Article published in Humane Health Care International, Volume 12, Number 2: Pages 78-80, April 1996. Circumcision is the act of one person removing a part of the penis of another person.
- Infant circumcision violates the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. (Many pro-circ advocates say it is necessary to circumcise infants because adults will not want it done).
- Infant circumcision violates a major tenet of medical practice: First do no harm.
- Infant circumcision violates all seven Principles of Medical Ethics.
Circumcision persists because circumcision has produced circumcisers. Many men who have been cut have yet to acknowledge that an injury has been done to them. As a consequence, they may have their son cut; if they become doctors, they may perform this procedure on thousands of innocent males. A conspiracy of silence among doctors, and in the community, has helped to perpetuate this practice, because circumcision could not continue in the United States and Canada without the doctors who perform it.
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The solution to this ethical and human rights dilemma is simple: Do not perform circumcision on infants. By ceasing to perform infant circumcision, nothing is lost. Any adult male may, with fully informed consent, have circumcision whenever he wishes.
As the public becomes aware of the accumulating scientific evidence, circumcision is declining, and with the current attention to unnecessary cost, insurance plans are ceasing to pay for circumcision. Most hopefully of all, caring physicians are reviewing this operation in the light of their own ethical standards and are refusing to perform infant circumcision.
The circumcision debate has been going on a long time. Hopefully, with the Internet becoming ubiquitous, people will take to heart that it has been known for a long time that infant circumcision has serious ethical problems. For as long as these ethical issues have been known, the medical community has failed to act.