Is There Any Choice Parents Can’t Make?

I haven’t written on Roman Polanski’s arrest because everything worth saying is so blindingly obvious that those who need to hear are likely devoid of any capacity for understanding it. Still, one point thrown around bothered me most. The following excerpt from a New York Times article discussing cultural changes since the rape of a 13-year-old sums up the point I witnessed in more than one excuse for Polanski (emphasis added):

A 28-page probation officer’s report completed in September of that year presented a broadly sympathetic portrait of Mr. Polanski and his behavior, even while acknowledging that the victim, Samantha Geimer (who has since publicly identified herself), had offered grand jury testimony of forcible rape.

Submitted by the acting probation officer Kenneth F. Fare, and signed by a deputy, Irwin Gold, that report, which recommended against further jail time, said “the present offense appears to have been spontaneous and an exercise of poor judgment by the defendant.”

In a further conclusion that appeared to shed blame on the victim, it said, “There was some indication that circumstances were provocative, that there was some permissiveness by the mother,” who had allowed Ms. Geimer to spend time with Mr. Polanski. And, in a conclusion that might particularly jar readers today, it pointed toward evidence “that the victim was not only physically mature, but willing.”

I do not want to meet the sort of person who would suggest that parents may consent to the rape of their children. Anyone who suggests such a right exists is a barbarian. It doesn’t, because children are not property.

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Posted without comment, I agree with every word of this assessment of the case (and the NYT article) by author Lauren McLaughlin, titled “She Was an Eight Grader.” A choice excerpt:

They don’t mention the drugs he gave her, drugs with very specific muscle-relaxing properties, mind you. They don’t mention that she said no repeatedly. They don’t mention that, after fleeing his sentence, Polanski immediately took up with another minor, Nastassja Kinski. If there’s a clearer case of unrepentant pedophilia, I’m not aware of it.

Nor is Polanski’s pedophilia in anyway mitigated by the fact that he seems to think that everyone wants to have sex with young girls. Rather, it’s a sign of the decrepit company he must have kept. And, perhaps, of the decrepit leniency with which sexual assault used to be treated.

For this reason, it irks but does not surprise me that people like Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Terry Gilliam signed that petition. But why did Tilda Swinton, Darren Aronofsky, and Alexander Payne sign it? Are they aware of the actual crimes they’re so anxious to pardon? And if so, what exactly would Polanski have had to do to this eighth grader to disqualify himself from their forgiveness?

Nancy McDermott Is Wrong On Circumcision

In replying to an essay against infant circumcision by Ethan Epstein at Spiked, Nancy McDermott attempts to defend parental proxy consent for routine infant male circumcision. She is mistaken.

The main problem with The Circumcision Discussion in general, and with Ethan Epstein’s article in particular, is the appeal to Science with a capital S to validate what is essentially a personal decision for parents. There isn’t really overwhelming evidence for or against infant circumcision, which makes this issue quite unambiguously a matter of preference, and more so than some other issues such as breastfeeding or vaccination where the scienctific research is abundant.

There is overwhelming scientific evidence against infant circumcision: the boy is healthy. Surgery on that healthy person is only unambiguously a matter of preference if the healthy person makes the decision for himself. It is not a valid personal decision for parents to make for their healthy children, male or female.

A good blogger would stop here because McDermott’s case is already refuted. But there’s more to say. Effectively, McDermott advocates using science without the capital E of Ethics. Would we entertain a discussion of whether or not removing the breast bud’s of female minors is a valid parental decision because it might reduce her risk of breast cancer? Of course not. Yet, we abandon such critical thinking because circumcision has a long history. We ignore that science without ethics encourages us to choose the science we prefer while ignoring objective reality. Again, the child is healthy. He needs no intervention. Therefore, the child’s human rights are involved, even when medical intervention is indicated. As discussed here it is the primary sole issue because the child is healthy. McDermott’s argument is the usual sophistry unleashed to defend genital cutting on male children as a parental right, despite the lack of need and demand that we only extend this right to their children of one gender.

She continues:

But that hasn’t stopped Epstein from trying to use Science to support what is essentially his own particular set of prejudices. In the end, his attack on infant circumcision is not based so much on evidence but rather on a degraded notion of personal autonomy that is contemptuous of parents and reduces the whole parent/child relationship to the matter of a few inches of skin.

