Males, too, face the unkindest cut of all

On May 2, the U.S. Senate voted to make female genital mutilation a crime. It was added, without opposition, to an immigrationbill.

The action followed in part, the publicity surrounding a young West African woman, Fauziya Kasinga, who has been trying to win asylum in the United States, saying her family in Togo insisted she submit to the age-old cultural ritual of female genital mutilation and become the fourth wife of a man twice her age. Her sister and brother, who opposed the practice, helped her to escape.

The procedure ranges from cutting the hood of the clitoris to the removal of the clitoris and the labia tissue at the entrance to the vagina, leaving the woman with dull or no sensation. A girl is subjected to it as some kind of proof of her virginity, all in the name of family honor, and to reduce female sexual pleasure and keep girls docile and chaste.

In short, a circumcised woman will not feel like strayingfrom her husband.

The immigration and Naturalization Service detained Kasinga in December 1994 and has held her since in New Jersey amid a legal battle as to whether genital mutilation is a form of persecution entitling a woman to seek foreign asylum.

Beyond the sheer loss of feeling in those nerve rich tissues that are integral to sensations surrounding sexuality, the routine female circumcision, clitoridectomy, often is performed without anesthesia or sterilized tools and can cause painful intercourse, difficult pregnancies and death. The World Health Organization, which vows to end female genital mutilation, says it has led to thousands of deaths and has condemned millions of women to lives of agony andlifeless sex.

It's estimated 80 to 110 million women have undergone his procedure. so interrelated to culture and the assignment of women. Each woman carries the scars on her body and her psyche. The issue has been on the agenda of world women's conferences in Egypt and China in recent years.

But the rite is no longer confined to foreign countries. It poses new medical, legal and ethical problems in the United States as foreign families who practice genital mutilation find permanent homes here and subsequently seek to continue the practice.

Our society asks the question: While we can ignore cultural practices that violate human rights in Gambia, can we dismissthem when they are brought to the United States?

Most of us are repulsed by that girls 7 to 12 years old are held down and subjected to such violations of their bodies, forever taking away such feeling and sensation in a part of their anatomy that so defines their gender. Among other things we would call it child abuse.

As I followed 19-year-old Fauziya Kasinga's case, I was painfully reminded that most parents in our own culture are no less insensitive to the issue - only the names of the society and he gender have changed.

Each day, many thousands of newborn boys in this country are strapped down against their will. Healthy, functional, nerve-rich tissue is irretrievably removed from their genitals.

Just as Egyptian or Sudanese fathers can confidently explain away the value of their actions on daughters with broad smiles and sincere arguments, so American parents smugly rationalize why they circumcise their sons. They justify it in so many ways: the majority of American boys have it done to them, the penis can be kept cleaner, male male organ is already so erogenous so what's the big deal about losing a few more nerve endings, that daddy is circumcised so Johnny should be too, that there might be a small chance that the wife an uncircumcised male contracting cancer and that circumcision is, well, so much more civilized. Wasn't it Elvis Presley who joked how his had been left intact and was the hillbilly kind?

Those parents never ask why nature put foreskin on the penis in the first place. (among other things as a protection of the glans), nor do they wonder why circumcision is rarely practiced in the rest of the world outside of Jewish and Islamic religious practices.

For most of my 50 years, I have resented that my registered nurse mother and farmer father subjected me and my twin brother to the procedure shortly after our births. Parents were well-meaning, and Dr. Benjamin Spock advised it.

Beyond the nagging feeling of incompleteness, there has been two other major, and important issues: 1) I imagine what it would be like to be fully functional, to have all those nerve endings and fully moveable tissue? 2) And there's the issue of having had my body violated, altered forever against my will.

Early in my marriage I informed my wife that under no circumstances would I allow a son born in our family to suffer the same fate. So I was almost merciless in my remarks to our doctor when our son was born in 1975, and Doc was ready to perform what's been called the unkindest cut. I felt triumphant having told him - and the rest of the relatives with vigor that no such child abuse, no such genital mutilation would ever come to our son.

Circumcision is commonly dismissed as just a little snip of skin that is hardly noticeable.

But depending on how much is removed that little snip of skin can grow into 12 to 15 square inches of functioning skin for the adult typically 30 to 50 percent of the area.

The National Center for Health Statistics reports 59.5 percent of newborn boys are circumcised today or 1.25 million boys a year. At an average of $200 per procedure it means some $250 million to the medical industry. In the 1970s, routine circumcision peaked at about 90 percent of newborns.

And doctors don't report any measurable percentage of uncircumcised adult male electing to go to their doctors to volunteer to have the procedure done - to have carried out what their parents failed to have done.

Not only has Spock, the baby guidebook guru, reversed himself by saying there is no medical or hygienic reason to have it done, the Academy of Pediatricians and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has said the same. Some insurance companies have dropped circumcision from procedures they will pay for. The Canadian Medical Association Journal, in March published results of a five- year study revisiting the issue and concluded, Circumcision of male newborns should not be routinely performed.

Ultimately it comes down to the same human rights issue related to the case of the young woman for Togo. Whose body isit anyway?

John Erickson, author of Deeper into Circumcision: An Invitation to awareness, puts it this way, Regardless of anyone's reason for circumcising a baby, the fact remains that infant circumcision is foreskin amputated by force - the deliberate, irretrievable destruction of healthy, normal, irreplaceable erogenous tissue - living flesh, part of someone else's sexual organ that is rightfully his and that he instinctively wants to keep at a time in his life when he cannot understand what is being done to him - or why - and can't speak for or to protect himself.

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