The Oregon Supreme Court on Friday blocked a divorced former Southern Oregon man from circumcising his 12-year-old son against the wishes of the boy’s mother. The court ruled that the trial judge failed to determine whether the boy wanted to have the procedure. The child’s mother, Lia Boldt, claims that circumcision is dangerous and that her son is afraid to say he doesn’t want the procedure. Go here for the court’s decision. The court ordered the case back to the trial judge to determine the boy’s wishes. James Boldt, who converted to Judaism several years ago, wants to circumcise his son. As the custodial parent, he argued that he has wide latitude to make decisions for the boy. The lower courts sided with the father. The case attracted national attention. An anti-circumcision group based in Seattle said the practice was dangerous. Jewish groups joined the fray out of the concern that the Oregon court would restrict circumcision.
Court blocks father from circumcising 12-year-old son
Posted by The Oregonian January 25, 2008 08:14AM
Court blocks father from circumcising 12-year-old son January 25, 2008
“Addressing Questions About HIV and Circumcision” (PDF resource) January 5, 2008
THE BOTTOM LINE: NOTHING HAS CHANGED
Circumcision is still not medically necessary.
Circumcision is still not recommended as a routine procedure.
Circumcision still carries many risks and harms.
Everyone still needs to practice safe sex.
The foreskin is still a normal, valuable body part.
It’s still “his body, his choice.”
Public Service Announcement December 18, 2007
Public Service Announcement
The odds of a boy *ever* needing to be circumcised for medical reasons are just 1%.Conversely, circumcision guarantees a child:
- 100% risk of losing “the most sensitive parts of the penis” LINK
- 71% risk of penile adhesions LINK
- 10% risk of meatal stenosis LINK
- 1% risk of circumcision revision LINK
…and that’s to say nothing of immediate surgical risks including, but not limited to, anesthesia reaction, hemorrhage, infection, penile amputation and death or later complications like painful erections from too much skin being removed or the progressive keratinization (drying, thickening) of the glans.A foreskin is not a birth defect.
MYTH: Circumcision & UTIs December 17, 2007
Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs) are rare, and mainly occur in the first year of life. They are several times commoner in girls than boys (but of course surgery is never considered for girls). They are painful, and women’s experience of them is a powerful inducement to have sons circumcised, if they imagine that this will protect them. In fact, a significant proportion of boys contract UTIs even though they are circumcised. A study in Israel found they mainly occured in girls at four months, but in boys soon after they were circumcised…. Now an Australian study suggests circumcision may cause urinary problems. The supposed correlation between intactness and UTIs was only discovered in 1982, long after the custom of circumcision was well-established in the US. (Yet today it is commonly presented as the first reason, illustrating how circumcision is a “solution” looking for a problem – constantly looking, as each new problem is disposed of.) Ironically, all the 1982 paper did was quite casually note that “95% of the [male] infants [with UTI] were uncircumcised.” without mentioning that virtually no babies born at that hospital (Parkland in Dallas, Texas) were circumcised. The paper went on: “All infants responded promptly to antimicrobial therapy.” It is Dr Thomas Wiswell who has made it his life’s work to establish the UTI-intact penis connection, and he is also a keen circumcisor. His many papers present statistics involving huge samples, tens of thousands of babies (which may convince those who mistakenly think large numbers guarantee accuracy). However, all the babies were born in military hospitals, where circumcision is very much the norm. It is very likely that the intact babies had their foreskinsforcibly retracted. It is also likely that a major reason for the babies to be left intact was that they were born prematurly, put in intensive care and catheterised for that reason: the catheterisation, not their intactness, caused their UTIs. There are also issues around the method of determining UTI infection. Some methods of collecting urine samples risk contamination. There is a more detailed rebuttal of Wiswell on the CIRP website. Another confounding factor is that in some studies, hospitalisiation is taken as the defining degree of seriousness of UTIs: but babies with UTIs are often hospitalised in order to be circumcised, so of course more intact babies appear in the statistics. One commonly quoted figure is that UTIs are ten times as common in intact boys (1.1%) as circumcised boys (0.1%). This means that circumcision offers an absolute reduction of 1% at best. Combining the rarity of UTIs, with the only partial prevention attributable to circumcision, To et al calculated that it would take 195 circumcisions to prevent one UTI.
Circumcision and Urinary Tract Infection
Dr Thomas Wiswell
Penn & Teller: B.S.: Circumcision December 17, 2007
- Penn & Teller’s 3rd season includes an episode on circumcision. It’s great! They definitely address a lot of the myths. I highly recommend it, especially for young, liberal parents and daddies-to-be.
- You can read about it and watch a preview, HERE.
- You can purchase it HERE. Makes a great stocking-stuffer!
A Matter of Semantics December 14, 2007
We need to eliminate the term “uncircumcised” from our vocabularies. Babies, children, and men who possess their whole penises are intact, just as a woman who has natural breasts is not unmastectomized or someone without a nose job isn’t unrhinoplastied. In fact, for a man to be “uncircumcised” circumcision would need to be reversible, which it’s sadly not.
Foreskins come standard, just like any other body part. Being born without a foreskin is a rare conenital condition (birth defect) called aposthia. Why would we want to take a perfectly healthy, normal child and surgically give him an abnormality?
Traditions are manmade; they start somewhere, often based on myth and superstition and continue, often blindly followed until someone asks, “Why”? Some traditions are harmless, but genital reduction surgery performed on children is painful, violating, and damaging.
Some things are inexplicable…as one bride found out when she finally thought to question why cutting off the ends of the roast before cooking the meat made for a better result:
The new Jewish bride is making her first big dinner for her hand and tries her hand at her mother’s brisket recipe, cutting the ends off the roast the way her mother always did. Hubby thinks the meat is delicious, but says, “Why do you cut off the ends—that’s the best part!” She answers, “That’s the way my mother always made it.
