Circumcision controversies
[1][15][4][2][16] By contrast, the majority of modern opponents, particularly of routine neonatal circumcision, question its preventive efficacy and object to subjecting non-consenting newborn males to a procedure that is potentially harmful with little to no benefit, as well as violating their human rights and possibly negatively impacting their sex life.
[1][2][4][5][3][17][18][19][20] In Classical and Hellenistic civilization, Ancient Greeks and Romans posed great value on the beauty of nature, physical integrity, aesthetics, harmonious bodies and nudity, including the foreskin[20][21][22] (see also Ancient Greek art), and were opposed to circumcision, an opposition inherited by the canon and secular legal systems of the Christian West and East that lasted at least through to the Middle Ages, according to Frederick Hodges.
[27] An additional hypothesis, based on linguistic/ethnographic work begun in the 19th century,[28] suggests circumcision was a common tribal custom among Semitic-speaking peoples (Jews, Arabs, and Phoenicians).
[29] The Bible records "uncircumcised" being used as a derogatory reference for opponents[30] and Jewish victory in battle that culminated in mass post-mortem circumcision, to provide an account of the number of enemy casualties.
Its ruler, Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175–165 BCE), smarting from a defeat in a war against Ptolemaic Egypt, banned traditional Jewish religious practices, and attempted to forcibly let the Jews accept Hellenistic culture.
[38] The revolt ended in the re-establishment of an independent Jewish kingdom under the Hasmoneans,[36][37] until it turned into a client state of the Roman Republic under the reign of Herod the Great (37–4 BCE).
[20][40][41] Overall, the rite of circumcision was especially execrable in Classical civilization,[20][40][39] also because it was the custom to spend an hour a day or so exercising nude in the gymnasium and in Roman baths, therefore Jewish men did not want to be seen in public deprived of their foreskins.
[20][40] The foreskin was restored by one of two methods, that were later revived in the late 20th century; both were described in detail by the Greek physician Aulus Cornelius Celsus in his comprehensive encyclopedic work De Medicina, written during the reign of Tiberius (14-37 CE).
[40][44] The second approach, known as "epispasm",[20][22][40][44] was non-surgical: a restoration device which consisted of a special weight made of bronze, copper, or leather (sometimes called Pondus Judaeus, i.e. "Jewish burden"),[20][40][44] was affixed to the penis, pulling its skin downward.
"[45] But he also explicitly denounced the forcing of circumcision upon non-Jews, rejecting and condemning those Judaizers who stipulated the ritual to Gentile Christians, labelling such advocates as "false brothers"[46] (see below).
In the mid-2nd century Rabbinical Jewish leaders, due to increasing cases of foreskin restorations in Roman Empire, introduced a radical method of circumcision, the periah, that left the glans totally uncovered and sew the remaining skin.
[23] Male circumcision is widely practiced among Christian communities in the Anglosphere countries, Africa, Oceania, the Middle East, South Korea and the Philippines.
[66][65] The Society for the Friends of Reform, a group that criticized traditional Jewish practices, said that brit milah was not a mitzvah but an outworn legacy from Israel's earlier phases, an obsolete throwback to primitive religion.
[65][66] Later evidence that syphilis and tuberculosis – two of the most feared infectious diseases in the 19th century – were spread by mohels,[66] caused various rabbis to advocate metzitzah to be done using a sponge or a tube.
[71][70][72][73][74] They are assisted by a small number of Reform, Liberal, and Reconstructionist rabbis, and have developed a welcoming ceremony that they call the Brit shalom ("Covenant [of] Peace") for such children,[71][70] also accepted by Humanistic Judaism.
Diego Durán, a Dominican friar, was convinced that the Aztecs were one of the lost tribes of Israel, with a crucial piece of supporting evidence being that they had practised circumcision.
The key being "a certain form", since Bancroft makes clear in a footnote that the majority of his sources, including Clavigero, Ternaux-Compans, Carbajal Espinosa, Oviedo y Herrera, and especially Acosta, believed Durán and others "confounded the custom of drawing blood from the secret organs with circumcision", and "the incision on the prepuce and ear to have been mistaken for circumcision", adding that this blood-letting rite[81] was "chiefly performed upon sons of great men" (p279).
[80] But in 1864 Brasseur published his French translation of Diego de Landa's recently recovered 1556 ethnographic manuscript, which decisively rejected the notion of Mayan circumcision, and in a footnote he acknowledged there had probably been a "mistake", an admission that never found its way into the English-language literature[83] although modern ethnography has long since understood the nature of these rituals.
[9] According to Darby, it was also seen as a serious loss of erogenous tissue: "During the Renaissance and 18th century the centrality of the foreskin to male sexual function and the pleasure of both partners was recognised by anatomists Berengario da Carpi, Gabriello Fallopio and William Harvey, in popular sex manuals like Aristotle's master-piece, and by physicians like John Hunter, who also appreciated the importance of the foreskin in providing the slack tissue needed to accommodate an erection.
[91][92] In 2013, a group of 38 Northern European pediatricians, doctors, surgeons, ethicists, and lawyers co-authored a comment stating that they found the AAP's technical report and policy statement suffered from cultural bias, and reached recommendations and conclusions different from those of physicians in other parts of the world;[17] in particular, the group advocated instead a policy of no-harm towards infants and respect for their rights of bodily integrity and age of consent.
[6] Doctors such as Sir Jonathan Hutchinson in England wrote articles in favour of the procedure on medical and social grounds, popularizing it in his home country, as well as the Anglosphere.
[98] Lewis Sayre, a prominent orthopedic surgeon at the time, was another early American advocate and is generally credited with popularizing the procedure in the United States.
[105] According to Milos and Donna Macris, "The need to defend the baby's right to a peaceful beginning was brought to light by Dr. Frederick Leboyer in his work, Birth Without Violence".
[103] Dr. Benjamin Spock (1903 – 1998), whose Baby and Child Care is the biggest selling American single-author book in history, originally supported circumcision but changed his mind near the end of his life.
Organizations involved in combating FGM have been at considerable pains to distinguish the two, as this UNICEF document explains: "When the practice first came to be known beyond the societies in which it was traditionally carried out, it was generally referred to as 'female circumcision'.
[citation needed] A Royal Dutch Medical Association viewpoint says that the form of female genital mutilation that resembles non-therapeutic circumcision the most is rejected unanimously throughout literature.
[124] This received coverage from several outlets, as major politicians discussing circumcision has been rare, with Yang being the only candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination to talk about it.
A Contribution to the Limitation of Consent in Cases of Care for the Person of the Child"[132] published by Holm Putzke, a German law professor at the University of Passau.
[135] A broad majority of German lawmakers passed a resolution asking Angela Merkel's government to clarify the ruling so as to allow Jews and Muslims to continue to practice their religion.
On 12 December 2012, following a series of hearings and consultations, the Bundestag adopted a law explicitly permitting non-therapeutic circumcision to be performed under certain conditions by a vote of 434–100, with 46 abstentions.
