Apparently foreskins are more important than people.
From the Facebook page of intactivist (and anti-vax activist) Hollie Redinger.
For once I am speechless.
Author:Amy Tuteur, MD
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Amy Tuteur, MD
Dr. Amy Tuteur is an obstetrician gynecologist. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard College in 1979 and her medical degree from Boston University School of Medicine in 1984. Dr. Tuteur is a former clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School. She left the practice of medicine to raise her four children. Her book, Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting (HarperCollins) was published in 2016. She can be reached at DrAmy5 at aol dot com... More
know who else is speechless?
“Apnea (Stopped Breathing)
Apnea is the temporary cessation of breathing. The pain of circumcision is so severe that some babies stop breathing during the surgery. In an important study on the pain of circumcision published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers discovered that serious complications occurred during circumcision. One infant experienced the same level of extreme distress as all the others in the study, but two and a half minutes after the conclusion of the surgery, the baby developed an abnormal posture, stopped breathing, and suffered projectile vomiting even though he had been denied food for more than three hours before the surgery. Another baby experienced a choking spell and stopped breathing three and a half minutes after the surgery.
The researchers noticed these serious complications because they were looking for them. One wonders how many babies suffer without anyone taking notice or caring, or even thinking there is anything wrong with projectile vomiting, choking, or cessation of breathing.”
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The vilification of parents who opt out of RIC is fading fast. The
problem is intactivists vilifying parents who choose RIC. This happens
because the American norm (backed in 2012 by the AAP) is that
parents are free to decide how a son’s penis will look and function.
This posture is nonsense, because very few parents have the detailed
knowledge of urology and STDs needed to make an informed decision.
When it comes to the tip of a son’s penis, nearly all parents have no business doing anything other than relying on
a doctor’s advice. Unfortunately, American doctors are sitting on the
fence. Medical education does not do justice to the harms of
circumcision, and to the dubiousness of circumcision benefits. Since 1990,
about 30-50 peer reviewed articles have appeared, nearly all in USA
journals, claiming that routine circ has this or that prophylactic
benefit. These studies are flawed, because of a lack of sophistication
in the handling of observational data. The few studies based on clinical trials suffer from flawed design and execution.
A major problem is ignorance and outright denial of the intensely sexual nature of that which circumcision ablates. The male foreskin and its motion are major players in masturbation, foreplay and penetrative sex. There is ample anecdotal evidence that the foreskin enhances the sexual experiences of women.
Finally, if you alter the penis to reduce the damage of irresponsible sex, what you will get is more irresponsible sex. The formal name for this relaxation of vigilance is Risk Compensation. Risk compensation predicts that the higher rates of condom use in Europe and Japan are no accident, and that circumcision will have no prophylactic benefit in the long run. There are no studies of whether circ status influences a man’s choice to use condoms during casual sex. I have read men comment in social media that they are cut, and that a condom makes sex impossible for them.
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Genital cutting is STUPID.
Circumcision is a cultural tradition with religious and cultural relevance in the US that had potential medical benefits and only small risk. So as far as how stupid it is or isn’t that is up to each parent to decide for each of their children.
Parents do not have the right to alter their children’s body without permission, especially their fucking genitals.
Of course they do. What makes you think they don’t?
The fact that it’s illegal and/or medical malpractice to cut off every other normal, healthy, functional, non-renewing body part without the patient’s own informed consent, including the female and adult male genitals. Why is this part on this sex at this age alone subject to removal at parental whim?
You know I would have this long discussion with you about how my views have changed on this topic (yet again) because I finally came upon anti circumcision advocates without the plethora of issues as…say…you, but you’ve made it quite clear that you’re all about the attack and defend and leave no room for conversation. You take a year old post and assume everything is exactly the same and while I do have some of the same complaints I don’t have all the same feelings. So…nope.
On any possible issue you can find extremists and tell the moderates that they should be able to control the rhetoric of others.
This is a deliberate red herring to distract from the issue itself. Circumcision has killed thousands and increased HIV rates among women and among men who think they are immune. It is also the source of FGC and all justifications for it are eventually used against girls.
I’m not going to comment on this person’s tactics. I am not obligated to answer for them, any more than you are obligated to answer for the initiation schools that are killing boys by the dozens in South Africa.
Circumcision has killed thousands? Over how long a period?
FGM is NOT a result of circumcision.
This is not a red herring. Your argument is just full of fallacy.
Over the past ten years. Per year the low figure is 117 boys in the US, and so far this year a single case in South Africa had 35 boys dying just at one initiation school.
And yes, FGM and circumcision have the same history. The US and Jewish culture are the only cultures that routinely cut boys but not girls. The cultures in Africa, the middle east and Asia that cut girls all cut boys in the same conditions.
Actually the correct figure is .5/100,000-1/500,000. Meaning 0-5 boys. Probably 0. Circumcision is safe. They use anesthesia. Hysterics don’t change that. And the thousands of lives saved by preventing HIV outweighs the 0 deaths by far.
Anesthetics are never used in traditional African and Muslim circumcision, and very rarely in the US. African boys in FGC-practicing cultures are cut under the same conditions – rusty metal, untrained practitioners, etc.
Complications from traditional circumcision: http://ulwaluko.co.za
Last year a dozen boys were infected with herpes during circumcision, with two deaths. There have been dozens of deaths in the US this year, most of whose names I’ve seen personally. Earlier this year there were 35 circumcision deaths at a single ‘initiation school’ in South Africa.
In the US anesthesic is almost always used. The closest thing you have to proof it isn’t is a 20 year old study. As for traditional male circumcision, that’s a wonderful reason to advance the medical circumcisions instead of traditional.
How many boys died in South Africa of HIV this year?
Yes, it’s unfortunate that mohel is still practicing. You won’t find me defending that. It is a rare practice of ultra orthodox Jews, and not a risk for boys circumcised without this practice, which includes medical circumcision and most Brit Milah performed in the US and even worldwide.
As for the dozens of deaths this year due to circumcision, I’m afraid I don’t find you reliable. Intactivists, like anti vaccine advocates are just as likely to attribute any death after circumcision (or vaccines for anti vaccine advocates) to circumcision (Orr vaccines) when it may not necessarily be the cause.
Nice moving goalposts though. Can’t wait to see what you come up with next.
Circumcision doesn’t reduce HIV in men at all, and increases it in women. And it’s not my job to educate you any further. I’m not the source on any of this information – all of it is out there.
Grass isn’t green, it’s pink. Down isn’t down, it’s up.
And circumcision has no adverse consequences for adult sexual pleasure and function, in both genders. We can assert this with confidence, and continue cutting baby boys, despite the fact that there never has been a study of the possible correlation of PE, ED and vaginismus with his circ status. There never has been a clinical examination of a large random sample of North American men, to ascertain the adult outcome of RIC. In 1986, the pioneering intactivist Edward Wallerstein was a guest on the Phil Donahue show. When he spoke, he laid out a number of reasonable questions. His answer to each of these questions was “we don’t know, because we’ve never done the research.” Almost 30 years have elapsed, and we still don’t know the answer to all sorts of evident questions about RIC in North America.
We also don’t know how many RICs have botched or lethal outcomes, because the only cases we know about are the cases when the parents go to the media. Many bad outcomes of circumcision are not apparent until after puberty, or the initiation of sex life, or even after age 40 or 50. Moreover, most parents accept a financial settlement from the hospital, after signing a legally binding statement that they will not reveal what happened to anyone without the hospital’s prior consent. Most parents understandably prefer not to put their son’s injured penis in the public domain.
LOL there’s studies for ALL of those things. Oh except vaginismus but that’s honestly the first time I’ve heard that ridiculous claim made. Seriously?
And all the good scientists go on the Phil Donahue show. We know for a fact that if he didn’t get answers there, there are no answers.
And, uh, btw…since we “don’t” have any studies on those things, why on earth would you claim with such confidence that circumcision causes them? Seems odd.
You guys are so adorable.
There are no studies, using large random samples of North Americans, of the possible correlation between circ status and sexual dysfunction. As for a possible connection between circumcision and vaginismus, every online account of vaginismus I have encountered, was written by an American woman; a large majority of American women have circumcised spouses. Circumcision is a possible factor in vaginismus, simply because of what many North American women have written online about their sex lives with circumcised men.
European studies of the connection between circ status and sexual dysfunction, are of very limited value, because nearly all circumcised Europeans are Moslems and Africans.
Edward Wallerstein was the author of a serious 1980 book, “Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy”. That book elicited little controversy. And what Wallerstein said on the Donahue show elicited no controversy either. For me, this silence speaks loudly to the truth of what Wallerstein said and wrote. Which was simply “there is a great deal about circumcision that we simply don’t know. We do know that most first world nations do not circumcise routinely, and there is no evidence that the absence of routine circumcision is harmful.”
There is ample anecdotal evidence that circumcision can cause sexual problems. I do not make any claim with confidence, because of the absence of studies based on stratified random samples, conducted in societies where both circ statuses are fairly well represented in all walks of life (eg, Canada). But the burden of proof rests on those who advocate circumcision; they have to make a case that circumcision is safe, and they have completely failed to do so.
What the hell does that have to do with anything?
I though Jewish people practiced circ and last time I checked, there was a good amount of them in europe. But it still has nothing to do with anything.
Well, Moslems and Africans aren’t like real Americans are they?
Sexual dysfunction is correlated with poor health and low education, and these in turn are correlated with socioeconomic deprivation. African and Moslem immigrants make up most of the European underclass. At the same time, a large majority of circumcised European men are of African or Moslem ancestry. Ideally, both circ statuses should be decently represented in all walks of life in order to have a good population. I nominate Canada, because the French Canadians don’t circumcise much.
Of course. There are no Jewish men in Europe and Muslim and African men are obviously all poor.
Just so you know, Moslem is no longer a generally accepted spelling for Muslim. It’s actually offensive.
In Europe, Jews are a small minority, and most liberal and secular European Jewish families no longer circumcise. The contribution of Jewish ritual circumcision to the European circumcision rate is pretty much immaterial. It is a raw fact that the European urban underclass is mostly made up of post WWII African and Moslem immigrants, and their descendants. Hence in Europe, a circumcised penis is often correlated with socioeconomic deprivation and low educational attainment. This is why studies of the alleged prophylactic benefits of circumcision, when based on European subjects, are of little value.
Just under 4% of babies in the UK are circumcised near birth (some are done on medical grounds while still babies). A significant proportion of them are Jewish. Muslims and Africans may make up a higher percentage of the underclass (I honestly haven’t looked), but here in the UK it would be possible to obtain Muslim men from wide range of economic status for a study. Unless you believe there are vast racial differences between between foreskins, such a study could easily be undertaken. (Of course, Muslim is a religious descriptor, not a racial one, unlike “African” which I am sure is not being used here to refer to white citizens of African nations)
In 2000, a UK study reported that 4% of UK boys were circumcised by the 15th birthday. Most of those circumcisions were done for phimosis, and were done after infancy. That study urged a halving of the rate, on the grounds that a phimosis rate of 4% was implausibly high.
What is your source for 4% RIC rate in the UK?
The UK is 0.5% Jewish. The fraction of UK births that are to Jewish parents is less than that, because Jewish women have low birth rates, and the proportion of Jews who are of childbearing age is lower than the overall average. Finally, UK Jews who do circumcise their sons do make use of the services of a mohel. Hence Jews do not make a material contribution to the UK RIC rate.
Most European Muslims belong to the urban underclass.
