In Response to Re: Should circumcision of both sexes be outlawed unless medically indicated? : religious 'laws'need to be reviewed and changed where necessary. this is 20012
Posted by shane

yoram chaiter, are you one of those who do not wish to look at the evidence.?
Posted by rmtracey

As ever, where strongly-held religioius practices are being defended, there are those who seek to conflate and confuse and those who seek to silence debate. There are also those who seek to distort the evidence and abandon basic medical and ethical principles of treating one's fellow human beings. This is a shame and shameful. How about we use existing medical principles and evidence. Normal children, normal bodies, with someone else wishing to surgically impose their beliefs on a child = a child safeguarding issue IMHO. Of course, one must seek to listen to parents' views but as doctors we must never collude with harmful traditional practices- so we don't always have to do what parents demand! Sometimes to do so, is professionally indefensible. To suggest that religious freedoms extend to someone's 'right' to cut someone else's body is ludicrous. Conflation of therapeutic surgery on abnormalities such as bat ears or hypospadias and non-therapeutic surgery on normal bodies suggests wilful distortion of principles. For most 'cosmetic' abnormalities, in any case, good practice is to wait until the child is old enough to consent or dissent to the procedure. Why abandon that principle? Unless you're worried the child might dissent. Justifying infantile surgery to reduce the risk of penile cancer is scientifically and ethically incontinent. Penile cancer affects 1:100,000 men and almost exclusively affects men over 40 with poor foreskin hygiene. There is no science behind forcing this on a child. As for STI's or protection of their presumed female partner from cervical cancer, these children aren't having sex, there is no evidence of infantile circumcision reducing STI's - the contested evidence from Africa (where South Africa, one of the countries involved, has since criminalised infant circumcision) was on consenting adult African men many of whom were lost to follow-up and whose partners were not studied. Extrapolating such poor-quality research on adults to children in other countries smacks of desperation, not science. And if there is evidence for cutting boys' normal genitals is it ethical to try this on girls as recommended recently by a Zimbabwean minister- it's logical, Cap'n- trouble is it's unethical so shouldn't be done- on boys or girls. No medical association in the world recommends routine infant circumcision; there's a reason for that. There is no convincing evidence that the risks justify the procedure. Here's a comprehensive 2010 summary of the evidence from the Royal Dutch Medical Association and associated dutch colleges http://knmg.artsennet.nl/Over-KNMG/English.htm The BAPS have stated that there are practically no medical reasons to circumcise a child under the age of 5. The only reason to do it to someone so young is that they can't resist, they can't do anything about it once it's done and the adults hope their sons will live a life without ever knowing what they're missing, just as they have. To those who would silence discussion, by all means let's stop talking about it. First stop harming children- stop removing the most sensitive part of their body http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17378847 without their consent and for pseudoscientific reasons and then we'll all stop talking about it.
Posted by Lempead