Male Circumcision in the USA: A Human Rights Primer

by Rich Winkel
rich@math.missouri.edu
posted with permission

”Despite the obviously irrational cruelty of circumcision, the profit incentive in American medical practice is unlikely to allow science or human rights principles to interrupt the highly lucrative American circumcision industry. It is now time for European medical associations loudly to condemn the North American medical community for participating in and profiting from what is by any standard a senseless and barbaric sexual mutilation of innocent children.” Fleiss PM. MD, MPH. Circumcision. Lancet 1995;345:927[1]

”Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity.” George Bernard Shaw

”What is done to children, they will do to society.” Karl Menninger, MD

The American medical establishment has promoted male circumcision as a preventative measure for an astonishing array of pathologies, ranging from masturbatory insanity, moral laxity, aesthetics and hygiene, to headache, tuberculosis, rheumatism, hydrocephalus, epilepsy, paralysis, alcoholism, near-sightedness, rectal prolapse, hernia, gout, clubfoot, urinary tract infections, phimosis, cancer of the penis, cancer of the cervix, syphillis and AIDS.[2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] But the only rationale which has clear, well established scientific support is the one originally and openly used by the medical establishment when medical circumcision was introduced as a ”public health” measure in the Victorian era. That is, to punish and control the sexuality of male children. Victorian doctors knew something that modern medicine has chosen to ignore: the foreskin is at the heart of male sexuality.

A typical western medical circumcision results in the loss of approximately 1/2 of the total surface area of the penis and between 50 and 80% or more of its erogenous sexual nerves,[8, 9, 10] including:

• The Taylor ”ridged band” , the primary erogenous zone of the male body. This unique, highly specialized and exquisitely sensitive structure is equipped with soft ridges designed by nature to stimulate the female’s inner labia and G-spot during intercourse
• The frenulum, the highly erogenous V-shaped tethering structure on the underside of the head of the penis.
• Between 10,000 and 20,000 specialized erotogenic nerve endings of several types, which can feel slight variations in pressure and stretching, subtle changes in temperature, and fine gradations in texture
• Thousands of coiled fine-touch receptors called Meissner’s corpuscles, which are also found in the fingertips.

Also lost are:

• The foreskin’s gliding action, the non-abrasive gliding of the shaft of the penis within its own sheath, which facilitates smooth, comfortable and pleasurable intercourse for both partners. \
• The ”subpreputual wetness” which protects the mucosa of the glans (and inner foreskin), and which contains immunoglobulin antibodies and antibacterial and antiviral proteins such as the pathogen-killing enzyme lysozyme, a potent HIV killer which is also found in tears and mothers’ milk.
• Estrogen receptors, the purpose of which is not fully understood.
• The foreskin’s apocrine glands, which produce pheromones.
• The protection and lubrication of the erogenous surface of the penis, which is designed by nature to be an internal organ like the vagina.Natural sex involves contact between two internal organs.[11]

In essence, medical male genital mutilation (MGM) is the pathologization and treatment of the ”disease” of male sexuality.[12] ”

Ken McGrath, senior lecturer of pathology at Auckland University of Technology...an internationally recognised researcher on the effects of circumcision...recently simulated circumcision by anaesthetising his foreskin. He describes it as a disturbing experience, going from full sensitivity to almost none.” ”Foreskin’s Lament” Sunday Star-Times (New Zealand) July 29,2001 [13]

”I was quite happy (delirious, in fact) with what pleasure I could experience beginning with foreplay and continuing as an intact male. After my circumcision, that pleasure was utterly gone. Let me put it this way: On a scale of 10, the uncircumcised penis experiences pleasure that is at least 11 or 12; the circumcised penis is lucky to get to 3...” (From a letter to Marilyn Milos, RN, Founder/Director of NOCIRC)[14]

”[Like] wearing a condom or wearing a glove ... sight without color would be a good analogy ... only being able to see in black and white ... rather than seeing in full color would be like experiencing an orgasm with a foreskin and without. There are feelings you’ll just never have without the foreskin.” (Paul Tardiff, circumcised at age 30)[14]