By “African”, I mean subSaharan Africans other than whites from SA and Zimbabwe.
How on earth would the use of a mohel impact on rates of circumcision? It is still routine infant circumcision. I would also dispute your claims of birth rate, as orthodox Jews, who are the most likely to circumcise, actually have a particularly high birth rate.
Your number sense is failing you. Yes, Jews make up a small percentage of the population but because they routinely circumcise the vast majority of male infants, they still make up a significant proportion of RIC because RIC is largely limited to specific minority populations. Yes, some Jews choose not to circumcise, but so do some Muslims. Additionally, some cultural groups ritually circumcise later in life.
For simplicity of numbers, assume an infant population of 100,000 per year. If Jews make up 0.5% of the population (though the Britain Election Survey 2015 says 0.8%), the number of Jewish boys would be 250. Muslims make up about 4.5% of the UK (UK census 2011), leading to 2250 boys, not all of whom come from cultures that circumcise in infancy. If all were circumcised in infancy, this would lead to a 5% RIC rate and 10% of those would be Jewish. It’s not a huge percentage, but neither is it so small a fraction as to be ignored.
Just so you are aware, the Muslim population has grown, compared to the total population of the UK, significantly since 2000. That alone could account for changing RIC rates.
Muslims are overrepresented in the poorest segment of the UK, however they are also well represented among the highest income levels and attend university at higher rates than white British. It would be extremely easy to conduct a study which accounts for the effects of socioeconomic status and education.
“most liberal and secular European Jewish families no longer circumcise.”
No, actually most still do.
A great deal. See above.
For the record: there is no up or down, only in or out.
It is simply not true that lidocaine is commonly employed during RIC in the USA.
As for your third sentence, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Medical circumcision does not satisfy African cultural requirements, just as medical circumcision does not satisfy Jewish religious requirements either.
A fair fraction of South African men are circumcised. At the same time, HIV is a grave problem in that country. So much for circumcision making HIV less likely.
I expect a committee of non-haredi rabbis to call for the total abolition of MBP in Judaism. But I am not holding my breath.
To circumcise lots of boys, to observe a few die within a week of the procedure, and then to assert “it is not proven that circumcision was the cause of death” is an example of what I call moving the goalposts. The burden of proof rests on the circumcisers, and not on the critics of circumcision.
Most American baby circumcisions are still performed without lidocaine.
Circumcision does not prevent HIV, especially in the First World, where HIV is transmitted by MSM and nonsexually.
We do not know if circumcision is safe, because there is no honest counting of botched and lethal outcomes. Complications that take years to become manifest, are not counted. There are no studies of the possible correlation between circ status and the usual sexual dysfunctions. There are no studies of the views of women who’ve been in intimate relationships with both kinds of men.
Name one culture that cuts girls but not boys.
don’t you have gender studies myths you should be studying?
“MY DAUGHTER IS NOW CLEAN” http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/24/indonesia-denies-its-female-circumcision-practices-are-female-genital-mutilation/
It is simply true that rite of passage circumcision in South Africa kills 50-100 teenage boys every year. Another 50-100 boys lose their penises to gangrene. Rite of passage circumcision is common in much of sub-Saharan Africa, and is always performed in a septic manner. Uncounted boys die from massive infections.
It is true that every culture that cuts girls also cuts boys. I decline to conclude that there is a causal relationship.
The WHO and UNAIDS are mistaken about the HIV-circ status connection. In only one African country where both circumcision statuses are common, is it the case that the HIV+ rate among intact men is materially higher than among circumcised men: Kenya. The clinical trials of circumcision were cut short after 18-24 months, so that those trials are not informative about risk compensation, a phenomenon that undercuts the circumcision-makes-AIDS-less-likely story, and that takes years to become manifest. All that can be concluded from the African RCTs is that cut men are less likely to contract HIV from a single unprotected sex act with an infected woman. Risk compensation predicts that that fact will gradually result in more unprotected sex.
In the First World, the USA has one of the highest rates of circumcision incidence. The USA is also tied with Portugal for the highest rate of HIV+.
Grave digging is bad form, just an FYI.
Who is digging, literally or metaphorically, whose grave?
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gravedigging
The following resolution was adopted unanimously by Genital Autonomy
2014, the 13th International Symposium on Genital Autonomy and
Children’s Rights.
The Genital Autonomy movement (intactivism)
condemns the shooting down of MH17 and deplores without reservation the
deaths of all on board. Any other sentiment concerning this
international tragedy is the opinion of the person making it, alone.
Endorsed by spokespeople for:
Genital Autonomy
Intact America
NOCIRC
NOHARMM
Doctors Opposing Circumcision
Attorneys for the Rights of the Child
Nurses for the Rights of the Child
NORM-UK
The Australasian Institute for Genital Automony
Canadian Foreskin Awareness Project
Intact Denmark – Forening mod børneomskæring
Bloodstained Men & Their Friends
Men Do Complain
https://www.facebook.com/events/400707260032181/permalink/471230502979856/
And yet, did any of you distance yourself from her or the other violent people in that thread? Actions speak louder than resolutions. So does hypocrisy if that isn’t clear
Do you know if I did or not? I had actually blocked 3 of the people in those comments long before this because of their tactics.
I asked. I didn’t accuse. Have you encouraged others to distance themselves from this horrible person, who was apparently arrested recently? Have you encouraged others to do more than just pass a resolution? Hollie is a pretty high profile member of the community, not just intactivist but anti vax as well. She openly admits to using illegal drugs, including while pregnant, and has admitted to allowing her children to ‘explore’ her body, including her genitals. This is a concerning and possibly mentally ill individual. She should not have the position in the community that she does. She also frequently insults men who were circumcised, using the term stubby wubby and stating they are limp. She allows and even encourages violent conversation, and has admitted to using multiple profiles to lie to people. The sad part is she’s nothing particularly novel within the group, and it’s commonly suggested that as long as she is ‘saving babies’ which is asinine, that it doesn’t matter what she does. If your community doesn’t make it clear that her actions are unacceptable, not with resolutions but with actions, none of you are any better than she is.
Intactivism is not a unified body with a hierarchical structure and she is not a high profile member of the community. Intactivism is made of numerous independent individuals and a number of organizations. I would consider high profile those who have better access to media, science, run organizations, etc. Hollie is loud but that’s about it.
Most of us would have no way to influence her presence or participation. I know that many of us disconnected ourselves from her after seeing her behavior during the protest at the Smithsonian earlier this year which was a very disordered conduct. We have no way of keeping her from using facebook or from creating pages or protesting in the streets, but we can stay away from her.
Given that you seem to have been keeping tabs on her though, and in the name of truth, it seems dishonest that you are not mentioning one important piece of information, that her arrest was not the result of the things you mention, but because of a family/personal problem between her and her ex’s sister. And an arrest does not constitute a conviction until judged by a court of law. That said, I find her behavior insulting and irresponsible though.
And speaking of convictions, I have yet to see the procircumcision groups emit any condemnation of Vernon Quaintance. Vernon pleaded guilty last month of sex offenses against boys, yet he is still running two pro-circumcision websites in spite of his home arrest. Gilgal Society was removed but all the content was published as Circumcision Helpdesk (the same week of his plead I believe) and the International Circumcision Information Reference Centre is still as active as always.
He is what I would call a high profile procircumcision advocate. Where are the actions against his crime?
Hollie’s page has many other ‘loud’ intactivists and she’s friends with brother k, who has asked to see photos of naked children and told a woman to “show me your intact son”. Which he claims he meant a fully clothed photo because he can see it in their eyes if they’ve been circumcised. Ok. Right. Is he not prominent either? Obviously your group is organized enough to ‘adopt resolutions’, surely you could speak out and warn other intactivists about her your the first person I’ve seen do so and be honest about her. I respect that.
Her arrest was mentioned because it demonstrates her poor judgment and possible mental illness. She created a page on fb called “I claim I was raped but I really just like to fuck my cousin” or something of that nature. It’s pretty in line with her intactivist tactics as well. She’s also openly admitted that she has multiple Facebook accounts and online personas, so how do you know that you’re not interacting with her online? I just feel a stronger position against her is necessary.
As for pro circumcision, I can’t answer to that. I’m not pro-circumcision and I’d never heard of the guy until recently. His actions are abhorrent and I’ve said so before. That has nothing to do with the support of people like hollie, Brother k, Brian herrity, or “David”/Christian.
I appreciate, though, that you do have some intellectual honesty on this topic. It’s too bad that you’re involved with the group you are. You seem to be too smart for the cherry picking and lying I’ve seen.
And not that it is any of your business, but I don’t have any circumcised children, nor am I circumcised myself. But I have been so turned off by the behavior of intactivists over the last 4 or 5 years that I simply can’t support the group. I’ve also come to believe that the procedure doesn’t warrant my judgment of other parents or medical professionals who do it.
If you guys don’t distance yourselves from the likes of Hollie, Brother K or Brian Herrity (among others), I firmly believe it will come back to bite you. They’re on a path that will do nothing to help your cause.
This person could be twice as crazy and it still would be my problem. You changed your opinion of the procedure itself, and that is more dangerous than anything this Hollie person is doing. Intactivists have never physically harmed anyone for their cause. Circumcision is an act of physical harm and children actually die from it. If you fail to understand that, your opinion of intactivists is irrelevant. You’re judging an act based on your opinion of the people who oppose it.
I fight racism and unfortunately the movement against racism is full of the likes of Al Sharpton. That doesn’t mean I can stop caring about racism just because some other people who claim to care about it are wacko.
Yes exactly my point. You don’t give a fuck about the craziness of your cohorts and long as they indulge your bullshit advocacy. As far as me changing my opinion being dangerous? How so? I believe in facts and evidence, and intactivists have few of either. Mostly just hysteria and drama. Circumcision is only harm the way a vaccine is harm.
There are risks to ever medical procedure. Circumcision is a safe one with few risks. Getting in a car and driving with your child is orders of magnitude more dangerous, and yet I don’t see you advocating against that.
I’m judging an act based on the evidence and judging the movement based on the people. I don’t have a high opinion of the quality of the evidence nor of the people.
And of course you’ve brought racism into this, though in a rather oblique fashion. Interesting, though, considering the raging racism among intactivists.
The fact that someone shares one opinion with me doesn’t make us cohorts. If she holds the same stance as me about abortion, should I change my mind about that too just for the sake of condemning her?
What about the mothers who were coerced into it, or the regret moms who’ve dealt with years of complications? The women who’ve been through years of rough unsatisfying sex until their husbands restored or they met intact men?
Circumcision did not start for the sake of medical benefits. It started as a ritual and medical excuses were made up later.
And you’re complaining about ‘racism’ (I’d love to see a source on that) in a movement that says NOT to cut people, but you think that the racism behind whites coercing black people to have their bodies altered isn’t a problem. It doesn’t occur to you that black skin even reacts differently to the procedure.
A fully-sourced timeline:
http://www.icgi.org/medicalization
You’re just a parrot. You have nothing useful, new or accurate to say. I’ve hit the point I simply can’t take you seriously.
How about you look at your own evidence with a critical eye. Let’s call it an intellectual exercise. Try to find at least one thing wrong with every study or assertion you’re making. You have to actually and actively try. Do that and maybe I’d take you seriously.
Pot. Kettle.
How much time do you spend on Internet comments areas talking about circ? I don’t think I’ve ever read a single article or blog online in which you haven’t.