Defining the foreskin down as “a few inches of skin” indicates a particular set of prejudices. Defining surgery as a relationship tactic indicates a particular set of prejudices, as well.

As for being contemptuous of parents, I am. When parents engage in contemptible behavior, I will call their behavior contemptible. Since it’s always worth repeating in this discussion, the child is healthy. Performing surgery on him (or her) for the parents’ subjective reasons is unethical because it violates a basic human rights principle: Performing medically unnecessary surgery on a non-consenting person is wrong. Where facts differ from any of the conditions involved in that principle, the discussion changes to proxy consent. But circumcision as understood in this essay involves all of the facts involved in the principle. Proxy consent is not valid.

Referring to Epstein’s essay, McDermott continues (footnote removed):

Take for instance his attempt to establish – or rather to assert – that male infant circumcision is on a par with ‘female circumcision’. It’s a comparison that defies even a basic familiarity with human anatomy. ‘Female circumcision’, or Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as it is usually called, involves the removal of some or all of a woman’s external genitalia and is associated with side effects like intense pain, infection, haemorrhaging, infertility and urinary incontinence. Comparable surgery in a man would involve the removal of most of the penis and the scrotum. But male circumcision as it is currently practiced consists of the removal of the foreskin and nothing else. Statistically it is a very safe procedure with few complications (in some cases, there may be minor bleeding or a local infection).

The moral equivalency exists because medically unnecessary surgery on a non-consenting person is wrong. Gender is irrelevant. Extent of damage is irrelevant. The World Health Organization defines female genital mutilation as “procedures that intentionally alter or injure female genital organs for non-medical reasons.” The intent is generally different between male circumcision in America and female genital cutting in other cultures, but a well-intentioned act can still be objectively harmful. Outcome matters. And male circumcision meets the definition applied to female genital cutting, since the male child’s genitals are intentionally altered for non-medical reasons.” There is usually a difference in degree, but there is no difference in kind.

Given that male genital cutting matches the definition applied to female genital cutting, it’s crucial to explore how McDermott is under-informed about FGM. As it’s typically practiced, it involves removal of some or all of a female’s external genitalia. But FGM is defined to include “all other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-medical purposes, e.g. pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterizing the genital area.” These (less commonly practiced) forms are similar in enough ways to male circumcision to make the point. Parents who force it on their daughters often give similar subjective reasons for both procedures. Yet, our anti-FGM laws make no distinction for extent of cutting or personal preference involved in the parents’ decision. The focus is on the autonomy (and health) of the minor, which is where the focus should be.

Yet, it’s easier to explain why McDermott is wrong. How does she arrive at the implied conclusion that removing a male child’s foreskin is not “the removal of some or all” of his external genitalia? Implicitly (and incorrectly) positing that the foreskin and its removal are trivial isn’t enough. She ignores the truth that, as surgery, circumcision is harm. Instead, she relies on self-reporting studies that she believes support her stance (footnote omitted):

Epstein doesn’t do much better when he tries to show evidence for psychological trauma and sexual dysfunction as a result of circumcision. He relies on a 2002 paper written by self-proclaimed ‘intactivists’ which indicates that some men enjoy sex less after circumcision. Had he more objectively investigated what he says is ‘quite evidentially true’, he might have come across any number of studies that show the opposite. My favourite is a large-scale study from 2008 (with over 4,500 participants) in which an overwhelming majority of Kenyan men reported no difference in sexual satisfaction or function after their circumcisions.

What is incompatible in comparing a study that indicates some men enjoy sex less after circumcision and a study that shows an overwhelming majority of men reported no difference? “Some men” and “overwhelming majority” are both synonymous with “less than 100%” for the purposes of the ethical discussion of medically-unnecessary child circumcision. Some males will not be happy being circumcised. I am not. Some men will suffer more than the standard, “acceptable” damage. The issue is about an individual right, not a right based on parental desires.

Continuing:

It is striking that midway through Epstein’s article the CDC’s proposal to ‘promote’ infant circumcision mysteriously transforms into a plan to ‘m
andate’ infant circumcision. This is not a slip and it’s not just that Epstein has got his facts wrong (although he has). …

I’ll pause here to make the point that I am not defending Epstein’s article. Were I to write about it, I’d call out the same flaw McDermott notes about the CDC’s intentions, as I wrote when the CDC news stories broke in August.