The next week they go to the old bubbie’s house, and she prepares the famous brisket recipe, again cutting off the ends. The young bride is sure she must be missing some vital information, so she asks her grandma why she cut off the ends. Grandma says, “Dahlink, that’s the only way it will fit in the pan!”
Every person reading this has the opportunity to make a difference. We can end this. We can stop it. We can start protecting our sons to the same degree we would protect our daughters if anyone suggested we cut off a part of her body at birth. Change starts with us. Our courage now will make it that much easier for our children to say NO to circumcision when we’re one day blessed with grandchildren.Start a new tradition: Bring the Whole Baby Home.
The Canadian Children’s Rights Council considers circumcision to be genital mutilation of children. December 13, 2007
Canadian Children’s Rights Council
The Canadian Children’s Rights Council considers circumcision to be genital mutilation of children.
The position of the Canadian Children’s Rights Council
The Canadian Children’s Rights Council position is that there is no medical benefit to the routine genital mutilation (circumcision) of any children (defined by U.N. as those under 18 years of age). Further, all Canadian children, both male and female, should be protected by the criminal laws of Canada with regards to this aggravated assault. Currently, the protection provided by the Criminal Code of Canada includes only genital mutilation (circumcision) of female children.
Our position is that all children should be protected from all forms of genital mutilation (circumcision of all types) including but not limited to, circumcision that doesn’t affect sexual function or that may be viewed by others as sexual enhancement surgery. Male circumcision does affect sexual function.
Canada and many other countries have responded positively to the U.N. initiatives to stop female genital mutilation (FGM), so female genital mutilation in Canada is all but non existent and is by law considered to be aggravated assault, an offence under the Criminal Code of Canada.
It is unfortunate that the women’s groups which sought the protection of female children did not seek protection of of male children. Their lack of concern and effort to protect male children has been viewed by some as a control and misandry issue of the western radical women’s groups.
There is much evidence in the various articles and documents on this website and elsewhere that suggests that the radical western feminists’ groups have unfairly blamed the female circumcision (genital mutilation) issue as being some form of male dominance or control over women in countries that previously practiced female genital mutilation. The evidence is substantially to the contrary.
A tragedy is occurring in Canada right now. Canada’s health services have recognized that they shouldn’t be paying for circumcision. It has no value as a health measure. Parents, out of medical ignorance, or who wrongly believe their religious obligations necessitate genital mutilation of their male children are asking that it be done.
If “medical necessity” is claimed, we suggest that such a claim is invariably fraudulent. Since in Finland, the risk of getting a circumcision at birth is zero, and the risk of needing one later is one in sixteen thousand, six hundred and sixtyseven (1/16,667), every claim for “medical necessity” should be fully investigated, and denied.
http://www.canadiancrc.com/circumcision/circumcision.aspx
Male Circumcision and HIV: A Public Health Policy Weblog December 11, 2007
Bookmark this site! http://www.circumcisionandhiv.com/
SEE ALSO:
- Circumcision does not affect HIV in U.S. men
Removing foreskin no protection for American men of color, study finds
December 4, 2007: MSNBC: READ THE STORY
“No one is promoting circumcision as a license for unprotected sex, but inevitably, in Africa and elsewhere, circumcision will be used not in concert with condoms but instead of condoms, potentially wiping out more than two decades’ worth of safer-sex intervention. Also, in an environment where “cut” = “clean,” women, who already constitute the majority of AIDS deaths in Africa, will have far less bargaining power to insist on safer sex with circumcised partners, and may seroconvert in even greater numbers.”LINK
Circumcision does not affect HIV in US men: study
Washington, Dec 04: Circumcision may reduce a man’s risk of infection with the AIDS virus by up to 60% if he is an African, but it does not appear to help American men of color, US researchers reported on Monday. Black and Latino men were just as likely to become infected with the AIDS virus whether they were circumcised or not, Greg Millett of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. ”We also found no protective benefit for a subset of black MSM (men who have sex with men) who also had recent sex with female partners,” Millett told reporters in a telephone briefing. Doctors believe circumcision protects men because of specialized cells in the foreskin of the penis, which is removed in the procedure. The foreskin is filled with immune cells called Langerhans cells, which are the immune system’s sentinels and attach easily to viruses — including HIV. In addition, sexual intercourse may cause tiny tears in the foreskin, allowing the virus into the bloodstream. The data has been so clear that the World Health Organization now recommends circumcision as one of the ways to prevent HIV infection. But circumcision does not protect men 100 percent — the studies in Africa have suggested it is 50 to 60% protective. Millett’s team studied 1,079 black and 957 Latino bisexual and homosexual men from New York City, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. They filled out a computer survey and were tested for the AIDS virus. ”Overall, we found no association between circumcision status and HIV infection status among black or Latino (men who have sex with men),” said Millett, who presented his findings to the CDC’s National HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta. Experts knew circumcision would not protect a female sex partner, nor the male sex partner being penetrated. But Millett’s study found no benefit of circumcision to any of the men. “We also found no protective benefit of circumcision among those men reporting recent unprotected sex with a male partner in which they were exclusively the insertive male partner,” he said. HIV is much more common among black and Latino men than whites and this may offset any protection offered by circumcision, Millett said. Black and Latino men are more likely to have sex with other black and Latino men, and thus may be exposed to HIV more often than white men. The CDC is about to release new estimates of how many people become infected with the fatal and incurable human immunodeficiency virus each year in the United States. The CDC estimates that more than 1 million Americans are infected, of the 33 million infected people globally. Bureau Report