I’m glad to learn I’m at least as thorough at writing them as you are at reading them.
I’d love not to have to talk about infant male genital cutting (inf ma ge cu?) – it’s a disgusting subject, and the videos are gruesome – but it’s necessary in order to talk about the human rights issue involved.
Long story short, many men living with this cosmetic alteration are saying that it is negatively impacting their lives. It is not your place to question that or correct them about their own bodies that they’ve lived in for decades. The fact that some men are relatively okay with it doesn’t change anything for those who are dealing with scarring, painful erections, ED and loss of sensation. Cutting an infant is irreversible. Not cutting them is reversible.
None of those things are true. Not any of them. Oh except for the very last statement.
There is no such thing as violent conversation. Violence happens in the real world, not on the internet.
Source on her being arrested?
As for weirdoes, circumcision is being promoted by convicted child pornographers who are deliberately distorting medical evidence and causing actual physical harm to millions of children. That is a bigger concern than anything this woman could be posting on the internet. You’re discussing people instead of the issue.
She’s the source. She deleted the post but you can see it on her Gofundme page which I’d check soon as it’s going to be deleted for fraud. Btw she claims she’s going to the ACLU. Since she was arrested for harassing her ex’s sister and which she admitted to doing, and I screen capped it. I also have screen caps of the page she harassed her on. She’s an obviously mentally ill person, in desperate need for attention.
And of course conversation can be violent. Your assertion to the contrary doesn’t make it not true. You seem to think you have magical powers.
In other words, we should spend more time attacking other people who share a single opinion with us than we should spend on the issue that the movement is about.
This according to someone who says it’s never killed anyone when I’m looking at photos of children it has killed.
Ms Reginder is not as prominent as you claim she is. She does not demonstrate, only marches in Gay Pride parades. She does not have an intactivist blog. She is a mother, but is largely ignored by the many intactivist mothers. Many intactivists question aspects of allopathic medicine other than RIC, aspects such as mass vaccination.
Several women, including my spouse, have told me of taking baths with their mothers when they were toddlers. My daughters have often seen their mother naked, and these experiences prepared them for puberty.
I firmly agree that circumcised men should never be shamed. But I also maintain that circumcised men who argue that “I am circumcised and love it, therefore there is nothing wrong with circumcising the next generation” are also dead wrong.
You claim that nothing is being done to marginalise Hollie Redinger. You and I are in no position to know that, because if she is being marginalised, that is being done very quietly, to avoid drama.
Getting over 100 people at a conference to agree unanimously to anything is no small action, believe me.
Oh pleaae. It’s not hard to get 100 people to decry someone celebrating the deaths of people in a tragic airline crash. I’d say it would be harder to get someone to disagree on record by name. And if Hollie hadn’t managed to alienate so so so many people (IA by accusing them of embezzlement, lying, not being as good of an activist etc, SOS, dr Momma all got lumped in with them by her. Brother K/the bloodstained men by starting The Foreskin Babe and jacking off dudes online which Brother K called disgusting…I’m sure there are more that I’m not thinking of) I have no doubts that many of these orgs would still be supporting her vile attention seeking efforts.
I’ve noticed an increasing and delightful pushback against the kind of advocacy that’s so bothersome to me anyway. So that makes me very happy. Oh what a difference a year can make.
I wonder if there has ever been a movement anywhere in the world, ever, without one person who behaved bizarrely and counterproductively. The fact that you are still harping on this says much more about you than Intactivism. (I’m here because someone linked to this page a few hours ago, like you, harping on it.)
Bottom line: cutting normal, healthy, healthy, functional, non-renewing parts off babies and children is still a human rights abuse.
As expected, nothing of substance. How many years? And I doubt I’ve read even a small percentage of your comments, but your name just keeps popping up. I doubt I’ve read every article on circ online and yet there you are on every one I’ve read. Must be a coincidence.
It’s too bad you’re so badly ineffective.
Eppur si muove: cutting normal, healthy, healthy, functional, non-renewing parts off babies and children is still a human rights abuse.
https://youtu.be/YhLgCmZAeu0
What would you know of Hugh7’s effectiveness or lack thereof?
I have met Hugh7. I have heard him make a speech on National Radio. I have read his blog. He did a degree in biology. He has an excellent grasp of the scientific method, and a grasp of how to reason from data that is unusual among intactivists (many of whom are mothers without uni degrees).
Oh and by the way ‘still harping’ cause I get notifications, genius.
Ms Redinger is not one of the leading intactivists. She takes part in Gay Pride parades, but does not demonstrate. She has no intactivist blog. She has staked out the sexual free spirit corner of intactivism, a corner which most intactivists, who are married mothers, silently avoid. Hollie’s take on intactivism is grounded in years of sexual difficulties, whose cause she eventually discovered was circumcised partners.
The way intactivism deals with people whose behaviour is less than savoury, is by ignoring them. A major intactivist 5-10 years ago was Matthew Hess. He is the coauthor of a series of online comics that created a superhero called Foreskin Man. The imagery of these comics drew on antisemitic stereotypes. Jewish nationalists seized on that imagery as evidence that the entire intactivist movement was age old antisemitism in a new disguise. This accusation may have been true of Hess, but was not true at all of the vast majority of intactivists (a movement that includes a number of Jewish voices). The way intactivism dealt with Hess is by gradually ignoring him. He is no longer mentioned in the social media I follow. Ms Redinger could well meet the same fate. Of course, she has made herself harder to ignore, in a very feminine way, by playing the sex radical card: in Gay Pride parades, Ms Redinger also advocates for topfreedom, and carries a sign saying “I like whole cocks in me”. Meanwhile, Matt Hess is a man in his 40s who is putting on weight.
You are free to dismiss Ms Redinger’s activities as vile attention seeking efforts. To which I will say this: an enduring and consequential social movement going back to the early years of last century, is a sustained women’s revolt against prudishness. More and more women are tired of being embarrassed by their bodies, of slut shaming, of being put on a damsel pedestal, and of being ashamed of thinking lucidly about their sex lives. Ms Redinger is a minuscule part of this revolt. The entire intactivist movement is a larger part thereof. A powerful driving element in intactivism is a growing scepticism about any claim that Nature botched the design of the human penis. Many American women have expressed their scepticism quite eloquently.
A few extremists do not represent the majority, as you can see from this post:
https://www.facebook.com/intactamerica/posts/10152637647601388
Actually, by virtue of being “intactivist” (“Intact America”) – having a child’s foreskin as your “issue” – they are extremist by definition. I did not have my son circumcised. So what? I don’t care what you or anyone else does with their child.
Unless the child is female, and her parents want to cut her vulva.
The issue is physical integrity. Something important enough for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to speak about.
A parliament spoke about it?!? Well, then, we must act now!
No action necessary. Do nothing at all, just leave babies’ genitals alone. It couldn’t be easier, and it’s free!
“Physical integrity”? What does that even mean?
Thank you for asking Stacy.
From the PACE’s resolution about “Children’s right to physical integrity”:
2. The Parliamentary Assembly is particularly worried about a category of violation of the physical integrity of children, which supporters of the procedures tend to present as beneficial to the children themselves despite clear evidence to the contrary. This includes, amongst others, female genital mutilation, the circumcision of young boys for religious reasons, early childhood medical interventions in the case of intersexual children and the submission to or coercion of children into piercings, tattoos or plastic surgery.
3. According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), in all actions concerning children, comprising every person under 18, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration and States are required to take “all appropriate … measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse … while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child” (Article 3).
4. The Council of Europe has been actively promoting children’s rights and child protection since 2006 through its Strategy for the Rights of the Child, and in which “Eliminating all forms of violence against children” can be found as one of four strategic objectives.
http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-en.asp?fileid=20057&lang=en
Physical integrity is what is violated when one person arbitrarily removes or permanently alters part of another person’s body without medical necessity or consent.
Such as FGM, breast ironing, facial scarification on children, tattooing a child, etc. All of these practices vary in the damage done, but all violate the same right.
Physical integrity is what you allowed your son to keep by not having him altered for social convention. It’s also what is taken away from children who are cut. The right not to be subjected to violence.
YES you made a very beneficial and ethical decision for your son’s quality of life, and I applaud you for it even if you don’t think you deserve it.
Then define ‘extremist.’ Removing part of someone’s body for your own preferences is an act of violence (one you did not commit). There is also the fact that parents are being defrauded and even coerced.
There is nothing extremist about saying that human anatomy does not require revision. Forcing a physical alteration on another person is extreme. Removing the tissue (with risk of death) is extreme. Saying that it should be left there is the neutral position. Nobody’s trying to ban adult men from getting cut.
So then why does everyone care if someone does female circumcision on their daughter?
PSF, why did you come back 2 months later to post this?
Did it take you THAT long to think of a comeback?
FGM involves removing the entire clitoris and often the labia minora and labia majora. This is, anatomically speaking, analogous to removing the entire penis and much of the scrotum.
It is also done for the sole purpose of reducing female sexual pleasure, in order to reduce the “risk” of infidelity and pre-marital sex.
So…not the same thing.
So make up your mind, either we are allowed to criticize parents’ decisions or we are not.
BTW, look up the history of circumcision and you will see the purpose was originally to try to reduce the sex drive of men. Of course now they come out with additional bogus reasons to keep it going.
When you compare apples with apples, tribal with tribal, surgical with surgical, male genital cutting and female genital cutting are very similar. Scores of boys die of tribal circumcision every year in Eastern Cape province of South Africa alone – heaven only knows how many for the whole of Africa!
Millions of baby girls are cut surgically and minimally in Malaysia and Indonesia in the name of Islam, and their loving mothers describe the operations in exactly the same terms as mothers of boys do in the west. This (using a gadget with a shield to protect the clitoris, invented by an American doctor) was covered by Blue Cross Blue Shield in the USA until 1977, legal until 1996.
Both are done for the same array of irrational excuses. Both are human rights abuses. Both must stop. (Anti-FGC activists Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Soraya Mire agree.) We would look less like hypocrites to girl-cutting cultures when we oppose FGC if we didn’t cut boys.
I need eye bleach!
OT (sorry): I can’t remember whether I mentioned here that I went in for breast reconstruction on the 14th. It did not work out. I spent four days in the ICU, and had four surgeries, with the final basic result of bilateral mast. Which would be okay as a result (not my first choice, but at least it’s symmetrical)…but if I’d been aiming there, we could have got to it faster.
I’m sorry. That sounds so terribly difficult. I hope your recovery goes smoothly.
Oh Elizabeth! I am so sorry that you’ve been through such a difficult time. I hope that you heal very quickly.
That, in fact, appears to be the problem. I’m not going to pretend to any scientific understanding of anything, let alone anything that was explained after my second surgery and before my third, but the issue may be that I heal too fast for microsurgery. Slayers should stick with implants.
I am sorry.
WTF!! Mother nature is more sacred than human life, I guess. And they were AIDS researchers. F*cking public health researchers and people are gloating. I am SPEECHLESS
This women is discussing!
Hollie’s appalling post has been removed, yes. Has Hollie changed her mind, or become contrite, or even have an iota of shame? NO.
I can still see it.
The page seems to have been removed. I hope this is because the author felt ashamed of her post and re-evaluated her position on the relative importance of foreskins and people. But it’s probably because facebook thought better of it.
For those of you who use Facebook, please read this post, by Malaysian Airlines gate crew member Renuka Manisha Virangna Birbal on #MH17.
https://www.facebook.com/aflyguyslounge/photos/a.288925981208734.48616.287081284726537/510353715732625/?type=1
That is just heartbreaking.