”The 1999 British Journal of Urology Supplement has a study of American women who have experienced sex with both intact and circumcised partners. The results of the survey are truly astonishing. Among other things, the vast majority of surveyed women indicated that they overwhelmingly prefer intercourse with a man with a natural penis (approximately 90%) and that they were significantly more likely to achieve a ’vagina’ orgasm during ’natural’ intercourse. More astonishing is the fact that many women actually rated circumcised intercourse a negative experience when compared to the natural intercourse.” -Kristen O’Hara, Author of ”Sex As Nature Intended”[15, 16] ”

I swore that I would never have sex with an un-circumcised man. The thought of it made me turn up my nose. When I first met my partner, we tended to have sex in the dark. [...] The sex was the best I had ever had. With the unique ’vaginal’ orgasms along with the standard clitoris orgasms. A few months into our relationship, I realized that he was actually un-circumcised. [...] My point in short is, sex is incredibly better with an un-circ’ed man. I never would have thought it, but now, with first hand experience, I know it is. I never had a ’vaginal’ orgasm, until him.” (private correspondence to Stan Emerson, circumcision awareness educator, nocirc47@yahoo.com)

In 1888, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a well respected physician and founder of the Kellogg cereal company, spoke for mainstream Victorian medicine when he wrote: ”A remedy for masturbation which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision. The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic as the brief pain [sic, see below] attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment.”[17]

Whatever the current rationales for circumcision, the procedure outlined by Kellogg in 1888 is essentially how MGM is practiced today: without anesthesia, without patient consent, without the presence of disease or the statistical likelihood of future disease, and without regard for the human rights of an innocent boy or the man he will become.

Incidentally, Victorian medicine was equally rapacious in its claims on female genitalia. The fact that FGM didn’t follow MGM in becoming nearly universal in this country may be largely 3 an accident of anatomy: the surgical risks are likely higher. Yet American medical journal articles proclaiming the benefits of clitorectomies persisted until at least the 1950’s,[18, 19, 17, 20] and clitorectomies of minors were covered by Blue Cross-Blue Shield until 1977. (Surprisingly, the continuing western practice of episiotomy during childbirth, in the face of its iatrogenic ”indications” and consequences, is not generally recognized as a form of FGM.[21])

In any case, MGM is not without risk either. Even today, partial or total penile amputation or deformity, sepsis, gangrene and even coma and death are well established immediate risks of MGM. While American medicine keeps no systematic record, estimates of US deaths rates range to over 200 per year.[22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31]

Medical Rationales

Setting aside for a moment the human rights implications of forcibly cutting healthy erogenous flesh from the bodies of screaming infants, and the older, more obviously bogus rationalizations for it, one would hope that an examination of medicine’s more recent justifications for MGM will reveal a valid scientific rationale for its continuation.

Incredibly, the opposite is true: decades of pre-emptive censorship of male sexuality have resulted in a corresponding censorship of natural male sexual anatomy and function in American medical schools. Even today, intact foreskins are routinely omitted from anatomical medical textbooks, or mentioned solely in the context of circumcision.[32] As a result, many American doctors and nurses are woefully ignorant of the routine care of natural male genitalia, and frequently perform unnecessary circumcisions as a direct consequence of their ignorance.[33, 34, 35, 9, 2] Perhaps nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in the medical establishment’s approach to urinary tract infections and phimosis.

According to the retrospective study of urinary tract infections (UTI’s) in US military hospitals which is usually quoted in support of MGM, it requires at least 50 to 100 circumcisions to prevent a single UTI infection.[36] But even this figure is likely unreliable because ignorant US doctors have frequently induced UTIs in intact children by advising parents to forcibly retract the child’s normally-attached foreskin and scrub underneath[36] (the foreskin often remains attached to the head of the penis for years after birth, with no ill effect if simply left alone). This excruciatingly painful procedure, which is done repeatedly as the raw tissues reattach, would be hygienically comparable to breaking a girl’s hymen in order to scrub her vagina: it’s an invitation to infection, and indeed bacterial strains isolated in American boys and girls with UTIs implies that boy’s infections tend to be iatrogenic.[36] The study is further confounded by the fact that MGM was so routine at one time that hospitals frequently did it ”automatically” without recording it on their charts, and sickly children were more likely to be spared the stress of circumcision, thus tending to select for apparent or real intactness in the ill group. These and other systematic flaws bring the reliability of the study into question.[37, 34]

