[karl262]

Browsing reddit, found a great article on the medical ethics of circumcision.

http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/m...equally-wrong/

I try not to talk about my research at dinner parties. I’ll say ‘medical ethics’ if pressed, which will sometimes trigger an unwelcome follow-up: ‘But what about medical ethics? That’s a pretty big field.’

‘I study lots of things,’ I’ll say – and that’s true, I do. ‘But I focus on medically-unnecessary surgeries performed on children.’

‘Like what?’

Like what, indeed. It’s rarely a smooth ride from there.

The truth is: I study childhood genital surgeries. Female, male and intersex genital surgeries, specifically, and I make similar arguments about each one. As a general rule, I think that healthy children – whatever their sex or gender – should be free from having parts of their most intimate sexual organs removed before they can understand what’s at stake in such a procedure. There are a number of reasons I’ve come to hold this view, but in some ways it’s pretty simple. ‘Private parts’ are private. They’re personal. Barring some serious disease to treat or physical malfunction to address (for which surgery is the most conservative option), they should probably be left alone.

That turns out to be extremely controversial.

In the 1990s, when the Canadian ethicist Margaret Somerville began to speak and write critically about the non-therapeutic circumcision of infant boys, she was attacked for even addressing the subject in public. In her book The Ethical Canary, she says her critics accused her of ‘detracting from the horror of female genital mutilation and weakening the case against it by speaking about it and infant male circumcision in the same context and pointing out that the same ethical and legal principles applied to both’.

She wasn’t alone. The anthropologist Kirsten Bell has advanced similar arguments in her university lectures, provoking a reaction that was ‘immediate and hostile … How dare I mention these two entirely different operations in the same breath! How dare I compare the innocuous and beneficial removal of the foreskin with the extreme mutilations enacted against females in other societies!’

It’s easy to see where these reactions are coming from. One frequent claim is that FGM is analogous to ‘castration’ or a ‘total penectomy’. Put that way, anyone who tried to compare the two on ethical (or other) grounds would be making a serious mistake – anatomically, at the very least.

You often hear that genital mutilation and male circumcision are very different. FGM is barbaric and crippling (‘always torture’, as the Guardian columnist Tanya Gold wrote recently), whereas male circumcision is comparatively inconsequential. Male circumcision is a ‘minor’ intervention that might even confer health benefits, whereas FGM is a drastic intervention with no health benefits, and only causes harm. The ‘prime motive’ for FGM is to control women’s sexuality; it is inherently sexist and discriminatory and is an expression of male power and domination. That’s just not true for male circumcision.

Unfortunately, there’s a problem with these claims. Almost every one of them is untrue, or severely misleading. They derive from a superficial understanding of both FGM and male circumcision; and they are inconsistent with what scholars have known about these practices for well over a decade. It’s time to re-examine what we ‘know’ about these controversial customs.