I want to go cry now. The immensity of this tragedy is beyond my comprehension.
I actually went away and wept when I saw Hollie’s post and her sycophants. I was already heartsick over the deaths; the callous glee from those people were just the final word.
There was a report from the ground gate crew in Holland as the passengers on MF 17 boarded the plane. I’ll post it here when I find it.
I was a mess on the day we heard. My sister and her fiancé were due back, they always fly out of Amsterdam and I didn’t know which flight they were on. I tried to figure out the last time she was on facebook to see if it was after the plane went down, ended up calling DFAT to see if they were okay. Luckily, she later got into contact and told me that they were on a later flight with a different carrier on a different route…the one that goes over Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Yeah, I worried until they were home again. Those hours of not knowing were terrible and I feel so sorry for the families involved.
Stop the earth, I want off.
How obsessed with baby penises do you have to be, in order to have this thought upon hearing of this tragedy?
Wow. Sick shit.
How obsessed with baby penises do you have to be, in order to take a scalpel to one?
You’re saying that internet posts are a bigger issue than physical alteration.
No.way.
I don’t really care what anyone thinks about circumcision — it’s utterly irrelevant in this case. Regardless of your personal stance, it makes up only one small plank in the very large log cabin that is the world of AIDS treatment and prevention. The AIDS researchers, research groups and conferences talk about everything from the finest points of molecular biology to regional macroeconomics, all of which also matter and to reduce these people and their work to ‘people who agree/ don’t agree with my personal version of penis obsession’ says something terrible about the writer.
Miserable, pathetic human beings.
PREACH.
I am against circumcision in developed countries. I am in favour of it in developing countries with rampant HIV.
But equating the situation of a developed country where condoms are easily accessible and cheap with the one in a developing country is just as saying that formula is unsafe in the US because it is unsafe in Mali, where there is little access to clear water.
Not the same.
I think people should take family history into account, among other things. Most of the men in my family were circumsized at a latter age (one in his late teens which lead to a host of unforseable issues like the worst case scenario not even fathomable ). That’s why we made the decision for our son. I have no doubt that we would have had to pay out lots of money and had a very unhappy toddler if we didn’t do it at birth.
Intelligence level: Potato
Sir, I believe you insult potatoes.
As my Scottish granny would say , “what else would you expect from a pig, but a grunt”!
Doesn’t this make you wonder what she would choose to not say? I certainly have thoughts that are unworthy, and keep them to myself because I know they would be hurtful and unproductive, or because I don’t want to be judged by them.
What on earth are those thoughts for this person, if she is okay with broadcasting this horror to the whole world? Shallow and vicious, not a winning combination.
Yet another cult with extremist, illogical views, not amenable to reason. And lying. Ugly.
How do these cults pop up over such small, personal choices?
A personal choice is one the person living with the result makes for themselves. Circumcision is only a personal choice when an adult man decides for himself.
Never mind free speech. That should be illegal.
Free speech? In the US, the free speech issue is related to government suppression, not the ability of individuals to call out someone’s statements as idiocy.
Wow just wow, it amazes me how some people will use any tragedy to promote their own agenda. Tragically we just lost 100 of the top AIDS researchers in the world 100 people who could have been working on a cure to the plague of the 20th and 21st century, yet these people want to turn it into a mandate on circumcision. Anti-vaxxers are just as bad, demonizing those of us who have lost members of our family to VPDs and telling us it’s our fault our loved ones died.
Wow. Just wow.
MH17 was a heartbreaking loss – one that could have significant consequences for the stability of the region. It is frightening to think how fragile peace is – two developed countries on the brink of war. Equally frightening, the level of ignorance of those who have the audacity to post such garbage.
Some people make me wish for the existence of brain bleach.
“possibly promote forced genital cutting”?
Well, maybe that’s because “genital cutting” (commonly known as circumcision) is known to LOWER the risk of AIDS, you dolt?
Maybe you should hope for an Israeli plane next time. Hey, it will be full of barbarians (both Jews and Muslims) who circumcise their sons, right?
To tell you the truth it really gets to me, every time, how circumcision (a common, safe, simple, easy procedure which doesn’t harm men in any way) is compared to female genital mutilation (a barbaric,violent act that is done with no other purpose than permanently depriving a woman of sexual pleasure).
Of course, we’re Jewish. Should we have a son, we’ll circumcise no matter what, it isn’t even a topic for discussion. But even practically speaking, I live in a country full of circumcised males, and no one seems to have any reason to complain.
I let my husband know his pens is worse than AIDS. He didn’t understand at all, alas.
I used to be really anti circumcision, but never talked about it ever. I just felt that it should be a boy’s own decision. At some point someone said there were viable alternative for religious purposes (honestly no clue if that is accurate).
My two long term boyfriends prior to marriage were uncircumcised so they saw no reason to do it if we had kids. After I married we started trying for a baby immediately and BOOM conflict.
That is when I went to the internet to back up my position with info that circ was unpopular, uncommon, and dangerous. Instead what I found were a bunch of propaganda sites stating total lies as facts. The more I read the more maladjusted and insane intactivists seemed.
I’m still on the fence (we’ve had 3 girls and baby 4 is unknown at this point), but I’m 100% more likely to seriously consider my husband’s position than I was before being exposed to these nutcases. There own toxic misinformation lost them at least one convert.
My husband refers to his as “My magical wand of oppression” because he finds radical feminists amusing.
If my husband were just a little geekier, I would be making a lot more jokes about his magic wand and ‘accio wife.’
My DH is 20 years older than me and calls his “The Magic Stick” because it says it got him a young thirty year old wife. That’s not why I married him, however it’s funny.
Of course right now he’s calling it the “unused stick” because of the baby and me not even wanting him near me but that’s another story.
“At some point someone said there were viable alternative for religious purposes”
Sorry, but I really don’t see how there can be “alternatives”. Either a male is circumcised or he is not (unless I’m missing something here).
Again… our particular reasons for circumcision are 100% religious. If tomorrow, a medical study comes out and says that circumcision has no benefits whatsoever and even some potential risks, we are still going to circumcise. So far, however, this isn’t the case. All medical evidence points out that circumcision is safe and has significant benefits.
Of course it’s always up to the parents. If you say, “my sons will decide for themselves when they grow up”, your choice. Your 100% legitimate choice. Keep in mind, however, that adult circumcision is riskier and more complicated.
In the 90’s, many Jews from the former USSR came to Israel. They were mostly assimilated, and many were uncircumcised. Many chose to undergo circumcision as teenagers or adults when they came here. Whenever I hear/read of someone discussing it, the opinion is, “I wish I had this done to me as a baby so I wouldn’t have to do it now”. On the other hand, I’ve never, ever heard someone lament the loss of their foreskin.
Another thing to remember is that we, as parents, make some choices for our children. This is a reality we cannot escape from. I chose to breastfeed my babies (though perhaps they would have thought formula is tastier), for example. Recently, we bought a house – without consulting our children (5 and 3 years old). We also choose to give our children Jewish upbringing, rather than wait for them to decide when they grow up.
When the subject came up with my (circumcised) husband, he was adamant that if we had a boy we would circumcise him. No doubt in his mind.
And frankly, while I admit I am not as familiar with the uncircumcised variety, IMO circumcised penises are WAY more attractive. Like, light years.
When erect the foreskin is retracted and there is almost no visual difference, and frankly, if a penis is in my vicinity for recreational purposes I’d hope it was erect ( and attached to my husband) and if it was in my vicinity for professional purposes it better be flaccid and aesthetics are irrelevant.
I don’t think there is evidence for routine infant circumcision without analgesia in the developed world, BUT I have no objection to parents who choose to circumcise (safely) for religious or cultural reasons, otherwise it should only be for medical reasons. To me “because his dad is circumcised” is a cultural reason too.
Aesthetics while flaccid may be irrelevant to you, but not to me. My husband can’t be erect every second he’s naked, but I often see him undressed, and I’m entitled and allowed to think that circumcised penises are more attractive than uncircumcised penises and to be glad my husband is among the “more attractive” group–however incorrect someone might think my subjective opinion on that is.
I honestly don’t know what his reasoning was; since we never had a boy, we didn’t discuss it much. Maybe it was because he is or maybe he had some other reason. All I know is he’s not unhappy with it, he doesn’t think some great harm was done to him, and he wanted any son we might have to have it done.
I’m the opposite, personally. I think purely religious and/or cultural reasons are not good or defensible. A rational decision based on what one thinks is best for the long-term health of your child _is_ a good reason, again all IMO. I can’t deny that the latter two will always be a stronger drive. Oh well.
Tangentially, I worked on a study once in Canada, and got a look at the incidence and some pretty pictures of balanoposthitis and phimosis in a healthy male population, and I think reducing that risk should be thrown on top of the benefits already discussed.
“For recreational purposes”… LOL… my husband is now asking, “what are you reading that is so funny?”
A Jewish friend of mine told me that pre-Hellenic circumcision took a very small portion of the foreskin. During Hellenic times some Jews had surgery to reverse their circumcision so as to fit into Greek society–exercising naked at the gymnasium. To counter this, the Jewish leaders started using a method of circumcision that left less foreskin available for reconstruction. My ex (not Jewish, just conventional American hospital procedure) felt that the doctor took too much off. He had very little slack in the skin of his penis.It didn’t seem to impair his sex life. We didn’t circumcise our son and I wouldn’t if having children now (our son is 35). But we live in a country with condoms and soap and water and pharmaceuticals.
To keep condom use in perspective, nearly 50% of the pregnancies in the U.S. ate unplanned. Yes we should heavily promote condom use but despite the AIDS epidemic and high rates of STDs, a large percentage of the population aren’t using them. That’s why from a public health perspective I understand why promoting circs for infants makes sense.
That’s an intactivist myth. They’re talking about the maccabee revolt. Greeks were trying to integrate Jews both culturally and religiously. Some Jews were stretching their foreskin to try to appear uncircumcised along with worshipping the Greek gods. In an attempt to save Judaism, the maccabees revolted. Before the revolt, Jews were possibly circumcised differently, but I haven’t seen a scholarly article on that. Even so, the current incarnation of Brit Milah has probably been around longer than the prior. It’s also pretty form proof that people have tried to use circumcision to ‘unjew’ or otherwise persecute Jews for millennia.
This is old thread now, but I’ll respond. For some reason I didn’t finish my original thought, I heard there were alternatives so that seemed to cement that it was unnecessary. I think if I had married a Jew today I would do what he wanted.
I honestly can’t remember what the supposed viable alternatives were now. I want to think it was making a small cut on the foreskin without removing it, or removing a very very small piece?
I tried looking it up but everything is so polluted with absolute lies when it comes to intactivism, and I know so little about Judaism that I’m at a loss.
As I’ve grown older I’ve become aware of many more instances when parents make life changing decisions for their kids. My 2 year old has zero say in what cancer treatments I choose, and is don’t know if they’d rather die than give up their fertility for life. I just have to make that call. Permanent sterility is a much bigger deal than circ, albeit at a likely higher benefit.
For some reason my ipad flipped out and wouldn’t let me keep typing.
Anyway, even when I wasn’t on the fence (as in absolutely no circ unless medically required) I never judged anyone for doing it. This was long before I had kids though, and before I knew how fierce mommy judgement even was lol. When you have kids you just do the best you can and everyone respects that right?
Ha ha ha.
