I’d like to say hello and thank Paul and AVFM for the opportunity to serve as the Director of anti-MGM (Male Genital Mutilation) Activism here and to administrate the new website, neonatalcutting.org (NNC).
The idea of reaching expectant parents and assisting even one of them to make the decision to not mutilate their son is nothing less than inspiring. It’s the best opportunity ever to help make a difference in the lives of infant boys.
As Director of anti-MGM (Male Genital Mutilation) Activism I invite you visit the site and to share the information we’ve collected on known genital mutilators. Social media buttons are provided for each offender.
I also encourage you to seek out and identify the doctors and clinics that proudly profit from the mutilation and pass them along to me (my email address is in the masthead). I’m also seeking volunteers who are willing to write up posts themselves for the site, allowing for many more and varied postings.
Most of you know the gist of this issue but for those on the fence or unaware of the controversy let me lay out the basics.
The foreskin (prepuce) is an organ with many thousands of nerve endings. Its purpose, aside from sexual pleasure, is to protect the head of the penis (glans), which is an internal organ at birth.
The routine amputation of this organ is not medically justified and results in what we now know to be negative consequences that range from loss of sexual sensitivity to death. As a 1.2 billion dollar annual industry[1] strongly rooted in some religious traditions, it is a practice that would otherwise be criminalized. This make things very difficult to contend with.
The way we have chosen to do that at AVFM is to directly out the practitioners and profiteers. Similarly, we make direct outreach to expectant parents with convincing research and testimonials before they subject their sons to the mutilating cut.
Genital integrity is a human rights issue and many organizations and governments recognize that infant genital mutilation is barbaric, cruel, and worst of all, performed on a non-consenting child.
While female genital mutilation is rightly outlawed in the modern world, MGM is still practiced and even encouraged by the modern medical establishment. Why this glaring hole in medical ethics?
First, misandry is a governing factor. Our cultural tendency to be blind to the pain and suffering of males is visited even on infant boys. This opens the door for the profit motive (the cut and sales of foreskins), ignorance, routine habit, and religion.
Circumcision advocates have defended their mutilations using unsound studies and rationales to deflect criticism from an act that scars and deforms each and every victim.
We do not hold an opinion on adults who elect this procedure with informed consent, though we doubt that very many would make that choice. We do, however, take a firm, irrevocable stand on the idea that infants are to be protected from the barbarism of the choice being taken from them by physicians, clergy or their parents.
Most of the world isn’t so barbaric, leaving both male and female infants genitally intact. But to have ‘doctors’ in the modern world doing this routinely to newborn boys is shocking and revolting.
We hold doctors to the spirit of the Hippocratic Corpus, “First, do no harm.” Our efforts underway at AVFM and NNC are a reflection of the fact that the western medical establishment has abandoned this credo in the name of money. We will not spare any of them the public scrutiny they so richly deserve.
[1] The 1.2 billion in estimated revenue does not include revenue from foreskin sales or the 1-2 billion estimated revenue in baby penis-based aftermarket products, including vanity items for women.
