Besides the pain of the initial crushing and cutting, circumcision harms in many other ways. First, the male glans and inner foreskin, just like the glans clitorides and inner labia of women, are actually internal structures covered by mucous membrane that, when exposed to the air and harsh environment through circumcision, develop a tough, dry covering to protect the delicate, sensitive tissue. It's sort of like if you went around with your eyelids pulled back or your tongue sticking out all the time or if a woman were to walk around with her labia pulled back exposing the clitoris and internal lining to the air. The moist, warm membranes of eye, tongue, clitoris or labia would react to the dry air and defend against it. The nerve endings would become dulled because layers of cells build-up in a process called keratinization. This keratin, a tough, insoluble protein substance, is the chief structural constituent of hair, nails, horns, and hoofs. Over time, these once exquisitely sensual organs acquire all the sensitivity of an old garden glove.
Circumcision is not simply the cutting off of useless skin. Author Gary L. Harryman innumerates what circumcision destroys:
***Its connective synechia, which fuses the foreskin to the glans while the penis develops.
***Approximately half of the smooth muscle sheath called the dartos fascia.
***Most of the erotogenic nerve endings on the penis, including the densely innervated ridged bands, reducing the sensitivity of the penis to that of ordinary skin.
***Specialized epithelial Langerhans cells, a component of the immune system.
***Thousands of coiled fine-touch receptors, including the Meissner's corpuscles.
***Estrogen receptors--the purpose and value of which are not yet fully understood.
***Ectopic sebaceous glands, which lubricate and moisturize.
***The protective covering of the glans, normally an internal structure. The foreskin shields from abrasion, drying, and callusing, and protects from dirt and other contaminants.
***The entire immunological defense system of the soft mucosa, which may produce antibacterial and antiviral proteins such as lysozyme, also found in mother's milk, and plasma cells, which secrete immunoglobulin antibodies.
***Lymphatic vessels, the loss of which interrupts the lymph flow within a part of the body's immune system.
***The frenulum, the sensitive "V" shaped tethering structure on the underside of the glans is also usually amputated, severed, or destroyed.
***The apocrine glands, which produce pheromones, nature's powerful, silent, invisible signals to potential sexual partners.
***As much as 50% or more of the total penile skin, radically immobilizing and desensitizing whatever skin remains.
***The "gliding" mechanism. If unfolded and spread out flat, the average adult foreskin would measure 15-20 square inches, the size of a postcard. This abundance of specialized, self-lubricating skin gives the natural penis its unique-hallmark ability to smoothly "glide" back and forth within itself, permitting non-abrasive intercourse, without drying out the vagina.
***The pink to red to dark purple natural coloration of the glans.
***10% to 20% of its circumference because its double-layered wrapping of loose foreskin is now missing making the circumcised penis thinner.
*** As much as one inch of the erect penis' length due to scarring and shrinkage from loss of the mobile, richly vascularized foreskin.
***Several feet of blood vessels, including the frenular artery and branches of the dorsal artery, the loss of which interrupts normal blood flow to the shaft and glans of the penis, damaging its natural function and possibly stunting its growth.
*** An estimated 240 feet of microscopic nerves, including branches of the dorsal nerve.
*** Perhaps most importantly, between at least 10,000 to 20,000 specialized erotogenic nerve endings of various types, which can discern slight motion, subtle changes in temperature, and fine gradations in texture.
And occasionally a boy will lose his life from this needless operation. It has been estimated that as many as 209 babies die every year from circumcision and related complications.
It's no coincidence that circumcision has its greatest detrimental effect on sexuality. Maimonides (or Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, a twelfth-century philosopher, legal scholar, and physician often called "Judaism's Aristotle") said: "As regards circumcision, I think one of its objects is to limit sexual intercourse and to weaken the organ of generation as far as possible, and thus cause man to be moderate... The bodily injury caused to that organ is exactly that which is desired; it does not interrupt any vital function, nor does it destroy the power of generation. Circumcision simply counteracts excessive lust; for there is no doubt that circumcision weakens the power of sexual excitement, and sometimes lessens the natural enjoyment; the organ necessarily becomes weak when it loses blood and is deprived of its covering from the beginning."
