Compelling reasons exist for strong concern among attorneys and the public about the various types of damage caused by circumcision. These include pain and suffering, psychological harm, behavioral changes, irreversible reduction or loss of full sexual function, and underreported tragic complications, including deaths. Moreover, no satisfactory medical justification for routine circumcision has ever been demonstrated.

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Summer 2010 Issue of the ARC Newsletter

Our 23rd newsletter ties our record for highest number of pages and shatters our record for most items in a single issue. We have broken it down into sections. Contents include:

1. Intactivist Karen Glennon's engaging personal story of her path to becoming an activist;
2. eyewitness accounts and testimony from Matthew Hess, ARC Legal Analyst Peter Adler, and me on February's hearing regarding Massachusetts legislation to ban male and female genital cutting (FGC);
3. a long section on the recent American Academy of Pediatrics position statement condoning certain forms of FGC and the subsequent retraction a month later, including a chronology and viewpoints from Dan Bollinger, David Wilton, Georganne Chapin, and Peter Adler;
4. three reports on Genital Integrity Awareness Week from Greg Hartley, Gregor Waltz, and Van Lewis;
5. a report on the Royal Dutch Medical Association's recent position statement on the impermissibility of male circumcision and Peter Adler's commentary; a lengthy interview with Steven Svoboda by a fatherhood magazine, addressing intactivism, fatherhood, and many other issues;
6. a bird's eye view of the American Medical Students Association convention from John Geisheker;
7. two fantastic blogs we are proud to reprint with permission and several important news items including a $10 million lawsuit David Llewellyn won against the makers of the notorious Mogen Clamp; and, last but not least,
8. the schedule for the Eleventh NOCIRC Symposium, to be held at the University of California at Berkeley on July 29-31.

Enjoy! Thanks as always to fearless ARC Newsletter editor Al Fields.

download pdf

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AAP's Two Retractions of May 1 FGC Policy Statement

June 15, 2010

On June 1, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) publicly retracted its May 1 policy statement condoning mild forms of female genital cutting (FGC). On June 2, the AAP sent a letter to Attorneys for the Rights of the Child (ARC) announcing this retraction. As you can see from comparing the two retractions, which are reproduced below, some interesting differences exist between the two. The public version twice attempts to shift responsibility to unnamed third parties for "misinterpreting" the AAP's statement as endorsing certain forms of FGC, but such a "misinterpretation" was actually simply a straightforward reading of what the AAP actually said. In its June 2 letter sent to ARC, however, the AAP refrains from any attempt to imply mistakes by those interpreting its policies. Amusingly, even stunningly, the AAP attempts to pat itself on its back for unintended benefits of its misguided May 1 policy, concluding that, "One good thing to emerge is that the discussion has shown a bright light on this issue and raised the world's awareness about this harm to young women." In the June 1 public retraction, a version of this statement appears but in a more modest, less questionable form.

Full story

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Congratulations to everyone involved in inducing the AAP to reverse its position. However, the battle is not over. We need to highlight the AAP's hypocrisy in approving its now disavowed statement and the legal and ethical necessity to equally protect the genital integrity of all children, male as well as female.

The Economist on Female Genital Cutting

The reputable UK newsmagazine The Economist, in its June 12 print issue, examines female genital cutting (FGC) in some detail with reference to the recent American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) position statements, which first (on May 1) condoned and then (on June 1) rejected the permissibility of minor forms of FGC. The article is titled, "Female Genital Cutting: Ending a Brutal Practice," does not carry a byline, and appears on pp. 66-67. (http://www.economist.com/node/16329452?story_id=16329452) The closing paragraph of the article paraphrases Dena Davis, the head of the AAP committee that generated the May 1 statement condoning FGC, and is worth quoting in full for its eloquent, succinct call to apply US constitutional principles of equal protection to genital cutting:

Ms. [Dena] Davis argues that in America at least, it is not acceptable to criminalise all female genital cutting while adopting a relaxed stance to the male sort. She suspects that by allowing male circumcision while forbidding even a symbolic cut on girls, Western countries show respect for only those religious and cultural practices with which they are already comfortable.