… Rather he makes this change in terminology because he isn’t really talking about the CDC at all any more. He’s talking about parents. For anti-circumcision activists, all infant circumcision is mandated in the sense that infants do not consent to it.

Exactly.

In what seems an attempt to defend her indifference to what the boy doesn’t need and may not want, her next paragraph demonstrates how she’s failed to grasp this fundamental aspect of the ethical case against infant circumcision.

On one level Epstein is right. It is of course impossible for an infant to consent to anything, and parents make decisions large and small on behalf of their children all the time. Some of these decisions affect their future and many are far more difficult than the question of whether or not to have your infant circumcised.

That some decisions parents make are “far more difficult” does not validate parental proxy for infant male circumcision.

In the second excerpt above, McDermott mentions the parent/child relationship. This inevitably leads to a mistake that advocates of infant circumcision, or at least of parental choice, make. McDermott is no different:

Many of the choices we make as parents profoundly affect our children. But when we look back at our own lives it is often things that didn’t concern us directly at all that had the greatest impact – things like parents’ decision to divorce, to change jobs, or to emigrate. As children we rarely have any say and yet we manage to adapt and often to flourish. One of the major reasons we are able to develop this resilience is because we can depend on our parents. It is the parent/child relationship – each one unique and dynamic, a complex mix of love and trust, and mutually crazy-making – that creates the sense of inner confidence that helps us learn shape our own destinies.

By counterpoising the ‘personal autonomy’ of an infant to the judgment of his parents, Epstein and others who campaign against circumcision reduce the relationship between parents and their sons to one moment; a moment that forever defines the child as victim and the parent as victimiser regardless even of what the boy himself thinks about it later in his life. Once a victim, always a victim.

McDermott’s shift from discussing the parent-child relationship to the parent-son relationship reveals the flaw in her thinking. There’s a key distinction because she talks in generalities to establish parental authority before shifting to a specific case in which she omits a gender from consideration to reach her preferred outcome. If parents have a right to choose that is superior to the personal autonomy and health of their sons, that same right exists superior to the personal autonomy and health of their daughters. She rejects objective health and risks in favor of subjective decisions by parents for their sons, yet accepts objective health and risks as a defense against subjective decisions by parents for their daughters. That right doesn’t exist, but if it did, she’s being contemptuous of the parents of daughters because she refuses to let them exercise their right. She’d deny that, but regardless, it’s clear she started with her preferred outcome and worked her way backwards to find only the relevant facts she needed.

She concludes:

There are all sorts of reasons why parents do or don’t circumcise their sons. For some it is the embodiment of their faith, for others it is simply custom. For some the thought of subjecting their child to any unnecessary pain or alteration is unacceptable. The important point is that the choice takes place within the context of the parent-child relationship. ….

Again, the choice she’s defending takes place between the parent-son relationship. She’s established this separate category, incorrectly as I’ve shown, without offering an explanation for why this is legitimately a separate category beyond an incorrect assumption that the removal of some or all of a female minor’s external genitalia is offensive in a way that removal of some or all of a male minor’s external genitalia is supposedly not.

…The CDC is not, as Epstein implies, planning to circumcise every male infant in the United States, but the change in its recommendation, just like every other official pronouncement about the right way to raise children, should be greeted with scepticism. Not because, as Epstein argues, it might lead parents to make a wrong choice, but because it questions their right to make choices in the first place.

Somehow I suspect she doesn’t believe we should be skeptical about the official pronouncement (i.e. a law) from the United States Congress criminalizing the parental “right” to choose female genital mutilation. But we are not to question the parental right to make that choice for sons, with circumstances and reasoning explicitly rejected for female minors. Her essay is a self-absorbed excuse for parents and their made-up right to impose their whims based on irrational traditions and willful ignorance.

Why Do We Tie Employers to Sickbeds?

There’s no easy way to give a sufficient account of this letter to Andrew Sullivan, posted under the theme “The View From Your Sickbed.”  I’ll do what I can, but give it a quick read to understand the details.

Bascially, a 33-year-old woman died after overdosing on Tlyenol, a problem further complicated by lupus. In the rush to give her care, the hospital didn’t get the woman’s new insurance information, so it worked under the assumption that the liver transplant she needed to survive wasn’t covered.  Her insurance from her previous job didn’t cover a tansplant, while her insurance from her current job did. The hospital lost time figuring out solutions to a problem it didn’t really have.