“I’ve never, ever heard someone lament the loss of their foreskin.”
I’m not sure how many conversational contexts would have allowed for this to come up in your lifetime, given the nature of your community and the realities of human social interaction. But as a gentile male who happens to have been cut shortly after birth, let me say that I would 100% have preferred not to have been.
From what I understand about it, the normal function of the organ really is impaired without the foreskin. I have no way to compare, of course, but it makes sense to me. In particular, I think due to the way I was cut, I have a significant amount of hair follicles (i.e., scrotal tissue) pulled onto the shaft. Less than ideal, for obvious reasons, but it’s still workable. Just mutilated for no good reason.
Another level of irony here is that my father was uncircumcised, and my mother never really intended it. Apparently they gave her a bunch of papers to sign as she was waking up from the anesthesia of her c-section, and in that time and place it was treated as routine.
Of course, I don’t make a habit of “lamenting” things I can’t change, but there you go.
Circumcision is useful in case you live in a country with low access to condoms and rampant HIV.
In a developed country? Not at all. That is like saying that, because formula with unclean water is unsafe, then formula in the US is unsafe. There is a huge non-sequitur.
In Europe, we don’t circumcise. And yet we live quite happily, too.
Personally I equate circumcision with a gross infringment on another person bodily autonomy right. I wouldn’t give a tattoo on a newborn, neither. Not my body and not my choice. If the child grows up to want a circumcision -or a tattoo- he can get it.
Neither of our sons is circumcised, BUT… Our oldest’s penis swelled up to about three times it’s normal size, resulting in a visit to the emergency room because of concerns about the blood supply being impeded (a friend’s child needed emergency surgery for this very reason). Fortunately, it was just some sort of allergic reaction. Our younger son had an ER visit for an asthma attack and happened to spike a fever while there because he had a respiratory virus. Despite the fact that he had symptoms of a virus for several days, the NP insisted that he have a urinalysis since he “might” have a UTI. I got to watch a pediatric nurse try to cath my 18 month-old three times with no success. Had he been circumcised, the NP would not have been so adamant about checking for a UTI (which was, of course, nonexistent).
But… nothing of this has to do with the benefit or not of circumcision. That the nurse was simply ignorant.
But the AAP states that uncircumcised infant males have a 12-fold increase in UTIs. In this particular case, there really was not reason to suspect that he had a UTI, but she wanted to be sure simply because she knew that the rate of UTI is so much higher in uncirced infants. Fewer UTIs is a benefit of circumcision, as is the issue with phimosis causing strangulation of the blood supply.
Yes I heard that, I am just unsure since there is not big RCT about it (wouldn’t be very hard do to, neither).
Also, some less infections is not a good enoug reason to make such a permanent change on somebody else body, IMHO.
Still, I am a CF Italian woman, and we don’t circ here. So not my business, really.
I understand what you’re saying. I guess that for me, I’ve had two moments when I’ve wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to have them circumcised as infants.
Who doesn’t go with “I wonder if…”? 😛
Even more so with children!
No pyrexic child under five left the paediatric ER where I worked without a urinalysis, but we were happy with clean catches (a mother chasing a naked toddler with a bed pan in her hand was a frequent sight) those stick on urine bags and sterile pads in the nappy. Kids weren’t catheterised to get routine samples, and nearly all our boys aren’t circumcised.
I think what surprised me was that we had taken our older son to the ER when he was about 18 months old with a fever of 105.6 and they did not even mention urinalysis. He too had respiratory symptoms that preceded it, and I was totally taken aback by the NP’s insistence on it. It probably didn’t help that our hospital system has eliminated 1000 positions in the past 12 months, which meant we had been waiting to be seen with a wheezy child for four hours. We ended up doing a clean catch (which she hadn’t even offered initially), but it took awhile for him to urinate. The same NP kept coming in and bugging us to see if he had gone to the bathroom, and telling us to “make him drink some more juice.” (She was pregnant with her first child, and I tried to remind myself that she would learn soon enough just how easy it is to “make” a toddler do much of anything). Anyway, knowing that it is common practice to do urinalysis makes me feel a bit better, Dr. Kitty.
“That the nurse was simply ignorant.”
Not at all. What’s ignorant is to assume that a child’s high fever is caused by the most convenient thing that jumps to mind. Sending a kid home with a diagnosis of “a bad cold” when the real diagnosis is urosepsis is a mistake with potentially life-threatening consequences. I absolutely would have wanted a urine sample too. This kid had already been sick with his respiratory virus for several days, but only now he gets a fever?! That’s not usual for a virus at all.
This conversation has been enlightening for me. In retrospect, it would seem that my older child should have had urinalysis when we took him to the ER with a fever of 105.6. He had also had respiratory symptoms for a few days prior. I had no idea. (although I still wish that the NP had recommended a clean catch rather than a cath for our 18 month old from the start).
There can be exceptions. For instance there is a upper respiratory virus that causes little blisters on the far back roof of the mouth. It frequently causes a temp in the 104-105+ range. But it also has features that make it easy to recognize and differentiate from a sepsis. First, the sores are obvious. Second the child refuses to eat or drink and seems in pain when they try. Third, despite this crazy high temp, the kid doesn’t act that sick. He or she may even be playing fairly happily with toys.A septic kid doesn’t play with toys. So when I see a kid with all these features, I don’t insist on the urine sample.
He was definitely acting sick – extremely lethargic, breathing fast, etc. He had ear tubes at the time, and one started to drain a bit that night. I remember telling the doc that he had never spiked a fever with drainage before, but she was confident it was related to his cold symptoms. I took him to see his pediatrician the next morning, and she disagreed with the ER doctor. She managed to get a good look at his throat, and diagnosed tonsilitis.
Would you also apply the “not my body, not my choice” to vaccinating a baby or toddler? Truly, this isn’t snark, I’m genuinely curious. It just occurred to me that, as we chose to vaccinate our daughters, we caused irreversible changes in their bodies (giving them immunity to certain diseases). Should they grow up and think that vaccines are unnecessary and potentially dangerous (I hope they don’t, but you never know), they might turn against us and say, “you had no right to do this to me! My body, my choice!”
Vaccines serve to have a immunity to potentially deadly and in any case quite painful illness. I should know, I got measles, rubellas etc the ancient way. No fun. They also protect people who can’t protect themselves.
Circumcision does have such a protective effect (though order of magnitudes lower, sadly) on HIV, so in places where HIV is rampant and the best solutions (condoms, antiretroviral for mothers) are not available, circumcision is the lesser evil (though circumcised men shouldn’t go around willy-nilly comdomless, neither) and, differently from vaccines, it causes an aestethic change, and it does have some hindrances.
Also, differently from vaccines, Circumcision is not The Solution. I mean, if you vaccinate 100% of the population (I wish…) you eradicate diseases. If you circumcise 100% of the population, you still got HIV.
A good example is the live polio vaccine. This vaccine sheds, so it is good to spread the immunity, but it also has a very small change of giving people polio. The dead polio vaccine doesn’t shed, and doesn’t give people polio.
When polio is rampant, giving the live polio vaccine makes sense. Yes, a small percentage of children will get polio of it, but a much greater one will be vaccinated-by-proxy. BUT when polio is no more common, then the very small possibility of getting polio is not worth anymore, since most people are vaccinated anyway.
So no, I don’t think it is the same thing. You do give up a bit of your bodily autonomy (and other freedoms) for the Greater Good, but the Greater Good has to be Great enough and objective enough, which for circumcision and HIV, in developed countries, is not so, but it is so on vaccines (the one we give, at least).
I hope I have been clear, English is not my native language 🙂
Have you ever known a child who had it done when they were older out of medical need? I’ve read blogs from people in my city (inactivist) who had to drive to Cincy to have it done. My cousins child had it done at 3, that poor poor boy. My cousins wife was dead set against it (because people never have problems, bodies just work) ignored our family history, and the fact that my cousin went through the procedure as a child. Sometimes it has to be done.
Oh of course, if it is medically necessary that is another thing. Health is health after all 🙂
I think one of my cousins got circ for medical reason, too. But that is a particular case 🙂
One of the popular guys at my highschool had to have a circumcision at 15 for medical reasons. He was quite vocal about his experience, as it got him even more attention from girls. As I recall, he said that it hurt for a day or two but that he had decent painkillers, and his main complaint was that it was itchy while healing.
There’s a new device that only requires a topical anesthetic to use. It basically is a rubber band that cuts off circulation. It was designed to be used in Africa instead of surgery because it’s faster and cheaper.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/health/aids-prevention-inspires-ways-to-simplify-circumcision.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Oddly enough, I was explaining about that one to my husband yesterday during a discussion on circumcision and STI prevention.
You make good points, but circumcision reduces the rate of HIV infection by up to 60%. It isn’t perfect but it’s still a dramatic improvement and on a population level it can make a big difference. Of course you have to weigh the ethics of performing a body mod on an infant but it’s not a trivial benefit. And as I said below, condoms aren’t perfect. People get drunk and high or they don’t have money to buy them or it’s late at night and they don’t feel like going to the drugstore, etc.
As I said: in a condition of rampant HIV spread with no or little access to condoms, circumcision is a reasonable option for infants.
In a situation with less HIV and more videly available condoms, in my opinion you don’t have a right to infringe on the bodily autonomy of another person, when a better result can be achieved with condoms (which also prevent other STD, and unwanted pregnancies).
Remember that in the 1980s, when HIV began in the US, most men were circ. And it didn’t help.
To make a comparison: there are 1.1 millions of people in the US with HIV. (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/statistics/basics/ataglance.html) say that half are men? 600k people.
There are roughly 300k diagnosys of breast cancer every year. Say a median of 3 years of life with cancer (either because you are cured, or because you die of it)?
900k women are living with cancer right now.
If you take away the mamary bub at birth, you get a -100% breast cancer rate. They could, after all, do procedure to reconstruct breasts and bottlefeed.
But nobody claims that such a surgery is ok… unless you have some gene that put you in a particular high risk category.
Which is the same as being high-risk for HIV, because you particularly enjoy not using condoms or because you live in sub-saharian Africa.
(I am trying to find reliable data on how much circumcision lower the risk of HIV, the number varies wildly, so it may be good, but likely not THAT good).
What you fail to take into account when you mention the US risks is that the early epidemic in the US was in men who have sex with men and injected drug use. Circ is not protective in receptive sex, nor obviously is it protective for injected drug use. Circ is important for HIV protection only in situations where there is a substatial rate of HIV in a man’s potential female sex partners. This is the case in much of Africa and in some small subpopulations in the USA. The risks of phimosis, pediatric UTI still stand however.
I do not fail to notice it. It is why I say that campain for infant circ in Africa are a good thing.
However, in the US if you really like to go bareback you can get circumcised in your adult life. And in any case, circ doesn’t prevent against other STD like siphyllis -which is on the rise, too- or herpes or hepatitis, so if you have to be circumcised AND use a condom you could as well use a condom, since they are easy to come by in the US.
Much of the risk of phimosis and pediatric UTI can be reduced with good hygiene. And they aren’t in any case enough to cause a permanent change in another person body. It is much like the case for breastfeedin. Yes, breastfeeding has some benefit. But not enough to demonize formula. AND in this case it has as a malus an infrigment in another person bodily autonomy.
I wouldn’t get an infant a tatoo on his penis, neither.
“Much of the risk of phimosis and pediatric UTI can be reduced with good hygiene.”
Pediatric UTI is not affected by hygiene, neither is pediatric phimosis (adult balanitis is).