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Royal Dutch Medical Association Statement

May 28, 2010

The Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) published an official statement opposing male circumcision yesterday, which they forwarded to ARC this morning with the two attachments linked below. They asked that we pass the good news along to our friends and colleagues:

KNMG's email to ARC

KNMG-press-release.pdf
KNMG-Viewpoint.pdf

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Circumcision Decision-Maker Website Launched

Mar 26, 2010

A new circumcision decision-making tool is now available to provide infant or adult circumcision information. Visitors are guided through an information gathering process addressing their particular situations to help them decide about an infant or adult circumcision. Additional circumcision information, facts about the foreskin, circumcision procedures and videos are also available.
circumcisiondecisionmaker.com

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Call for action

AAP Task Force on Circumcision

Jan 27, 2010

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is set to release its new policy on circumcision later this year. According to a January 19, 2010 article in the "Washington Post", the AAP Task Force on Circumcision met outside Chicago the week before to begin finalizing its newest circumcision position.

Dr. Susan Blank, Chairman of the AAP Task Force, said this concerning the new position: "It could end up being anything from: It ought to be done on every male; on only some males; or only if the parents want it to be done. It could fall anywhere along the spectrum."
Washington Post article: "Debate on circumcision heightened as CDC evaluates surgery"

Blank makes no mention of the only acceptable choice regarding circumcision of male children. Physicians and parents must respect the human rights of all male children to their own bodily integrity and self-determination and say NO to circumcision. Members of the Task Force must be reminded that male and female children alike have a right to equal protection under the law. The new AAP policy must recognize and respect these basic human rights. Anything less is unacceptable.

Please contact the Task Force members listed below and insist that the right of male children to be protected from circumcision be honored by the AAP in its newest position statement.

AAP Task Force on Circumcision - Contact List

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New Book
Circumcision and Human Rights

Denniston, George; Hodges, Frederick; Milos, Marilyn F. (Eds.) 2009, 276 p. 53 illus., 26 in color., Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4020-9166-7 $219.00 www.springer.com

"There is hardly a reason to circumcise a little boy for medical reasons because those medical reasons don't exist," said Dr. Michael Wilks, Head of Ethics at the British Medical Association, who admitted that doctors have circumcised boys for "no good reason."

In the United States, parts of Africa, the Middle East, and in the Muslim world, 13.3 million infant boys and 2 million girls have part or all of their external sex organs cut off for reasons that defy logic and violate basic human rights. Doctors, parents, and politicians have been misled into thinking that circumcision is beneficial, necessary, and harmless.

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Recent ARC Activities and Accomplishments

Thymos Article

Apr 4, 2010

Thymos: Journal of Boyhood Studies has just published an article by Steven Svoboda based on his July 13, 2007 presentation to the interdisciplinary Boys and the Boy Crisis conference in Washington, DC. The article is titled, "Genital Integrity and Gender Equity" (pdf) and discusses parallels and contrasts between two important movements—the movement for genital integrity and the movement for genuine gender equity. The article was published in Volume 4, number 1, pages 71-77, of the Spring 2010 issue of Thymos.

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ARC Letter to Washington Post

Jan 20, 2010

We submitted this letter to the Washington Post in response to the terrible article by Rob Stein published yesterday, titled "Male Circumcision: Leading Health Authorities Debate Benefits." URL of original article: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2010/01/19/DI2010011901691.html

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Abstract for Presentation at the Eleventh NOCIRC Symposium, Berkeley, California, July 29-31, 2010, By J. Steven Svoboda

"Tortured Doctrines, Tortured Bodies: How Legal Fictions Help Justify and Perpetuate Male Circumcision and Other Inhumane Practices"

Although the doctrine of informed consent functions reasonably well within its area of applicability, it dissolves into an incoherent legal fiction when applied by proxy to incompetent persons such as newborns and mentally incapacitated adults. Both leading approaches to permitting an oxymoronic "proxy consent"—substituted judgment and best interests—cloak a usurpation of agency that allows ostensibly hallowed principles of autonomy and self-determination to be violated with impunity. Because a court can never truly know what an idiot or a newborn wants, Kantian ethics and human rights are violated. History abounds with examples of tortured doctrines applied to justify human atrocities such as male circumcision, Japanese internment, adult sterilization, organ transplants from incompetents, slavery, and inhumane experiments. Such legal fictions conceal our violations from ourselves and others under the pretenses of legal authorization and compliance with human rights, masking our failure to properly safeguard human dignity and autonomy.