This is all unfortunate, no less so from the apparent inevitability of her death suggested in the reader’s e-mail.  But I wouldn’t get here from the facts provided, as the e-mailer did:

But, if there was a universal healthcare plan in place, all of that would have been unnecessary. This woman’s condition and treatment wouldn’t have been contingent on just what was and was not covered by her particular plan, and the simple fact she had recently changed jobs would not have confused what options were available, and a bureaucracy would not have come between her and her doctor.

This conclusion leaves unquestioned the assumptions upon which our current system is built.  Specifically, if we didn’t tie health insurance to employment, this woman may have had consistent coverage on her own, relevant to her unique health considerations.  This may have avoided the situation she encountered due to the hospital’s out-of-date records.

We need reform, but not the reform currently offered.  Regardless, we will never get the process correct until we break from the narrative that demands we accept that the road to peril started at the point and with the cause(s) most convenient to a preferred explanation.

Post script: For the purpose of this post, I’ve intentionally ignored the privacy and data management issues involved in a universal health care plan capable of solving this problem.

Bill O’Reilly On Health Insurance

Many people seem to be quoting this statement from Bill O’Reilly:

… I want, not for personally for me, but for working Americans, to have a [sic] option, that if they don’t like their health insurance, if it’s too expensive, they can’t afford it, if the government can cobble together a cheaper insurance policy that gives the same benefits, I see that as a plus for the folks.

I’ll argue that O’Reilly hasn’t said anything of substance here.  Not because I think we should abandon the people he speaks of, those who (genuinely) can’t afford it; I don’t.  But he’s wrong in his assumption. How will the government offer the same benefits for less money?

Two ways to pay for this seem apparent: subsidies and hiding costs. The latter is reprehensible but the expected outcome.  Just look at how we currently treat the solvency of Social Security and it’ll be clear that politicians will never admit the truth about costs when they can hide them.  (The last resort option is to blame it on the other party and claim that this proves we need more government to oversee the bad people, a group to which the current politician will never claim membership.)

But if I assume this won’t happen, then that leaves subsidies.  If we’re going to subsidize, why not subsidize the private insurance for those who (genuinely) can’t afford it rather than restructure the entire system?

For what it’s worth, insurance is expensive at least in part because government regulates (i.e. limits) the amount of competition in the insurance market.  If you could buy insurance across state lines, you wouldn’t be captive to the specifics of your state.  And so on.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Religion By Scalpel Is Not A Parental Right

Andrew Sullivan weighs in on the CDC circumcision mess:

… I guess I was an early obsessive on this. As readers know, my position is simply that no parent has a right to permanently mutilate a child for no good reason. Scar tissue should be a personal choice. Would we approve of parents’ tattooing infants? The entire thing is an outrage and should be banned outright with a religious exception for Muslims and Jews.

Damnit, no.  The entire thing is an outrage and should be banned outright.  If it’s wrong for parents to mutilate a child for no good reason, and it unequivocally is, permitting an exception for parents to mutilate their children because their god says they must mutilate their children only legalizes no good reason.  Scar tissue should be a personal choice, unless your parents believe their god tells them to sacrifice your foreskin?  That’s incoherent.  Favoring one subjective, non-medical reason over another subjective, non-medical reason for surgically altering (i.e. mutilating) a child is indefensible.

It is also objectively flawed on its practical point.  Let’s assume the government finally acknowledges that boys deserve closer-to-equal protection that girls already receive, with closer-to-equal being the only way to admit that federal law currently prohibits genital cutting on healthy female minors for all subjective, non-medical reason, including religious reasons cited by parents.  Either the Congress or the courts must embrace this closer-to-equal protection.  What will stop parents from claiming religious requirements if they want to circumcise their sons?  How will the government verify the real Jews from the temporary Jews or the real Muslims from the temporary Muslims? Will the government intervene on matters of theology when Christian parents continue incorrectly claiming that Christianity endorses (or requires) infant circumcision? The only result will be that this hypothetical prohibition on the non-ritual circumcision of male minors would be struck down.

This all-too-common charade only tricks people into thinking they’re being tolerant of religion. Yet, whatever your overall opinion on religion, here religion deserves explicit condemnation.  I’d rather engage reason where it involves what one person may do to another. Circumcision for non-medical reasons, including religious adherence, is purely subjective.  Scar tissue should be a personal choice.  It must therefore be left only to the individual exercising his religious freedom to circumcise himself. Or not.