” And they aren’t in any case enough to cause a permanent change in another person body.”
UTIs can cause permanent kidney damage. Very rarely they cause sepsis and death.
I agree, the medical benefits of pediatric circ in the developed world are not overwhelming since we have antibiotics etc here. Since that’s the case, I agree it is comparable to breastfeeding. There are benefits that are real, but they are small here, so it shouldn’t be pressured on parents. Instead social factors can taken into account (religion, social preference, concerns about what child might want in the future or not want etc). But just like breastfeeding, the reasons to do circ are much more compelling in Africa.
Yes, sometimes people overhyphe small (but presents) benefits. And I was just thinking about health-related circ reasons, not other (for example, religious) reasons.
To make a comparison: lets say you discover (hope never happen) to have a gene that put you at high risk for cancer. You debate with yourself and decide to make preventive a double-mastectomy. Sadly, you disscover your infant daughter has the same gene. Would you decide for her to have the same procedure?
Most people would say no, they would wait until the child is old enough to make such a choice by herself, as it is her body and her choice.
Same with circ. His body and his choice.
Bodily autonomy is hugely important. Boys have right to it, too 🙂
Still, all freedoms (up and including life) can be diminished if there is a compellig “Greater Good” reason. And in Africa there is one such with HIV.
“To make a comparison: lets say you discover (hope never happen) to have a gene that put you at high risk for cancer. You debate with yourself and decide to make preventive a double-mastectomy.Sadly, you disscover your infant daughter has the same gene. Would you decide for her to have the same procedure?”
Excellent question. The answer would depend on 2 things:
1) What is the time frame that the cancer would manifest? A cancer that is known to manifest only in adulthood (e.g. BRCA-1 and 2) would result in me making a very different decision than one that could manifest in childhood or adolescence.
2) What would be the potential harms of the surgery? A surgery that would be dangerous and/or would put my child at a significant social disadvantage or turn my child into a “freak” would result in me making a very different decision than one that was quick, very safe, and would give my child a neutral social status or even possibly be preferred.
Yes, those are indeed difficult questions (and ones I hope nobody here will have to face, though probably somebody has to).
I am not saying that a “Yes” or “No” is a definitive answer, because, as you said, it would depend on several factors. I would say that question 1 is the most important: if the major benefit (not getting cancer) happen in adulthood then it is morally better (in my opinion at least) to wait and let the child -then woman- making the decision herself.
I can say I wouldn’t have liked, in a similar situation, for my mother to make the choice for me.
Circ main benefit (protection against HIV) happen mostly in adulthood. So in my opinion it makes more sense (again, in a developed country) to let the child -then man- make his own decision about it (developing countries where HIV is endemic are a different background).
It just sort of perplex me when people who think circumcision is not the default option, but actually something that should be tought about and perhaps even avoided, are often painted as crazy. There are crazy people (like the one referred in the OP. Crazyness personified) but in many countries children aren’t circumcised (in Italy as I said is almost never done save for religious or specific health reasons) and we aren’t all rabid 😛
Actually circ has a number of medical benefits in infancy and childhood. Urosepsis is potentially fatal. It kills children in every country every year, including in the US and Italy. It is most common and most dangerous in infancy. And since children at that age are pre-verbal, they can’t tell you what is wrong. If they have a runny nose at the same time, as children that age so often do, parents and doctors may mistake their fever for a virus and leave them untreated. Even HIV is not an “adult problem”. Many cases of HIV discovered in adults were actually contracted in adolescence when sex drive is already there but decision making skills aren’t.
On the other hand, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for a person not to circ their infant if they live in a country with low HIV prevalence and are not burying their heads in the sand thinking that their sons aren’t at risk for urosepsis because of “hygiene” or some other myth. And if non-circ is standard in your country for those of your ethnicity, all the more reason not to circ. This is where the decision gets into culture, no? Why would you voluntarily make your child look like someone of a traditionally-oppressed minority if you didn’t have to, right? Especially if in addition to choosing an appearance for your child that marks him of a more desirable social status you can also at the same time claim that it was all chosen out of a more advanced sense of ethics.
The situation is obviously different in a country like the US where “circ” does not automatically mean “Jew or Muslim”.
I am CF 😛 I don’t plan to have children, never. I am debating pure theory.
Also, since not-circumcising is the norm, there is no claim to advance sense of ethics. It is simply normal. One could* make a claim to a more advance sense of ethics would they chose not to circ due to a respect for the child bodily autonomy in a country where circumcision is normal, not in Italy.
HIV is not an adult problem in the same way that breast cancer isn’t. While breast cancer in younger women is rarer, it is not unknown and it can also be fatal. Talking about your children about HIV and telling your sons that, if they so desire, circumcision can lower thair chances of getting it would be a more moral way to approach the point, if HIV is the problem (again and always talking about developed countries). Even if the decision-making abilities of a, say, 14 years old are yet not developed, they are indeed superior to the decision-making abilities of a one-day old.
As I said, I do not negate that circumcision has some health benefict. But it is a strange misure since for most of those that are relevant in the developed words there are medical answer insteads. I was told that surgical procedure should be done when there are no medical answer to the problem. You don’t amputate a foot before trying to see if the infection will go down with antibiotics after all. And it is twice strange that it is done on newborns. Since circumcisions has such health benefits, better would be to educate adolescent and young men, so that they can choose it for themselves (which also compute for the social part)
I am not against circumcision, mind you. I am simply again modify the body of somebody else withouth that somebody else consent.
About the “social status”. While I agree on the religious excemption on circumcision (up to a point) I do not think that social reasons are enough.
There are social reason for type Ia and type IV female genital mutilation, too: women who have it are by far more likely to find a good husband, and have higher status.
Still wrong in my opinion.
Different is if an adult woman chose the same stuff. Her body and her choice.
Bottom line:
The body of somebody belongs to that somebody, not to his or her parents or society, not unless a clear-cut Greater Good reason exists, which do exists in the case of circumcision and Africa (because of HIV) but does not exist in the developed World. Since circumcision has such health benefict, better would be to educate adolescent boys and young men on it.
(Type Ia – removal of the clitoral hood or prepuce only; Type IV — All other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-medical purposes, for example: pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterization, but without resection of clitoris or the labia)
*Could. It is to be seen if this claim is substantial.)
Why do you keep ignoring urosepsis?
Why do you ignore bodily autonomy? ;P
My answer:
1. I haven’t completely ignored it. I have put it under the “why use surgery options before medical options?” perplexity above.
2. I haven’t mentioned it specifically because I can’t find reliable data on infantile urosepsis, neither in Italy nor in the US. I can’t find hard data on infantile sepsis, period. I do find some papers about neonatal sepsis, which seems to depend on things like the mother having herpes (or long labour after rupture of membranes) and is not relevant. What I find about sepsis, in general, do point at the elder and at the children younger than one year, but since it includes neonatal sepsis, it is not what I was searching. So, in absence of reliable hard data that say something like: in the US 1 on 1000 children who are not circumcised will die of urosepsis against 1 in 10 000 in circumcised ones will die, I can’t put it into my computations (at this point one should also compute the problems deriving from circumcision, though. Noticed I didn’t mention those? Because I can’t find any true, reliable data about them neither. Only intactivist sites, which aren’t reliable data). I searched on pubmed “childhood sepsis” which gave me a lot of papers but nothing in the first five pages. I searched sepsis circumcision, but no comparison study or anything like that. So I can’t really say. I thought about extrapolating, say “1 in X circ/not circ boy will get UTI” and “1 in X boy with UTI will get sepsis” but one could say that a not-circumcised infant boy with UTI is more likely to be treated for it (a commenter before said that nurses and doctors seem to be very careful about that) so perhaps it would be less likely to become a full-blast sepsis? I don’t know, so I can’t compute that :
Edit to add: since my status as a CF person seem to be called in question, I prefer to close the debate now on an agreeing to disagreeing bases. I enjoyed debating with you, fiftyfifty1 🙂 Thank you for your time.
Ah, so basically you don’t know much about it and your Google skills aren’t strong enough to learn about it so you want to wave it away?
I am CF 😛 I don’t plan to have children, never. I am debating pure theory.
Translation: I’m a jerk who enjoys trolling people. Got it. Get lost.
I do not enjoy trolling people, Ms Elizabeth. I enjoy debating. The status of my personal choice on motherhood has no bearing on my moral or ethical landscape neither. I am a long-time commenter on this site, because in spite of what you may think I do consider the care of mothers (I have one, for your information) and infant important.
I enjoy debating, which I am doing. But I suppose that if you are so set against it, there is nothing to be said.
Good day to you.
I frankly do not give a single damn whether you ever plan on having children or not. Have them if you want, don’t if you don’t. But every time someone comes wandering by (so far as I can tell ANY part of the internet) and announces that they’re CF, what they inevitably mean is that they’re going to carry on conversation with neither nuance or sympathy, and claim that it’s some kind of virtue.
Short version: CF is code for obnoxious.
If you were debating, you could do it better.
CF is code for “person who doesn’t want children”.
I mentioned it to make clear my interest in infant circumcision was purely theoretical: I have no real bone in the discussion.
“The status of my personal choice on motherhood has no bearing on my moral or ethical landscape neither”
Then why did you bring up your status? Obviously to try to make the case that your arguments were somehow stronger because you didn’t have a dog in the fight.
(I actually agree with you that it can be a worthy thing to debate topics in a non-personal manner. That’s why I stuck with that decision and haven’t tried to use my own personal status to bolster my arguments. You may have noticed that I haven’t even mentioned if I have kids let alone whether they are boys or girls or the state of their genitals.)
Mastectomy is a far more invasive operation than circumcision and it permanently alters body function, which circumcision does not. It’s not an apt comparison.
For a newborn mastectomy is not as invasive as for an adult, developed woman. That could also be a good case for infant mastectomy of girl with a genetic high predisposition to breast cancer, actually.
I still stand that it would be the girl’s choice, not the mother 🙂
A mastectomy is the removal of tissue which does not develop until adolescence and is not fully developed until adulthood. Therefore, it is actually not possible to perform a mastectomy on an infant.
Your arguments here have no basis in fact, and are way over the line in terms of offensive to families dealing with these choices.
It is actually possible to remove undeveloped tissue. But even if it would not be possible it matters absolutely nothing for the sake of the argument, as it is theoretical (as I have stated several time) and should be taken as such.
I had a phylosphy teacher who made us write an essay debating both the pro and the cons of slavery, too.
They are called “thought experiments”. Discussing them is not offensive.
1. IF you say A = B and someone happens along and says, actually, A has no resemblence to B, you cannot just handwave the difference because it’s a thought experiment. That’s intellectually dishonest.
2. There is nothing theoretical or hypothetical about what you are calling a thought experiment here. Real people cope with it every day.
3. I’m sorry you had a shitty philosophy teacher. There are ethical limits even to intellectual exercise, and it was wrong to ever lead students to believe there weren’t.
4. When you suggest impossible things and trivialize major emotional struggles faced by real people every day, even if you then call it a thought experiment, you may still be a jackass.
