciser’s blade survive his ordeal?

“Today, we must stand and firmly oppose this practice because it clashes with our core universal values and constitutes a challenge to human dignity and health,” Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro told the Commission on the Status of Women where the campaign was launched.

“The consequences of genital mutilation are unacceptable anywhere, anytime and by any moral and ethical standard,” she said. “Often, female genital mutilation is carried out on minors, violating the rights of a child to free and full consent on matters concerning her body and body functions.”

These agencies¹ argue that males don’t require human dignity. They argue that males don’t require their full, healthy bodies. They argue that moral and ethical standards do not fully apply to males. They ignore that unnecessary genital surgery is carried out on male minors. They reject the notion that a male child has an equal human right to free and full consent on matters concerning his body and body functions.

They defend this idiocy with the following note in the press release (pdf):

In contrast to female genital mutilation, male circumcision has significant health benefits that outweigh the very low risk of complications when performed by adequately-equipped and welltrained providers in hygienic settings Circumcision has been shown to lower men’s risk for HIV acquisition by about 60% (Auvert et al., 2005; Bailey et al., 2007; Gray et al., 2007) and is now recognized as an additional intervention to reduce infection in men in settings where there is a high prevalence of HIV (UNAIDS, 2007).

Significant is subjective. The missing word potential before “health benefits” is necessary, since most males have a healthy foreskin with no history of problems when they are circumcised². Very low is subjective. But the key word in that note is outweigh. Who is the appropriate person to evaluate the balance of those two sides? For example, who decides that the inherent risk of death is low enough? These agencies claim that every female must decide for herself from birth, but every male is subject to the decision of his parents until he reaches the age of majority. Females are assumed to be against medically unnecessary cutting until they state otherwise. Males are assumed to be indifferent, at worst, to medically unnecessary cutting until they state otherwise, when it’s too late because a portion of their genitals are already gone forever.

The ten agencies involved place political correctness before principle. They possess no moral or ethical credibility.

¹ The agencies are The Joint U.N. Program on HIV/AIDS; the U.N. Development Program; the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa; the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; the U.N. Population Fund; the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights; the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR; the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF; the U.N. Development Fund for Women and the World Health Organization.

² This omission is damning to the intellectual integrity of the agencies.

The issue is always individual rights.

Three circumcision topics, in order from past to present.

First, author Susie Bright wrote the following based on a discussion in her podcast from 2005:

The problem is, it’s one thing to decide for the newborn… and it’s another to deal with the adult men around you who already had the choice made for them a long time ago. So often people think they’re talking about “babies,” when they’re really talking about themselves.

I’m not deluded into thinking the foundational basis for my advocating against circumcision isn’t my complete dissatisfaction with being circumcised. I hate it. I have been and always will be upfront about that. But, that’s not where my thinking is on why infant circumcision as practiced in the United States is wrong. What is broken can’t be fixed; I’m not trying to fix it. Nor do I need to resolve any phantom psychological problems some imagine I suffer. I’m only making the basic human rights (and common sense) argument I wish someone had made before I was born.

In other words, it’s only about me when someone else makes it about me. That involves assuming something I haven’t said, or ignoring what I have said. You like being circumcised? Good for you. I’m not trying to convince you otherwise. You think your preference permits you to impose it permanently on a healthy child? Only there do we have a problem.

Next, from a blogger who self-identifies as a (paleoconservative) libertarian, this argument pointing to Time’s ranking of voluntary, adult circumcision as a way to reduce the risk of female-to-male HIV infection:

So much for Penn & Teller’s anti-circumcision show [sic]

I’ve seen the Penn & Teller: Bullshit! episode on circumcision, which its producers describe thusly:

In episode 301, the third season premiere, the mischievous magicians examine the historical, religious, medical and ethical arguments associated with circumcision.

How many of those has the blogger, Josh, ignored? There’s the obvious medical argument against circumcising healthy infants, that we don’t routinely perform surgery on healthy children that corrects no malady. However, I’m only interested in challenging the direct flaw in pretending that X scientific assertion (reduced female-to-male HIV risk) demands Y response (circumcising healthy infants). X doesn’t demand Y. Aside from the easy medical dismissal, the beginning of the ethical analysis informs us that the HIV angle on voluntary, adult male circumcision suggests nothing about forcing infant circumcision on healthy infants, the topic of the circumcision episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!.

Finally, for parents who claim a First Amendment right to circumcise their children, consider:

Forty-four percent of Americans have either switched their religious affiliation since childhood or dropped out of any formal religious group, according to the largest recent survey on American religious identification.

The obvious shortcoming is that it’s a survey with insufficient detail. It can’t specifically rebut any rights claim.

Yet, it demonstrates the valid individual rights counter-argument to the invalid group rights claim such parents make. Freedom of religion is an individual right. Parents have only the individual right to practice their own religion. They may raise their children in that religion, but that is a concession to practicality and reason, not a separate guaranteed right. There must be limits that protect the child’s individual rights. That includes his individual right to be free from religion by rejecting his parents’ religion. Modifying his body permanently revokes his right. That can never be legitimate.