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ARC Letter to San Jose Mercury News

November 25, 2009

Circumcision advocate Edgar Schoen continues to tout the supposedly miraculous benefits of removing functional tissue from males (November 24). Schoen has the nerve to urge his readers to "face the facts" while simultaneously recycling medical myths discredited decades ago suggesting that circumcision can help prevent cervical cancer or penile cancer. Recent studies prove condom use 95 times more cost-effective in preventing HIV infection than male circumcision, and prove the lifelong damage to sexual sensitivity. The American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics agree on the lack of justification for neonatal circumcision. Europeans don't do it and have fewer STD's and lower HIV rates than we do. Non-prophylactic amputation of male genital tissue should be no more permissible than a similar procedure on girls.

J. Steven Svoboda
Attorneys for the Rights of the Child

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"In Search of Fatherhood" Magazine Interview

The Autumn 2009 issue of "In Search of Fatherhood" magazine features a six-page interview with Steven about his work with Attorneys for the Rights of the Child. A small picture of Steven appears on the cover along with others also discussed in this issue.

Here is the full text of the interview.

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Interview on radio station KOPN

On November 9, Steven was interviewed by Janel Miranda and Rich Winkle of Thoughtcrime Radio on radio station KOPN (89.5FM, Columbia, Missouri; www.kopn.org). Janel and Rich were well-prepared and sympathetic interviewers and did a fantastic job. The discussion was pretty far-ranging and included human rights protections applicable to male circumcision; our 2001 mission to the United Nations that resulted in the first UN document focusing on male circumcision as a human rights violation; the ongoing violation of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection; flaws in the African studies as well as developments relating to HIV and the CDC and other recent medical studies; the new organization Intact America; and parental rights and responsibilities. The URL to visit if you are interested in listening to the podcast is:

http://www.math.missouri.edu/~rich/janel/TCR091109.mp3

KOPN allows anyone with Internet access to listen to the station live through a link from their home page. The program producing the interview is Thoughtcrime Radio (http://thoughtcrimeradio.blogspot.com/), operated by Rich Winkle and L. Janel Martin, and they are doing a series on circumcision, having previously interviewed Marilyn Milos, Gloria Lemay, and David Chamberlain on the topic.

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ARC Letter to San Francisco Chronicle

October 31, 2009

Here is an outrageous recent editorial by the San Francisco Chronicle and our letter in response.

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New Book:
Fearful Symmetries: Essays and Testimonies Around Excision and Circumcision

2009

The long-awaited book edited by Chantal Zabus, Fearful Symmetries: Essays and Testimonies Around Excision and Circumcision, has recently been published by Rodopi. It includes two contributions on which I worked: A Rose by any other Name: Rethinking the Similarities and Differences between Male and Female Genital Cutting (revised version with Robert Darby, Ph.D. of our well-received Medical Anthropology Quarterly article), and My Story, by Jerry K. Brayton as told to J. Steven Svoboda, an autobiographical account of one man's experiences with his circumcision.

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London's Interdisciplinary "Genital Cutting in a Globalized Age" Conference Highly Successful

My talk at the Genital Cutting in a Globalized Age conference held in London on July 4, 2008, was extremely well-received by the mostly European, academic audience. The conference was held at the Royal Society of Medicine, which published an article by Robert Van Howe and myself on HIV and circumcision in 2005. The talk, entitled, "Three-Fourths Were Abnormal—Male Circumcision, Culture, and Law," presented an overview of male genital integrity including harm caused by the procedure, law, human rights, ethics, history of medicalization, lack of medical justification, mythologies including the HIV craze, cultural aspects, and connections with the other forms of genital cutting.

Steven Svoboda Presenting at London Conference

more...

 

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