But with thought experiments you have to *actually do the experiment*. Since you seem unable to get past the first step (deciding that your experiment will be to compare infant circ to infant mastectomy) I will do it for you:
Is infant circ similar to infant masectomy, why or why not? We can all agree that doing a mastectomy on an infant with BRCA is a bad idea. Why? Because it’s a relatively high risk procedure with absolutely no health benefit until you are in your 20s, that causes an absolutely huge social disadvantage. How is this different from an infant circ? An infant circ is a relatively low risk procedure with both infant and childhood benefits (reducing urosepsis and phimosis), adolescent benefits (reducing HIV risk) as well as long term benefits (reduced penile cancer and reduced cervical cancer in future partners) that is socially neutral typically and sometimes even socially beneficial. Should we therefore limit infant circ based on our decision not to do infant mastectomies? No, as the factors in play are not similar and actually are quite opposite.
Your comparison is weak:
1. Newborn circ is a low risk procedure and lower risk than adult circ. Infant mastectomy, although removing less tissue, still requires general anesthesia which with an infant’s physiology and airway makes the procedure as risky, if not more so, than adult.
2. BRCA mutations do not cause breast cancer before puberty and almost never during adolescence. Urosepsis kills babies in every country every year, including in Italy and the US. HIV is frequently contracted as an adolescent.
3. Circ has, in most places in the world, either a basically neutral social effect or a small positive effect on obtaining mates and in other social factors. Lack of breasts has a large negative effect on a young woman in every culture and location on earth.
But in your mind, people should not circ if they wouldn’t give their infant daughter a mastectomy upon learning she was BRCA positive?! You’ll have to do better than that in your arguments.
Notice I didn’t talk about BRCA. You did. I talked about “genetic risk for breast cancer”.
Lets say, to make the possibility of infant masectomy more akin to circumcision, that exists a mutation, on some gene, that make a woman likely to develop cancer even in adolescence (or, beginning from adolescence)*
Would such a mutation make breast mastectomy in infancy a suitable moral choice?
I have, as said, not an answer on that. I was thinking on it 🙂
I would, personally, say no, as the ability to make a choice of a 14 to 16 years old is anyway better than the ability to make a choice of a newborn.
Again, my personal take on the matter.
Even because my argument was not based on this. This was something I picked up as I was thinking on it. It was about bodily autonomy 😛 Not genetic mutation and breast cancer.
Please, do not misunderstand me.
Most of the benefit of circumcision (save infant urosepsis, on which I can’t find any data) apply even if the procedure is done in adolescence or adulthood, when the boy/man can have a saying on what happen on his body.
This is the point. Not whatever circumcision has benefit.
The point is whatever the parents have the right to decide a permanent modification on their child body, which will give most of the benefit after said child could have decided for himself to have it done or not.
Period 😛
And really, with this I am done. It was nice debating with you 🙂
*Though experiments need not to be rooted in reality. This is still wastly more likely than us going as fast as light 😛
Of course thought experiments don’t need to be rooted in reality, they can be as sci-fi as you want to make them! But in the end, we do need to decide if they are useful, and even with your modifications your breast cancer experiment still isn’t useful.
You now specify that your theoretical gene can sometimes cause cancer even in a 16 year old. But urosepsis can and does cause death in in infancy (whether or not you have the skills to find that fact). And infant mastectomy would still be relatively risky whereas infant circ is much safer. And mastectomy still causes a huge social disadvantage whereas infant circ doesn’t.
A more apt comparison might be if there was a type of breast cancer that could strike anytime from infancy onwards. To permanently prevent it, there was an outpatient procedure that involved tattooing the skin of the nipples with a dye that had medicinal properties. The dye would leave the nipple and areolar areas a darker pinkish-brown color than they would otherwise be, but would prevent the cancer. People would be able to tell if you had had the tattoos done, but it wouldn’t be a big deal. Some would even say that the look of the nipples was better (after all the darker color actually looks a lot like the flush of color that nipples take on when a woman is aroused). Would you consider this for your daughter? Why or why not? Should this procedure be made illegal, why or why not?
Actually, circumcision does appear to reduce the risk of STDs besides HIV. And again, condoms are not foolproof. The typical use failure rate is around 15%
This is something that bothers me about people who oppose circumcision: you can oppose it without diminishing the real health benefits. It’s perfectly reasonable to say “I don’t feel comfortable with permanently altering an infant’s body before they can give consent, period.” It’s not reasonable to undermine the health benefits to justify it. The ethical argument is justification in and of itself.
I am not dimishing the health benefit. I am arguing that in developed countries they aren’t good enough to justify a permanent alteration on somebody else body.
I also think that the benefit, even if present, are overhyphed and misapplied, just like the benefit of breastfeeding. It makes sense to promote breastfeeding a lot in countries where there is little access to clear water, not so much on developed countries.
To make a comparison: lets say you discover (hope never happen) to have a gene that put you at high risk for cancer. You debate with yourself and decide to make preventive a double-mastectomy. Sadly, you disscover your infant daughter has the same gene. Would you decide for her to have the same procedure?
Most people would say no, they would wait until the child is old enough to make such a choice by herself, as it is her body and her choice.
Same with circ. His body and his choice.
URGH I deleted my comment by mistake.
I did notice it. This is why I said that campain for incant circumcisions are reasonable in Africa.
In the US it is better just to use a comdom, since they also protect from other STD and unwanted pregnancies. OR the man can chose to get circumcised himself.
The risk of phimosis and pediatric UTI, while real, can be lowered with god hygiene. Also, they are not enough to infringe in another person bodily autonomy.
To make a comparison: lets say you discover (hope never happen) to have a gene that put you at high risk for cancer. You debate with yourself and decide to make preventive a double-mastectomy. Sadly, you disscover your infant daughter has the same gene. Would you decide for her to have the same procedure?
Most people would say no, they would wait until the child is old enough to make such a choice by herself, as it is her body and her choice.
Same with circ. His body and his choice.
Unfortunately the current spread of HIV is in African American straight partners. Circ has its uses medically and in religious folks for a certainty. I also don’t understand why culture is dismissed so readily. As far as iv drug use, you can’t spread it if you don’t have it. Needle exchanges would be highly beneficial as well.
Thank you for replying. You were perfectly clear; English isn’t my native language either, by the way.
maybe the difference is that vaccination doesn’t change one’s appearance?
Perhaps, but then, I’m not sure if having or not having a foreskin is that important, appearance-wise. I mean, it’s not like a facial tattoo everyone will stare at.
Speaking from personal family history. You never know where your child will end up. They very well, might end up visiting one of those hot, humid tropical developing countries. Or a country where the sand irritates the foreskin. If your child joins the Peace Core, it’s an issue, if your child is in the Armed Forces, well uh, Uncle Sam takes care if the problem (which can make for one angry kid).
There’s no alternative. It’s made up by folks such as these.
It is pretty obvious they do not care at all about preserving human lifes, exactly the opposite those scientists did. They have an agenda and that is it, they do not care about anything else.
I am utterly at a loss for words. How incredibly sad.
It is rather scarey knowing the pathology behind a multitude of healthcare issues. From Midwifery to anti vax. I struggle with memory loss becuse of the abuse I endured for taking a stand with families. I am rather shocked that some agency is not immediately interveneing given all the data.
It’s like celebrating the loss of life if a plane carrying vaccines to Africa went down. Just mind boggling. To put some petty, unfounded idiocy born of luxury above actual people.
Wow so I just googled Hollie Redinger and she is the kind of anti-vaxx genius that takes her 18 month old baby to chicken pox parties and advertises it on fb! Then she has the nerve to say parents should be more dedicated to their children’s health, because you know how gluten free snacks create herd immunity!(sarcasm) What Hollie doesn’t realize is she is really lucky that dedicated parents get their kids vaccinated on schedule and in return protect her child from measles and polio.
She should take her unvaxxed kid to a polio party in a developing country, and then stay there away from modern medical care when the kid gets sick. Because karma, you know.
Yeah karma. I hate how dumb Westerners use eastern religious traditions and practices to make bad things seem deserved to other people. It is too much for me to deal with and I’m sure Hollie will be on this thread in a couple days running her mouth like Lucy on the EBB article
Good God I’m lucky she doesn’t live close to me, I’d find her and snatch her bald. I’m one of those people who’ve lost someone to a VPD because they were contraindicated for vaccines, and it’s my hill to die on.
What a sick little bridge troll! Of course their ideology is more important than human lives.
That literally brought tears to my eyes. I hope none of their families ever hear something so cruel.
Yes… let’s celebrate the loss of 100 AIDS researchers. I wonder how many lives they would have saved had they not been killed. Absolutely sick.
WOW
Wow. Now that really is viewing the world through your lenses. Let’s completely ignore the human loss, the international political consequences of what happen, so we can further our own small cause.
I… They… Oh my effing Spaghetti Monster! I just… No words… @_@
How do you know your Facebook post is crazy beyond all comprehension? When it is parroting the thoughts of the Westboro Baptist Church.
These people really don’t understand how karma works. At all.
Wouldn’t karma mean they would come back as some other caste, or possibly an animal?
I wonder what karma will bestow upon these people for what they believe and post. These hurtful thoughts and words towards the victims and their families.
Myself, I’m hoping that it bestows realistic and gory dreams about what the people who died experienced in their last moments, the suffering of those who lost loved ones, and how their own acts make that suffering worse. And then invests them with a conscience so they feel bad about it. But I only hope that because I’m a nasty person. I don’t want them getting off with something minor like being a cockroach or maybe an ebola virus for their next dozen lives. I’d like them to really feel how much they are contributing to evil in the world.
I was hoping they could come back and get some disease we have vaccines for and live for the rest of their lives with complications because of it. Living with the effects of post polio syndrome is all my husband’s aunt needs to believe that vaccines are a good thing (she also had mumps and chicken pox and is thrilled her children and grandchildren won’t have to have those things)
My brother was one of those people who were vaccinated and still got the mumps. They were worried about his fertility. Thankfully, his kids are proof it was ok.
Harlan Ellison once said (and I paraphrase, but I think it’s close: “And for you, I wish the worst. I wish that nameless and terrible dreammonsters haunt you till you die.” That would be fine with me …
I think they believe that karma doesn’t apply to them.
Exactly. They need to shut up and stop using it as an excuse to say vile things. I’m so over these stupid karma statements, especially at a time like this and for something as tasteless as this Hollie woman promoting her own little agenda.
To think like this, to write like this, to discuss openly on the Internet like this, these people should be on some bodies watch list. There usually isn’t a far separation from thinking like this and acting on it.
That’s why I always say, it’s not a flame war until you get the anti-circumcision people involved, and NO ONE is a troll like “intactivists”. They are bat-shit crazy.
God forbid you enter a conversation about female genital mutilation. That’s like a dog whistle for them to come in crying about foreskins, despite the fact that the two are entirely different and despite being far less of a human rights violation, they demand that the two be treated differently; nay, that circumcision is MOAR evil, because the feminist agenda or something.
Intactivists, the only group that can claim both rabid feminists and rabid MRA’s and still be clueless enough to believe their opinion is the only right one.
I remind readers that the rabid and tepid feminists all agree that FGM is an unmitigated social evil. Feminists quietly admit that they don’t much like RIC either, but do not want to linger over that fact.
MRAs hate RIC, but add that they hate FGM just as much, but do not linger over the fact, because the First World has made FGM illegal.
MRAs and feminists are both intactivists, but with rather different slants. Do keep in mind that FGM has no defenders in the First World, and that RIC for alleged prophylactic advantage is almost entirely limited to Americans, and Brian Morris and his friends. Hence far more people find distasteful the surgical alteration of the human genitalia, than self-identify as intactivists.
There is no objective way of deciding how similar FGM and RIC are. There is no objective way of measuring a human rights violation.