Update: Mr. Sullivan responds to a reader’s e-mail (emphasis added):

The reason I don’t follow this to its logical conclusion is that I just cannot imagine trying to enforce a total legal ban on it given the religious outrage among Muslims and Jews it might provoke. And I do make exceptions for religious liberty that I don’t for other issues, because I believe very deeply in the right of people to figure out their ultimate purpose in life without the intervention of the state. So I restrict myself to mere venting about what seems to me to be an irrational and barbaric relic.

On the first sentence, he’s right. Enforcement would be difficult. But enforcement is a separate issue. Its difficulty may make the law largely impotent in the years immediately following its introduction, but that is not a valid reason to avoid enacting the legislation necessary to protect the rights of male minors. When those rights are acknowledged, as we’ve acknowledged for female minors for all unnecessary genital cutting, other methods of enforcement (e.g. lawsuits) become more likely, which will eventually act as a deterrent and shape the culture.

However, the fundamental problem with Sullivan’s approach rests in his notion of religious liberty. Religious liberty involves letting a person “figure out their ultimate purpose” through mutilating their own genitals without state intervention. There is no liberty in letting people mutilate another’s genitals. Circumcising another person is not a right, and protecting individuals from unwanted physical harm is exactly the purpose of the state. This is true even when – perhaps especially when – the harm is carried out by well-intentioned parents searching for their ultimate purpose. What about the child’s ultimate purpose? That may include a preference for normal genitals. It probably will include a preference for normal genitals, if he’s left his choice. Instead, Mr. Sullivan’s defense of parents imposing ritual circumcision respects magical thinking more than reason and objective facts.

Talk About The Issue, Not Rush Limbaugh

I’m probably supposed to deal with this:

Limbaugh then elaborated on the reference to him in the lyric. “I would remind the rapper Jay-Z: Mr. Z, it is President Obama who wants mandated circumcision. That means if we need to save our penises from anybody, it’s Obama. I did not know I was on anybody’s balls, either. I’m happy to know that they think I am, though.” The mention of Obama is in reference to the fact that the Center for Disease Control is considering recommending circumcision to high-risk adult men to reduce the spread of HIV, according to The New York Times.

Rush Limbaugh is a hack using controversial buzzwords because he knows it will get him attention, which is all he wants. He’s a deejay, not a political thinker. Using his nonsense for political arguments on any side of any debate is stupid.

With that out of the way, Ed Brayton has a post in which he begins:

The record of demagoguery and lunacy from the right wing continues. The CDC is considering — just considering, mind you — adopting a policy to encourage — just encouraging, mind you — people to have their children circumcised on the grounds that it reduces the risk of disease. Run that through the silly straw prism of right wing spin and it magically becomes “Obama is going to force us all to cut off our genitals!”

Fine, fair enough. Again, Rush Limbaugh is a moron. But Mr. Brayton links to an article that unfairly maligns Ed Morrissey’s post about circumcision and the CDC’s potential recommendation that I used yesterday as a starting point for discussing single-payer and circumcision. Whatever other issues Mr. Morrissey may have in how he presents political arguments, he was correct in the suggestions of his piece. Any other interpretation is a failure by the reader to interpret his words using their common meanings. As he wrote:

Why should the CDC push circumcision at all? The government has no business being in the middle of that decision. Under ObamaCare, however, when the government starts paying more and more of the health-care tab, they will point to ambiguous cost savings down the road — in this and other cases, decades down the road — to pressure Americans into surrendering their choices now.

As I mentioned in my entry, he unnecessarily cluttered his argument with the term “ObamaCare,” but other than that, I can’t find anywhere he mentioned that the government would force circumcision on anyone. “Pressure” does not mean “force”. The writer at Salon directly, and Mr. Brayton indirectly, are undeniably wrong.

Yet, Mr. Brayton’s post generated this comment:

… While I think the net effect of such a policy would be detrimental, to equate it with forced circumcision is BAT SHIT INSANE. …

To equate a recommendation with forced circumcision is not BAT SHIT INSANE. I’ve written this several times over the last week, but it’s worth repeating here: For the circumcised male, why does he care whether circumcision is mandated by the government or merely by his parents? The result – forced circumcision – is the same for him. Eliminating the choice of a healthy child is the issue, not who forces the circumcision.

