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America’s Infuriating Double Standard on Cutting Children’s Genitals

Slightly edited version of essay published in  Huffington Post 05/03/2017 01:26 pm ET

By: Georganne Chapin, MPhil, JD, Executive Director, Intact America

Fraternal Twin Baby Brother and Sister

On April 13th, a Detroit doctor was arrested and charged with the Federal offense of removing parts of the genitals of two young girls. Meanwhile, doctors across the United States remove part of the genitals of 3,000 baby boys every single day.

How is that different?

It’s not. Too many people who object to cutting little girls have no qualms about cutting baby boys. The simple truth is that no child born with healthy genitalia should have any part of them cut, permanently altered, or painfully removed—no matter what gender they are.

I remember the first time I heard about female genital mutilation, or FGM as it’s often labeled. I was in my 20s, and not yet married or a mother. I immediately thought, “But we do the same thing to boys…, and call it by its euphemism — ‘circumcision’.”

Maybe if we called it male genital mutilation, more people would understand what it actually entails—binding the arms and feet of a newborn boy, using a metal probe to forcibly tear his foreskin from his glans penis, clamping that foreskin, and then cutting it off with scissors or a scalpel. Sometimes doctors cut off too much (causing complications too gruesome to mention here); sometimes they cut unevenly. Follow-up surgeries to correct errors and functional impairments are common. That’s no surprise. Surely, it is hard to operate on the genitals of a bucking, screaming child.

‘I Heard the Most Terrible Cries.’

Read what Elise Carin Wicklund, a mother in Parrish, Florida, wrote after she was told by her baby’s pediatrician that her weeks-old son would feel only a few seconds of discomfort.

“I heard the most terrible cries. The nurse brought me my screaming baby. They hadn’t even been able to put his onesie on all the way. He wouldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t nurse. For a long time, when I changed his diaper, he screamed.”

Without a doubt, that doctor is still out there cutting little boys. Compare this to the case of Jumana Nagarwala, a Johns Hopkins-trained female physician, charged with genital cutting of minor girls.

“Despite her oath to care for her patients, [Dr. Nagarwala] is alleged to have performed horrifying acts of brutality on the most vulnerable victims,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Blanco in a news release announcing the arrest.

Nagarwala’s case, the first to be filed under 18 U.S.C. 116, the Federal law that criminalizes female genital mutilation, has opened the eyes of many Americans, who are shocked that FGM is practiced on our soil. Perhaps it’s time they think more about what doctors routinely do to little boys.

As for the alleged health benefits of male circumcision, suffice to say that Great Britain, Europe, Australia, and other Western countries do not circumcise their boys or men, and their rates of AIDS/HIV, cervical cancer and penile cancer are comparable to or lower than ours.

The truth is that Americans circumcise their boys for the same reason other cultures circumcise their girls. We need to recognize that only tradition, bias and politics make the one okay, and the other abhorrent. Let’s acknowledge that all children deserve equal justice.

Author

4 Comments

  • Edward von Roy

    May 10, 2017 11:34 am

    “Be a hero, don’t circumcise your daughter or son.”

    My real concern is that the US and Europe will soon legalize some “mild” forms of the Classification of female genital mutilation (FGM). Every form of FGM should be banned everywhere.

    “Female genital mutilation comprises all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons (WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, 1997).”

    Classification of female genital mutilation

    http://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/topics/fgm/overview/en/

    There’s no such thing as ‚mild‘ FGM.

    Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) =
    zero tolerance even to the less invasive forms of FGM

    Any ritual circumcision or other ritual injury of the genital of a girl or a boy below the age of eighteen years should be banned on a global level.

    Edward von Roy (social worker)

  • Yolanda D. Zapatero

    September 3, 2017 11:39 am

    A new danger for a child’s intact genitalia: Talking of the “Gillick-competent child”

    “Fully informed, Gillick-competent individuals (male, female, or intersex) should be allowed to choose NGC for themselves, if they wish, under conditions of valid consent.”

    http://euromind.global/en/brian-d-earp-and-rebecca-steinfeld/

    ::

    A new danger for global intactivism: Talking of the “Gillick-competent child”

    Kommentare von Jacques Auvergne (2017). UPDATE: Earp reagiert, Auvergne antwortet.

    Kindeswunsch auf Beschnittenwerden auch für Mädchen bald Gesetz?

