http://www.nocirc.org/, https://www.cirp.org/, and https://www.noharmm.org/North Dakota Contact People: Duane Voskuil 701-222-3777 and Jody McLaughlin, 701-852-2822; authors of the nation's first genital integrity law passed in 1995.
After announcing today (3/1/99) that no medical reasons exist to justify amputating healthy male prepuces, nevertheless the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Circumcision (whose members include a physician from Fargo Meritcare) concluded ...that it is legitimate for parents to take into account cultural, religious and ethnic traditions, in addition to medical factors, when making this decision [for their infant].
Thus a medical association, whose competence supposedly lies in dispensing medical advice, postured itself as an authority on ethics, and in so doing directly contradicted a federal law passed in 1996 that criminalizes the surgical alteration of the genitals of females (FGM). This law explicitly says, ...no account shall be taken of the effect on the person on whom the operation is to be performed or any other person, that the operation is required as a matter of custom or ritual.
1 This law was passed a year after North Dakota led the nation in passing the first genital integrity law, which as first introduced would have protected all infants, but was finally passed in the same sexist form as the federal law.
The AAP statement also flies in the face of the AAP's own Bioethics Committee's position on the ethics of proxy consent: ...
2Proxy consent
poses serious problems for pediatric health care providers. Such providers have legal and ethical duties to their child patients to render competent medical care based on what the patient needs, not what someone else expresses... The pediatrician's responsibilities to his or her patient exist independent of parental desires or proxy consent.
The AAP statement fails to adequately enumerate the complications of neonatal circumcision. These include meatitis, urethral strictures, balanitis, hidden penis syndrome, complete amputation of the penis, amputation neuromas (tumors) at the circumcision scar, skin bridges, necrotizing fasciitis (flesh eating bacteria), sepsis and death. All men circumcised as children lose the highly innervated, erogenous sensory receptors in the foreskin and have the internal glans penis permanently exposed and abnormally keratinized.
At long last the AAP finally recognizes infants feel pain and recommends use of dorsal penile nerve blocks and EMLA cream as anesthetics. However, all anesthetics have inherent risks and none fully relieve the pain of neonatal circumcision during surgery much less afterward.
But pain is not the real issue. Were anesthetics completely effective, a painless amputation of normal, healthy, functioning tissue would still violate the physician's oath to consider first what his patient needs, not what others want. Forcibly traumatizing a child's penis and removing for life its normal function without the patient's consent, violates his natural right to decide for himself issues of bodily integrity guaranteed by the 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It violates as well his right to protection equal to that now accorded females as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment and federal law criminalizing FGM.
Ritual infant circumcision is not a medical procedure: A physician's license does not permit him or her to act as an agent for this social custom that is not based on medical need, but has always violated the patient's human rights and personal dignity.
web sites: http://www.nocirc.org/, https://www.cirp.org/, and https://www.noharmm.org/
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