We can and should rebuke those like Limbaugh who offer absurd suggestions of government-mandated circumcision as a result of health care reform. It’s political nonsense intended to distract. But we mustn’t falsely accuse someone of making that argument who hasn’t, in fact, made the argument. Doing so is no less a distraction from the legitimate issues.

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From another comment to the Ed Brayton post:

You can count on Limbaugh to say something stupid, but the Ed Morrissey quote is right. CDC guidelines are pressure on doctors and patients. They are supposed to be. The real problem with the Morrissey piece is the following:

“Why should the CDC push circumcision at all? The government has no business being in the middle of that decision.”

That is wrong. The point of the CDC is to study the spread of infectious disease and recommend the most effective ways to slow or stop the spread.

As Mr. Morrissey wrote in the paragraph before the one I excerpted above:

I’m neutral on the issue of circumcision, which has become a controversial practice, but find this idea of interventions very, very odd. In the first place, circumcision does not provide an immunity to STDs, not AIDS or anything else. Studies indicate that circumcised males may have less danger of acquiring an infection, but as the NYT points out, that’s from heterosexual relations — a very minor channel of AIDS communication in the US. Men have much better choices than circumcision for avoiding HIV infection, including the use of condoms (still not a perfect defense, but better than circumcision), refraining from intravenous drug use with shared needles, avoiding high-risk sexual practices altogether, and so on.

Any recommendation to circumcise infant males to reduce the risk of HIV is unethical because it encourages genital cutting on a healthy, non-consenting individual. It is also stupid. Infant males are not at risk of HIV now, and will be at little risk of the only type of transmission (female-to-male) that voluntary, adult male circumcision has been shown to reduce when they begin having sex, even if they do not use condoms, which no one is suggesting they may do after circumcision. Like WHO and UNAIDS, the CDC is considering recommending infant circumcision because they know such recommendations convince parents. If they were confident that men would embrace it, they’d focus on adult volunteers. They know that’s a dead-end for mass acceptance, so they recommend it for those who can’t say no. It is not force by government, but when told to a receptive audience acting on behalf of another, the difference is in tactic, not outcome.

Matt Steinglass Is Mistaken On Circumcision

In the interest of context for this post, Chris Bodenner did what Hanna Rosin didn’t, which is to apply critical thinking to the circumcision question. He wrote:

Studies are a red herring, however, when it comes to the ethical part of the debate. Even if there are no discernible differences between cut and uncut on average, there are still many individuals who are better or worse off from a procedure their parents imposed. As one reader puts it:

It’s my dick. It’s my dick. It’s my dick. It is no one else’s dick but my dick. And I should have the choice to circumcise it when I am old enough to make that decision.

Matt Steinglass reacts:

Let me reassure this guy: no one is planning to do anything to his dick. Assuming, that is, that he is more than 8 days old. But with respect to the practice of circumcision, the important point is this: he’s my son. Not yours. Parents have the right to decide on medical treatment for their children, presuming such medical treatment is not actively harmful. And parents have the right to include their children in cultural rites and practices, again presuming no harm is done.

Proxy consent is valid where medical treatment is indicated (i.e. necessary). Parents do not have a right to impose medical treatment – in this case, surgery – because they like that medical treatment, for whatever reason they value it. This is precisely because it fails the test Steinglass establishes: it causes harm. Circumcision is surgery. It removes healthy, functioning tissue. There is scarring. There is an inherent risk of further complications, starting with “excessive” bleeding and infection and extending all the way to death. The more extreme complications are, of course, rare, but the risk itself is a form of harm. Parents cannot know if their son will be the statistic. Good intentions are not a substitute for objective criteria.

He continues:

What, then, of female circumcision? Well, I understand, perhaps wrongly, that there are some forms which are not particularly medically invasive, and which do not entail significant medical consequences. I think that such forms of female circumcision are a matter of cultural practice that should be left up to parents to decide. The more invasive forms of female circumcision entail serious negative medical consequences. Obviously that’s not cool. And female circumcision is carried out on girls aged 7 to 12 or even older; at that age, the child gets a vote, too. In any case, this doesn’t have much to do with anything, because we’re talking about a medical recommendation.