The "weakening" of sexuality was precisely the reason circumcision was introduced into medical practice in the United States as a "prophylactic" during the 19th century. Until that time, the practice was virtually nonexistent. Here in good ol' God-fearing, Puritanical America, masturbation was not only considered sinful, but was deemed a major health peril as well. Countless maladies were thought to accrue from this "degenerate" practice, and, in 1888, J. H. Kellogg--the All Bran laxative king--together with other Victorians of his ilk, began proselytizing for mass circumcision as a deterrent to "self abuse." Their purpose was to keep the male youth of America from masturbating, going blind and insane with hair growing on the palms of their hands. Kellogg said, "Tying the hands is also successful in some cases... Covering the organs with a cage has been practiced with entire success. A remedy which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision... The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment."
These self-promoting defenders of public health and morality claimed that circumcision also cured a vast litany of masturbation-related ills and proselytized for its mass acceptance as an "immunizing inoculation." They claimed it cured everything from alcoholism to asthma, curvature of the spine, enuresis, epilepsy, elephantiasis, gout, headache, hernia, hydrocephalus, insanity, kidney disease, rectal prolapse and rheumatism. In the face of rationality and modern research, contemporary circumcisionists have abandoned most of these claims but have now updated their list to include cancer, urinary tract infections, sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, and premature ejaculation.
The cancer argument has been an especially effective scare tactic, prompting officials of the American Cancer Society to write a letter to the American Academy of Pediatrics condemning the promulgation of the myth that circumcision prevents penile cancer. "The American Cancer Society does not consider routine circumcision to be a valid or effective measure to prevent such cancers... Perpetuating the mistaken belief that circumcision prevents cancer is inappropriate."
Of course it is. Penile cancer is an extremely rare condition, affecting only one in 100,000 men in the United States. Penile cancer rates in countries that do not practice circumcision are lower than those found in the United States. Fatalities caused by circumcision accidents may approximate the mortality rate from penile cancer, and, for circumcised men who do contract penile cancer, the lesion may occur at the site of the circumcision scar. Portraying routine circumcision as an effective means of prevention distracts the public from the task of avoiding the behaviors proven to contribute to penile and cervical cancer: especially cigarette smoking and unprotected sexual relations with multiple partners. The ACS has recently reiterated this position on their web site and also notes that "...circumcision is not medically necessary."
On a recent BBC radio broadcast of "Case Notes", pediatric urologist Rowena Hitchcock pointed out that "Even using the figures of those who support circumcision one would have to perform 140 circumcisions a week for 25 years before you could prevent one case of cancer. Of those cancers, 80% are treatable and they are avoidable by simply pulling the foreskin back and washing it, which I would prefer to 140 circumcisions a week for 25 years."
The "cancer prevention" argument would have greater persuasive appeal if applied to breast cancer in women. The American Cancer Society estimates that 44,000 women will die of breast cancer in 1998. This same year, by comparison, an estimated 200 men, most of them beyond 70 years of age with poor hygiene habits, will die of penile cancer. If amputating healthy tissue is an antidote to cancer, it would make far more "sense" to routinely perform radical mastectomies on adolescent girls and remove the breast buds of all newborn females than to amputate the foreskin of male infants to prevent such comparatively paltry numbers. But nobody in their right mind would suggest this as appropriate therapy... except when applied to infant boys, that is. Go figure.
The HIV scare is another in the continuing effort of circumcision advocates to view their favorite "surgery" as a hedge against disease. Despite the fact that the United States is a "circumcising country," where the majority of sexually-active men are cut, we nevertheless have the highest HIV infection rate among advanced industrialized countries. In fact, the U.S. has an infection rate 3.5 times greater than the next leading country, or 16 cases per 100,000 population. None of the other advanced industrialized countries circumcise routinely. France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand, Finland and Japan all have near-zero infant circumcision rates, yet their AIDS infection rate goes from 3.5 cases per 100,000 down to 0.2, respectively. Consequently, not only is it clear that circumcision does not prevent HIV or AIDS, the infection rates suggest that circumcision may actually contribute to HIV infection by depriving the penis of the natural immunological protection of the foreskin. But rest assured, as soon as medical science debunks these latest "benefits" for mass mutilations, the pro-circumcision industry will invent new reasons and new diseases for continued use of their favorite treatment of nonexistent ills.
Such persistence in the face of overwhelming evidence against routine circumcision should alert us to the fact that irrational, more emotional and compulsive forces may also be at work. These forces have been identified and were alluded to earlier: the seldom mentioned psycho-sexual pleasure derived by some, possibly many, circumcising physicians.