    Britischer Medizinethiker fordert das verstaatlichte Befragen des männlichen oder weiblichen Kindes nach dessen baldiger Genitalverstümmelung (MGM oder FGM)

    (…) Individualrechte versus Gruppenrechte – hat der 18 Jahre alt gewordene männliche oder weibliche Mensch das Recht auf einen intakten Körper, insbesondere auf ein intaktes Geschlechtsorgan? Wir Intaktivisten spalten die Schülerschaft eben nicht auf in Christenkinder, Judenkinder, kleine Muslime oder kleine Atheisten, sondern fordern: Keine Beschneidung unter 18 Jahren. (…)

    Westliche Medien (in the Western media), gibt es für Earp auch Eastern media, Oriental media, Islamic media? Wie es in den Siebziger Jahren schon Ali Schariati betrieb, versucht der Multikulturalist und Kulturkreistheoretiker Brian D. Earp die eine Welt mit ihren unteilbaren allgemeinen Menschenrechten aufzuspalten in Okzident und Orient.

    Earp, der als Fachmann für Ethik zwischen Atheistenkind, Judenkind, Christenkind und Muslimkind gerade nicht hätte unterscheiden dürfen (…)

    https://jacquesauvergne.wordpress.com/2017/08/28/475/

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Marilyn

Marilyn Fayre Milos, multiple award winner for her humanitarian work to end routine infant circumcision in the United States and advocating for the rights of infants and children to genital autonomy, has written a warm and compelling memoir of her path to becoming “the founding mother of the intactivist movement.” Needing to support her family as a single mother in the early sixties, Milos taught banjo—having learned to play from Jerry Garcia (later of The Grateful Dead)—and worked as an assistant to comedian and social critic Lenny Bruce, typing out the content of his shows and transcribing court proceedings of his trials for obscenity. After Lenny’s death, she found her voice as an activist as part of the counterculture revolution, living in Haight Ashbury in San Francisco during the 1967 Summer of Love, and honed her organizational skills by creating an alternative education open classroom (still operating) in Marin County. 

After witnessing the pain and trauma of the circumcision of a newborn baby boy when she was a nursing student at Marin College, Milos learned everything she could about why infants were subjected to such brutal surgery. The more she read and discovered, the more convinced she became that circumcision had no medical benefits. As a nurse on the obstetrical unit at Marin General Hospital, she committed to making sure parents understood what circumcision entailed before signing a consent form. Considered an agitator and forced to resign in 1985, she co-founded NOCIRC (National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers) and began organizing international symposia on circumcision, genital autonomy, and human rights. Milos edited and published the proceedings from the above-mentioned symposia and has written numerous articles in her quest to end circumcision and protect children’s bodily integrity. She currently serves on the board of directors of Intact America.

Georganne

Georganne Chapin is a healthcare expert, attorney, social justice advocate, and founding executive director of Intact America, the nation’s most influential organization opposing the U.S. medical industry’s penchant for surgically altering the genitals of male children (“circumcision”). Under her leadership, Intact America has definitively documented tactics used by U.S. doctors and healthcare facilities to pathologize the male foreskin, pressure parents into circumcising their sons, and forcibly retract the foreskins of intact boys, creating potentially lifelong, iatrogenic harm. 

Chapin holds a BA in Anthropology from Barnard College, and a Master’s degree in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University. For 25 years, she served as president and chief executive officer of Hudson Health Plan, a nonprofit Medicaid insurer in New York’s Hudson Valley. Mid-career, she enrolled in an evening law program, where she explored the legal and ethical issues underlying routine male circumcision, a subject that had interested her since witnessing the aftermath of the surgery conducted on her younger brother. She received her Juris Doctor degree from Pace University School of Law in 2003, and was subsequently admitted to the New York Bar. As an adjunct professor, she taught Bioethics and Medicaid and Disability Law at Pace, and Bioethics in Dominican College’s doctoral program for advanced practice nurses.

In 2004, Chapin founded the nonprofit Hudson Center for Health Equity and Quality, a company that designs software and provides consulting services designed to reduce administrative complexities, streamline and integrate data collection and reporting, and enhance access to care for those in need. In 2008, she co-founded Intact America.

Chapin has published many articles and op-ed essays, and has been interviewed on local, national and international television, radio and podcasts about ways the U.S. healthcare system prioritizes profits over people’s basic needs. She cites routine (nontherapeutic) infant circumcision as a prime example of a practice that wastes money and harms boys and the men they will become. This Penis Business: A Memoir is her first book.