I’ll address his strange tangent on female genital cutting in a post script. For now, I’ll point out that his criteria fail because the cultural genital cutting is not a medical recommendation backed by need, regardless of the child’s gender. Medically unnecessary genital surgery on an unconsenting individual is unethical. Again, it causes harm in 100% of cases for no objective benefit or attempt to correct a genital malady. The intervention is indefensible.

He concludes:

… Men who are circumcised don’t complain about it. There may be some vanishingly small number of guys who are upset about the fact that their parents circumcised them. It’s a weird thing to be upset about. The whole issue of treating this as some kind of mutilation of a rights-endowed human being who should be allowed to decide for himself seems to me like an insane metastasis of the American fixation with individual rights-based ideology. Children are born into families. Those families have cultures and beliefs, and are entitled to make decisions about how their children will be treated, shaped, and raised.

He perceives no harm and thus dismisses the individual making the rights-based claim against something he, Matt Steinglass, thinks is a “weird thing to be upset about”. That tells us nothing because it’s about Matt Steinglass, not circumcision. He writes only of culture and family without considering that the male may not value that culture or that circumcision is objective harm.

Yet, he’s not in favor of families deciding how their children will be treated, shaped, and raised without limits. He stated that he believes parents have the right to make decisions as long as it’s not actively harmful to the child. He is making a rights-based argument that centers on the child possessing certain individual rights. There are limits to how much culture may play a role. This makes the role and influence of the family and culture irrelevant here; his claim hinges first on the merits of circumcision as surgery on a healthy child. It fails for the reasons I’ve stated, which prevents moving to cultural considerations. It’s important to remember that he implicitly agreed to that test because of his caveat. He probably disagrees that circumcision is objective harm. He is wrong, if he does, but he hasn’t bothered to attempt the defense. Instead, he is essentially proposing that subjective preferences are valid for parental decisions as long as the parents believe them to be culturally valid. That’s madness.

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Post Script: To his credit, I suppose, his paragraph on female genital cutting shows that he is consistent in his error. But I’m not sure why he thinks that girls aged 7 to 12 or even older get a vote. Is he saying they do or that they should? If it’s the former, he is mistaken. If it’s the latter, we limit the rights of children to the extent that we deem them capable of consenting. In this “ideal” world where children are asked before their parents surgically alter their healthy genitals, is a 7-year-old competent to make that permanent decision without undue influence? More importantly, do we believe parents will refrain if the child rejects it? Is the child to be considered potentially opposed to genital cutting only if she’s old enough to voice opposition, whether or not she could reasonably be expected to comprehend the full implications? Is there a similar age for male minors?

The shorter version here is that I don’t think he thought that paragraph through before he posted the entry. It’s incoherent.

Insults Instead of Inquiry

Robert Stacy McCain blogged about Hanna Rosin’s first circumcision post at the Daily Dish:

She dares defend circumcision while guest blogging at the site of the world’s foremost foreskin fetishist, Andrew Sullivan.

“Male genital mutilation!” scream the connoisseurs of uncut, preservationists of the precious prepuce.

Get over it, people. Only porn freaks and gay men — having ample opportunity to comparison shop, as it were — obsess so fanatically over the difference. …

Is this typical of McCain’s writing? Rather than deal with the issue up for discussion, he smears Andrew Sullivan, which would be bad enough if Mr. Sullivan had any direct involvement in Mr. Rosin’s entry. That Mr. Sullivan is not involved in the post and yet is the direct target of the smear shows an appalling lack of class. But he was only having “some mocking fun”, as he writes in a follow-up post, because he “knew” Andrew Sullivan to be a foreskin fetishist. More on this in a moment.

… As I was taught in commercial design classes 30 years ago, form follows function, and familiarity with the fact of foreskinless functionality (i.e., I’ve fathered six kids) indicate my circumcised state is entirely adequate to the rigors of the task.

This proves what? I’m not aware of anyone making the claim that circumcised men can’t have sex or that humanity will die out because circumcision causes sterility. This is a pointless diversion. “My penis works after circumcision” proves nothing about the merits of infant/child circumcision because it’s a “comparison” of one data point specific to one individual.