The notion that the ranks of circumcising doctors harbor what have been termed "circumsadists" and "circumfetishists," comes as a shock to many parents who never considered the notion. They realized they were being pressured insistently by their pediatrician or urologist to have the procedure done, but it never entered their minds that darker motives may have been at issue. "The idea that we turned our son over to some pervert who got off sexually by handling and cutting our baby's penis just makes me sick," said one mother when learning of this possibility. "I had no idea such people existed."
Few people outside the medical profession do realize this. As with the Catholic church and the pedophiles lurking within the folds of its priesthood, the medical profession has coalesced around a wall of lies and silence that allows these sadists to do their work in obscure anonymity.
One person who does recognize their prurience is John Erickson. He has done extensive work on this subject and maintains a web site dedicated to the Memory of the Sexually Mutilated Child. "It would never occur to most parents that the doctor's real reason for wanting to circumcise their child might be sexual," he says. "They hold their doctors in such high esteem that this whole area of surgical sexual perversion never comes up."
Carla Miller, founder of Patients in ARMS, a non-profit advocacy group dedicated to reforming medical standards and eradicating patient abuse, who herself was sexually mutilated by an American doctor, has also given serious thought to this issue. She echoes the words of others who likewise have been victimized. "Like rapists, serial killers, and other sociopaths, serial circumcisers probably get a chemical high from doing the circumcision. The very act of shredding and mutilating a baby's penis with knives, clamps, electrocautery guns, or fingers affects the circumciser's brain chemistry like a drug, as irresistible as heroin. Carving, crushing, burning, and slicing a baby's penis, reducing it to gore, getting his hands covered with penis blood, and filling his ears with shrieks and screams of agony and terror are the potent elixir the serial circumciser needs to make himself feel alive."
To date, the medical establishment has done nothing to identify and excise such sadists from their midst. They continue to cut and torture in protected anonymity, cold and oblivious to the screams all around. Perhaps the institutions that hire them actually support their compulsions because they help provide a steady cash flow for all. For obvious reasons, such "circumsadists" relish doing these procedures and are a principal source for the hundreds of millions of dollars a year that fill their pockets and the coffers of the sponsoring hospitals and clinics.
It should be obvious to any caring, feeling person that amputating normal, healthy, sexually sensitive tissue for no valid medical reason whatsoever, especially when such a mutilative procedure is harmful both short term and long, performed against the child's screaming protests and with no informed consent, can only be regarded as an act of supreme cowardice, devoid of moral or ethical support. Given these facts, any physician who performs such acts should be held suspect, the onus of perversion entirely on him or her. A loving parent should think long and hard before offering their son to any circumciser.
The circumcision epidemic is a national scandal in this country and a crime against infant boys. Simply put, infant circumcision is child abuse. It is gratuitous genital mutilation and should be banned along with thumb screws, hot pincers and boiling in oil as nothing short of perverse. In a recent article appearing in ObGYN News, doctor Leo Sorger says, "Circumcision causes pain, trauma, and a permanent loss of protective and erogenous tissue. Removing normal, healthy, functioning tissue violates the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 5) and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Article 13)."
Last year a group of civil rights attorneys took note of this fact and banded together to form Attorneys for the Rights of the Child (ARC). They are currently assessing this area of human rights concern and are starting to bring lawsuits against offending physicians and physician groups. Attorney J. Steven Svoboda, a former Human Rights Fellow at Harvard Law School and director of ARC, considers circumcision to be medical malpractice. "The medical profession, which has perpetuated this tragic disfigurement of baby boys' genitals, will now be challenged by an organization of legal professionals." If physicians cannot find the ethical and moral center sufficient to end this barbaric habit, then let a stop be applied by the courts. At the very least, it should make for spectacular theater. However you look at it, the case against circumcision is building towards critical mass and it won't be long before the whole putrid business falls of its own dead weight.
For more information contact:
National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers (NOCIRC)
Post Office Box 2512
San Anselmo, CA 94979-2512
U.S.A.
Telephone: (415) 488-9883
Fax: (415) 488-9660
http://www.nocirc.org/
Doctors Opposing Circumcision (D.O.C.)
2442 NW Market Street, Suite 42
Seattle, Washington, 98107
U.S.A.
http://weber.u.washington.edu/~gcd/DOC/
Attorneys for the Rights of the Child (ARC)
2961 Ashby Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94705
USA
Tel. 510-848-4437
E-mail:
svoboda1@flash.net
http://www.noharmm.org/ARC.htm
Patients In ARMS
(Advocates Reforming Medical Standards)
7480 Gravies Road
Dieters, Missouri 63023
USA
(314) 274-ARMS
Carmilarms@aol.com