One thing is clear to me. The American practice of circumcising newborn boys without effective anesthesia is barbaric.
There is no objective way of deciding how similar FGM and RIC are.
Sure there is. A few possibilities:
– How much tissue is removed?
– How much blood loss is there, on average, with each procedure?
– How much (if any) lasting functional and sensory impairment is there with each procedure?
– What is the fatality rate of each procedure?
1,2 are not measured even in the west, much less in the African bush.
3 There is no agreed way to measure functional and sensory impairment, esp. across subjects.
4 The only honest recording of fatalities I know of is that of rite of passage circumcisions in South Africa. I have read that FGM may kill as many as 1% of the girls who undergo it between the equator and Egypt. But I know of no data collection or reporting.
How evil do you have to be to not only think that, but to actually put it on your public Facebook?
These people are insane to celebrate the deaths of those who work to prevent and treat HIV.
Circumcising Americans for HIV prevention is unfounded, as there are way more effective and available methods, but in a place where condoms and antiretrovirals are scarce to non-existent, circumcision is the next best risk reducer for the population. To ignore the basic science to hang on such an ignorant ideology is baffling.
Not to contradict you on HIV in America, but just to add… the medical conversation isn’t just about HIV. It’s also about the cancer-causing strains of HPV (cervical, oral, anal, penile), along with herpes, syphillis and male infant UTI/kidney issues. When you add it all together, this is why the AAP says that the medical benefits of routine infant circumcision outweigh the risks for Americans. We have plenty of condoms here, and yet these are still very American problems.
Yes, there are potential benefits. Many of the benefits can also be achieved without circumcision with the medical and hygiene care available in the U.S. The other benefits, once weighed against surgical risks, are quite slim. The risks of either choice, again in the U.S., are pretty small.
I personally default to non-intervention when the difference is so narrow, but other people’s circumcisions are really none of my business.
Well, I don’t find the risks all that small. HPV can scar your life and your fertility forever, even when it is not killing you. Unfortunately, the intactivist/anti-vax overlap seems huge, and seem to believe that if they eat enough kale then no one they love will go through the pain of this married lady, who always got all her PAPs: http://cellwarnotebooks.blogspot.ca/2009/07/i-lay-mostly-in-my-garden-room-now.html#comment-form
The conditions circumcision provides very partial protection against may not be entirely “non-trivial”, but they are largely preventable without requiring surgery, and likely not to affect most men: HPV by vaccination, HIV and HSV with education and condom use. As a physician I have seen 3 circumcision complications, one a life-threatening bleed, one mildly disfiguring, and one requiring minimal revision; all performed by skilled practitioners (urologists and a pediatrician). Although usually uncomplicated, it is not necessarily so.
I am in the same camp as Cobalt, I defer to non-intervention when the differences are small. Circumcise if you so choose, but don’t vilify those who chose not to circumcise, either!
(PS HPV does not cause infertility in men.)
Circumcision, like vaccination, offers some herd immunity for STDs. Important especially if the herd includes the woman who mothers your kids. Saying that the diseases that circumcision protects against are not trivial is not the same thing as vilifying people who don’t circumcise.
And again, we have the HPV vaccine and condoms in the U.S., and we are still beset by rampant HPV and other STDS. It is another good tool in the box.
The vaccine is new, it doesn’t protect against ever strain of HPV (some strains are more prevalent in minority populations so this is a big issue). Vaccination of boys just started, and many people are against it for stupid reasons.
The USA has the highest rates of STDs of any advanced country, despite high rates of circumcision for more than 100 years, esp. during the second half of last century.
The overlap between intactivist and lactivist is large. The overlap between intactivist and anti-vax is not. For starters, I listen politely to the anti-vax side, but have yet to join them.
The conditions it protects against are non-trivial, and I have yet to see any good evidence that properly done circumcisions (I don’t count the ones where men put their mouths on the baby penis, which I’m not a fan of) have any negative long-term effect, including on sexual function or pleasure, and have seen good studies that say there’s no discernable effect, so I would never think less of anyone who made a science-based decision to do it to their child.
Seriously, if it were any other bit of skin hanging off of any other organ, I doubt we’d have so much arguing.
No one claims that circumcision “protects” against anything. The claim is only that it changes for the better a man’s odds of contracting this or that STD from a single unprotected sex act with an infected woman. If circumcised men become more lax about condom use, or circumcised men are more reluctant to use condoms because circumcised penis + condom = boring sex, then circumcision is pointless in the long run. Consistent with this paragraph, there is no evidence that circumcised men in South Korea and the USA have healthier penises than men in Japan and Europe.
There is no way of assuring that all circumcisions are done properly. The occasional botch and lethal outcome goes with the territory.
The effect of circumcision on the sexual enjoyment of men cannot be measured and so cannot be studied. There is only one study of which kind of penis North American women prefer. It was carried out in one city, in 1987, using a convenience sample. There are no studies, using North American random samples, of the possible correlation between circ status and sexual dysfunction.
What you dismiss as a bit of skin is in fact an important player in masturbation, foreplay and penetrative sex. It is a highly erogenous part of the male body, and many sexually experienced women have reported that that that moving skin on the end of the penis does a lot to improve the quality of their sexual experiences.
Don’t let your science get in the way of their ideology.
I actually looked up the post and reported it – something I never do
To homeland security I hope.
Not sure reporting it to Facebook will do much good.
Nope. Doesn’t violate the community standards.
Right, only the standards of human decency.
One of my fb friends (not a close friend I hasten to add) posted a very graphic video of someone being hit by a train. I reported it and got the same response, ‘doesn’t violate community standards’. I wonder what does!
Fat women in underwear violate community standards … sigh.
Bambi’s beautiful daughter did, at least temporarily.
Nipples.
And yet, one can get temporarily suspended from FB for posting something as innocent as a bare baby’s bottom…such as what you’d see on the beach, or in the bathtub. Ridiculous!
To be fair, if that picture of a babies bare bum ended up on a pedophiles computer and it came out that the picture was reported and Facebook did nothing they would be facing a legal and PR nightmare. The concequences for letting someone act like an asshole on the Internet are much less severe.
She does have a public video up of her bathing her son where camera shows multiple views of butt and his privates, ostensibly (I personally think she’s sick) to show how to clean an uncircumcised penis. If anyone can get her suspended for that, I’m in full support.
If 5,000 people complain, than it doesn’t matter what the content is. Every time a new FB group goes up for victims of pit bull attacks, the haters complain until its taken down. Post a pic of what happened to you? They flag it incessantly. Its sick.
But getting hit by a train, or making death threats to feminists? Totally cool!
I’m not often at a loss for words…but you got me on this one.
WTF? Let’s say that these people were actually “cutters” and they all had their scalpels packed away in their luggage and when they got off that plane they were planning to go straight to a village and start circumcising babies … is it completely lost on these people that circumcision reduces the transmission of HIV by 38 to 66%? (Sorry got that stat on Wikipedia.) Whatever your personal opinion about these “cutters” happens to be they’re not hoovering over bloody babies, cackling maniacally, and then tanning all those foreskins like little pieces of leather so they can use them to wallpaper their trophy rooms. They’re promoting circumcision because they believe it genuinely saves people’s lives. I don’t get how you can weigh “avoiding a slow and painful death from AIDS-related complications” against “intact foreskin” and come up with “intact foreskin” as the clear winner. And then make the giant leap from that to “people who promote circumcision deserve to die.” It’s like these people just lack the capacity for critical thinking.
I don’t know anything about this movement beyond circumcision = reduction in AIDS. Do they recommend that adult men that are not HIV+ and have not been circumcised, get circumcised? And if so, what percentage of those men agree to it?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24732820
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24901226
Etc etc, there’s a lot on PubMed – it varies by country/region…
Thank you, very informative. So it IS recommended for adult men, to VOLUNTARILY get circumcised as a measure to protect against HIV. I don’t think the intactivists have a leg to stand on in those cases. How do they know the researchers weren’t going to promote circumcision for adults? (not that it should it matter, but my point is, as soon as they decided circumcision was involved, they’re circling like vulture and howling for blood.)
And she’s not even sure if they were Actually going to promote “cutting,” just that they were possibly going to promote it. That is enough information to publicly applaud indiscriminate killing on her part.
Even if they were traveling to a circumcision festival, that would be no excuse for this behavior.
Goes without saying, no? My point was to distinguish between two types of abhorrent people. Those who are careful to target their perceived enemy and limit collateral damage, and those who are not.
Absolutely vile, hideous, horrific things to say…I am sitting here, rendered completely speechless. I don’t even know, honestly.
Holy shit, man. Just…wtf is wrong with some people?
I feel sick.
What the ever loving fuck? Why does AIDS research equal pro-circ?
In any case, why cheer for anyone’s death?
Large epidemiological studies have shown that HIV transmission rates are lowered by circumcision. It’s known that the body’s mast cells, which are prevalent in the foreskin, are a major route of infection for the virus, so removing the foreskin could that way have an effect on sexual transmission to men. By no means all AIDS researchers are committed to the idea that mass circumcision is ‘the answer’, but given there are so few weapons against HIV it’s a point worth raising.
Circumcision doesn’t work nearly as well as condoms, but it only needs to be done once and it does reduce lifetime infection risk. In some parts of the world, condoms just aren’t available.
and yes, beyond sickening to use that to jeer at the tragedy of MH17
WUTTT? So many innocent victims on board, with their bodies being further disrespected as we speak, and we can pin our pet project on this and call it Karma?
I did not know them personally, but my cousin’s niece and hubby were on that flight…and someone wrote for them to ‘burn, baby, burn’? Utterly disgusting.
Wow Dr. Amy, you have reprinted some vile things, but this is near the top of the list.
Unbelievable.
So sorry for your cousin. How awful.
My condolences to your cousin, that’s so sad.
I’m surprised Facebook didn’t block this. The girl is clearly inadequate.
What. the. fuck is wrong with some people?
Oh, an anti-vaxxer. Someone who has no problem with killing small children. Got it now.
I’m speechless. One of the victims was a well known and well respected ex-school principal that is known to a few people I know – he was flying with his 3 grandkids. I’m pretty sure karma had very little to do with this. This was random and had nothing to do with the state of anyone’s genitals..
There were 80 children on that flight. Along with 100 or so people trying to fight a disease that claims millions of lives every year. Still. But I suppose dying with your foreskin intact is so much more important than all that.
That’s been revised down to six activists and researchers. Three of those that perished were infants under 2yo.
You’d think people would find plenty of other things to gloat about..
If I could edit that I’d add that those three infants were not part of the activists and researchers..
Huh. I’d heard that it might have been considerably fewer than originally thought, but hadn’t realized that it was so few in the end. Which means that if this was karma, karma has as good an aim as the “god” that sends tornadoes to the midwest to punish the US for legalizing gay marriage–in Massachusetts.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/six-mh17-passengers-were-bound-for-melbourne-aids-conference/story-fni0fiyv-1226994175207?nk=f5f5e02c10b7e370448b58a4ff8f8c95
And yes – karma causes a lot of collateral damage…
Does this kind of radical thinking remind anyone of westboro baptist? Replace God with karma, homosexuals with AIDS/circumcision, and they sound the same: inhumanly hateful and evil. Blech.
Okay, those people are officially insane.
o_O what?
O_O What?!
@_@ WHAT??!
“Good riddance to the cutters!”????? I really don’t think being pro-circumcision is a position worthy of death. Heartless. Tasteless. Disgusting.