The advantages in terms of hygiene are well-known, and tend to be especially appreciated by mothers who have a difficult enough time getting boys to bath, much less to wash their winkies with health-conscious care. …

The advantages in terms of hygiene are achieved easier with basic hygiene methods (i.e. soap and water), which are still required after circumcision. McCain’s error likely centers on his apparent ignorance of human anatomy. The foreskin adheres to the penis at birth and will not separate for many years. This protects the penis. The normal separation process may last late into puberty, long after mothers have ceased washing their sons’ genitals. Not only is there no need to go digging for dirt, it is potentially harmful to do so. Not that that stops parents from permitting doctors to forcefully break the natural adhesion in order to circumcise.

As for the throwaway point about circumcision easing the job of mothers, any parent who circumcises their healthy child to make their job easier is a bad parent. Child care is difficult? Don’t have kids. Choose to have kids and you discard your right to place your laziness first.

Back to his claim about fetishists:

… And it is certainly my impression — based on comments whenever the subject is raised — that women generally prefer what we might call the kosher pickle.

If there are fetishists, which side are they on? Is it those who advocate for each male to keep his normal genitals and choose for himself for his reasons or those who believe that parents may impose unnecessary surgery on their son’s genitals because they believe his future partner(s) will find his circumcised penis more sexually appealing? A woman can believe a man with a surgical scar on his penis is sexually preferable, yet it is those who state that the foreskin is a normal part of the penis, and each male should decide for himself, who are the fetishists? With this smear, McCain shows nothing more than an apparent character flaw deployed to mask his lack of curiosity.

He continues in his follow-up post (linked above):

Being quite happily married for 20 years, after having previously spent more than a decade as an equally happy and reasonably popular bachelor, I protest any suggestion that I really give a damn about anyone else’s penis but my own. While quite satisfied with my own equipment, I think it unseemly that I should boast of its merits, or to cast aspersions on the equipment of others.

What obtrudes here — and it obtrudes from only one direction in the present discourse — is the Foreskin Lobby’s repeated assertion that the circumcised penis is “mutilated” or in some other way inferior to the unmodified phallus.

I’m happy that he’s happy with his circumcised penis. I do not intend to waste my time trying to convince any circumcised male that he needs to be unhappy and wish that he hadn’t been circumcised. I’d gain nothing from such an endeavor, and it’s unnecessary to my logical and ethical case against circumcision. What each male decides for himself is what’s valid. No one is suggesting he has to give a damn about anyone else’s penis. But he needs to give a damn about the males who will give a damn about their own penises being altered by their parents without medical need.

McCain’s position, like most Americans, is that parents can decide and whatever they decide is fine, for whatever reason. It’s not. The child is healthy. He doesn’t need surgery. The legitimacy of proxy consent ends there. This should be blindingly obvious, especially when considering the inane, offensive reasons many parents give. As McCain highlights without awareness with his reference to women’s stated preference, parents circumcise based on nonsense. They don’t know what their son’s future partner(s) will prefer or whether he would want to have sex with someone who would reject him for having normal male genitalia. There is no possible defense for non-therapeutic infant male circumcision. That is the issue, not that Robert Stacy McCain likes being circumcised or that I hate it.

So, are those who derogate the foreskinless phallus as “mutilated” expressing some sort of religious bigotry? I hesitate to suggest such a thing, but sincerely wish that these barbaric aficionados of heathen penises would cease inciting unseemly debates over a subject so offensive to so many.

I am not surprised that someone who would trot out the fetish smear – in mocking fun, of course – would also attempt the more offensive smear that having a problem with infant circumcision is just a charade for anti-Semitism. There is no problem with circumcision as a religious rite, only with circumcision of children as a religious right. An adult may choose circumcision for himself for religious reasons or any other reason he deems worthy. And, yes, I’m aware of what the Old Testament says about circumcision. I also know what it says about slavery and adulterous women and so on. Civil society does not permit those, either, because we grasp that individuals have rights. What someone would choose for himself may not be what someone else would choose for him. The only valid option is to default to the individual’s choice. Hence, no circumcision of healthy children.

**********

Because it’s there… He concludes his original entry with this:

Those who prefer the sword-and-scabbard setup are perfectly entitled to their preference, …

I’m not entitled to my preference, am I, because society allowed my parents to surgically entitle their preference on me? This is the point McCain seems determined to miss.

… without casting aspersions upon those of us who’ve forsaken the sheath and keep the blade ready. “Mutilation,” indeed!

Without casting aspersions… Fascinating. Those who resort to name-calling are always the most thin-skinned, aren’t they?