Should circumcision be considered assault on newborn boys?
Brynn
2012/07/02 05:12:18
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BERLIN -- A German court has ruled that circumcising young boys on religious grounds amounts to bodily harm even if parents consent to the procedure.
Cologne state court said the child's right to physical integrity trumps freedom of religion and parents' rights, German news agency dapd reported Tuesday.
The case involved a doctor accused of carrying out a circumcision on a 4-year-old that led to medical complications. The doctor was acquitted, however, and prosecutors said they won't appeal.
The president of Germany's Central Council of Jews, Dieter Graumann, called the ruling "unprecedented and insensitive," urging the country's parliament to clarify the legal situation "to protect religious freedom against attacks."
Graumann said the circumcision of newborn Jews has been practiced for thousands of years and "every country in the world respects this religious right."
Muslims also circumcise young boys, while many parents request it on health grounds.
The state court's ruling creates a tricky legal situation for doctors who perform the procedure on parents' orders.
Unlike female circumcision, there is no law prohibiting it and the ruling isn't binding for other courts. However, it sets a precedent that would be taken into account by other German courts when ruling on similar cases.
Cologne state court said the child's right to physical integrity trumps freedom of religion and parents' rights, German news agency dapd reported Tuesday.
The case involved a doctor accused of carrying out a circumcision on a 4-year-old that led to medical complications. The doctor was acquitted, however, and prosecutors said they won't appeal.
The president of Germany's Central Council of Jews, Dieter Graumann, called the ruling "unprecedented and insensitive," urging the country's parliament to clarify the legal situation "to protect religious freedom against attacks."
Graumann said the circumcision of newborn Jews has been practiced for thousands of years and "every country in the world respects this religious right."
Muslims also circumcise young boys, while many parents request it on health grounds.
The state court's ruling creates a tricky legal situation for doctors who perform the procedure on parents' orders.
Unlike female circumcision, there is no law prohibiting it and the ruling isn't binding for other courts. However, it sets a precedent that would be taken into account by other German courts when ruling on similar cases.
Top Opinion
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DavidGustafson 2012/07/02 06:13:47Yes
+7Let "men" decideif they want a surgical procedure. If THE UNIVERSE deemed it necessary for there to be no foreskin, we would have been born without it. When we mess with nature we tend to f**k things up.
"Funny how many in this string of comments appear to know so little on the subject! But that is to be expected.
First, the study ecouraging circumcision mentioned is but one, the results of which are summarily tossed out the proverbial window when one looks at dozens of far more impartial studies!
Secondly, I went through it in my late 20's after yrs of having lots of sex, and have had lots since, so I'm fairly well qualified to state that if people had even a remote idea of what sex feels like after circumcision compared to before, it would be gone by 6am tomorrow morning! Period! What it feels like is not even close to what it feels like before.
The problem as that it is usually done to infants, thereby safely (and mercifully!) removing any possible frame of reference. Yes, the human brain is plastic enough to adapt, deal with that loss and go on, but how sad is it that circumcised men will never have ANY idea of what it felt like had their bodies been left as they were at birth, and that the women they are with know that they can never be physically enjoyed as much either?... I hope sad enough to cause people to think before subjecting their babies to such a loss!"
What next, will we be tattooing babies?
Allah forfend that thumb-fingered fumblenuts like you should get more pleasure in the act of copulation than the bare minimum. Who wants YOU encouraged in any way to pass along those diseased chromosomes of yours?
I was circumcised as an infant.......it appears I survived and got over it and as a result I am a very grateful adult.
Your idiocy about how "This has been done since way back in time" exposes your ignorance of American (and world) history, because the origins of "routine" infant circumcision are found in our republic entirely in the mass insanities of the progressive movement which started up in the late 19th Century, emphatically including the hilarity us Boomers grew up with about how jerking off made you grow hair on your palms and go blind.
Which crap the sex-obsessed progressives took seriously. No joke.
Look, the real reason why "routine" infant circumcision took off in early 20th-Century America was because it was supposed to make penile sexual stimulation (both in masturbation and in intercourse) LESS PLEASURABLE.
It was noted to cause thickening and relative "deadening" of the skin over the glans penis, and - according to quacks like Dr. Kellogg and the rest of his flakes-and-nuts colleagues - thereby reduce the incentive for little boys and men to desire sexual stimulation.
Those neurotic nanny numbnuts thought it would reduce the desire to copulate, and thu...
Your idiocy about how "This has been done since way back in time" exposes your ignorance of American (and world) history, because the origins of "routine" infant circumcision are found in our republic entirely in the mass insanities of the progressive movement which started up in the late 19th Century, emphatically including the hilarity us Boomers grew up with about how jerking off made you grow hair on your palms and go blind.
Which crap the sex-obsessed progressives took seriously. No joke.
Look, the real reason why "routine" infant circumcision took off in early 20th-Century America was because it was supposed to make penile sexual stimulation (both in masturbation and in intercourse) LESS PLEASURABLE.
It was noted to cause thickening and relative "deadening" of the skin over the glans penis, and - according to quacks like Dr. Kellogg and the rest of his flakes-and-nuts colleagues - thereby reduce the incentive for little boys and men to desire sexual stimulation.
Those neurotic nanny numbnuts thought it would reduce the desire to copulate, and thus abolish the scourge of prostitution. Not to mention pocket-pool among the prepubescent.
Worked real well in both regards, didn't it?
Anything else you're told about circumcision by any practitioner who isn't a "Double-Oh-Seven Doc" (i.e., licensed to kill) is nothing more than a lie uttered to assuage your idiot qualms.
When we can't teach the willfully ignorant the facts of reality, we just try to calm them down and hope that they'll shut the hell up.
Except for Emergency Department encounters or the coverage of colleagues' practices (meaning that the kids' attending pediatricians or family docs had screwed up the management of the parents/caregivers which is key in the physician's responsibility to pediatric patients), I have never in my life had to refer such a patient to the surgeon urologist on call for possible circumcision. In my own primary care practice, I caught 'em early and nailed these infections down with conscientious conservative treatment.
In those cases where I got handed the proverbial cement bicycle, circumcision was not "routine" but appropriately THERAPEUTIC.
At any rate, your own personal experience falls outside the consideration of "routine infant circumcision," which is the subject at hand.
So shut your festering gob and go away.
Gawd, another Brit. The NON-religious practice of "routine" infant circumcision is a largely American phenomenon. This republic is the place where the greatest numbers of such malpractitionate procedures are perpetrated, and the prevalence thereof in the population is highest.
Insofar as I understand (I haven't bothered looking much into the data over there), this peculiar idiocy never fully caught on in the United Kingdom.
If you're a Brit (and I use the term inclusively, just the way our over-the-pond friends employ "Yank" to describe folks from Alabama), you haven't got every goddam obstetrician in ACOG hacking off pediatric prepuces with merry abandon to enhance their practice revenues.
I want to stamp out that blatant violation of medical ethics. You?