Circumcising Infants is Wrong

As a worldwide non-profit organization of attorneys dedicated to halting all forms of childhood genital mutilation, we would like to express our alarm at Mark A. Wainberg's article, Circumcision Helps in AIDS Fight, (Gazette, Oct. 12).

While we have no doubt Dr. Wainberg is sincere in his desire to help bring a halt to the scourge of AIDS, as we also are, the medical evidence has quite conclusively demonstrated the absence of any AIDS-related benefit deriving from male circumcision.

Indeed, the country that performs the most circumcisions, the United States, also has thehighest number of AIDS cases per capita in the developed world.

Highly reputable historians such as Frederick Hodges have exhaustively documented the fact that throughout the modern history of circumcision, the procedure has been repeatedly, and always incorrectly, touted as a cure-all for whatever the most feared diseases of the current age happen to be. The fact that most of us are quite concerned about AIDS should not lead us to jump to conclusions that areunsound under both medical and human rights principles.

Even in the exceedingly unlikely event that medical benefits related to AIDS (or any other medical benefits) could be proven to derive from circumcision, this would not justify infliction of the practice on non-consenting infants.

Prophylactic amputation of healthy tissue grossly violates principles of both human rights and medical ethics. For example, despite the fact that double mastectomies at birth would, on average, increase the female lifespan by at least nine months, far in excess of any speculative benefit deriving from circumcision, such a procedure would be rightly denounced as a barbarity and a gross human rights violation.

This conclusion must apply with at least at much force regarding male circumcision, an exceedingly painful procedure which irreparably removes a portion of the human body that, in intact males, develops into fifteen square inches of highly innervated and extremely specialized human sexual tissue.

J. Steven Svoboda
Attorneys for the Rights of the Child
Berkeley, Calif.

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