”The intact baby has a slightly increased chance of developing a urinary tract infection 4 in infancy but a lower incidence of UTI (urinary tract infection) the rest of his life. UTI’s in females are found at rates of up to 50 times that of males (Understanding Urinary Tract Infection, Infect Urol 8 (4), 111,114-120, 1995) and we do not alter their genitalia as a preventative measure. Most UTI’s in the intact male are iatrogenic (doctor caused) by inspecting, probing and even retracting the fused foreskin and introducing bacteria the foreskin is designed to keep out.” -Eileen Wayne, M.D.[15]

”Toronto researchers studied almost 60,000 boys. The study suggests 195 circumcisions would need to be performed to prevent one hospital admission for urinary tract infection in the first year of life. Since a conservative estimate of the number of significant complications of circumcision is 2-3%, this would mean that circumcising nearly 200 boys to prevent one urinary tract infection would result in at least 4 boys suffering a major complication to prevent one easily treatable urinary tract infection.” -The Lancet 1998; 352:1813-16[15, 38]

In fact, breastfeeding and physical contact with the mother have been shown to be far more effective at preventing UTI’s than even proponents of circumcision claim for MGM. If given a chance, nature elegantly protects infants from infection by immunizing, via breast milk, against the very organisms which the child’s skin, in the company of his mother, would be colonized by.[39] Recent research in Japan, a non-circumcising country, has found a much lower rate of UTI’s among intact children than the earlier American studies.[40] Of course, for any other bodily tissue the standard of care for infection would be antibiotics, not amputation. Thankfully, the fact that UTIs are far more common in girls is not used to push FGM in this country.[41, 42, 43]

MGM has also been routinely prescribed for ”phimosis,” a condition in which the foreskin of the penis is abnormally non-retractable. But phimosis in intact boys is greatly exaggerated in the USA because ignorant doctors confuse it with normal attachment, and also because they frequently cause an iatrogenic version of it, again by advising parents to forcibly retract, leading to infections and scar tissue. In any case, the American Academy of Pediatrics recently admitted that true, non-iatrogenic phimosis, which occurs in less than 2% of intact males, can be successfully treated in 85-95% of cases by the simple application of a steroid cream.[44] This miraculous medical breakthrough, coming decades after the introduction of steroid cream, is illustrative of the cavalier contempt medicine has demonstrated for male sexual integrity.

Between iatrogenic UTI’s and phimosis, many boys who survive the high-tech birthing industry whole and intact later succumb to the knife in early childhood, and any future younger brothers are more likely to be circumcised immediately after birth. Currently around 80% of all US-born males have been circumcised.[45, 46]

For decades MGM has been endorsed for the prevention of penile and cervical cancer. But in a letter to the American Academy of Pediatrics in 1996, physicians at the American Cancer Society wrote: ”As representatives of the American Cancer Society, we would like to discourage the American Academy of Pediatrics from promoting routine circumcision as a preventative measure 5 for penile or cervical cancer. The American Cancer Society does not consider routine circumcision to be a valid or effective measure to prevent such cancers. Research suggesting a pattern in the circumcision status of partners of women with cervical cancer is methodologically flawed, outdated and has not been taken seriously in the medical community for decades. [...] Fatalities caused by circumcision accidents may approximate the mortality rate from penile cancer.”[47, 48] Another, more recent study widely trumpeted in the media as proof of an increased cervical cancer risk among partners of intact men, has been found to suffer from numerous methodological flaws and exceedingly unstable statistics.[49, 50] The primary risk factors for both penile and cervical cancer are the presence of the human papilloma virus and the use of tobacco.[48]

On the issue of sexually transmitted diseases (STD’s), one obvious point should be stressed: children are not sexually active, thus infant MGM cannot reasonably be promoted based on STD prevention arguments. The child can and should be given the opportunity to judge the facts for himself when he is old enough to give informed consent for this very important decision with the full knowledge of the value of his intact organ. The miniscule rate of adult circumcision provides strong evidence of what this decision would be.[51]

With that said, the jury is still out: the body of medical literature gives no clear indication of whether circumcision protects against STDs.[52] Many studies have reached contradictory or null conclusions, such as a well controlled study of 1400 American men published in the April 1997 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association which found that ”Circumcised men were slightly more likely to have had both a bacterial and a viral STD in their lifetime. While these differences are not statistically significant, they do not lend support to the thesis that circumcision helps prevent the contraction of STDs. Indeed, for chlamydia, the difference between circumcised men and uncircumcised men is quite large. While 26 of 1033 circumcised men had contracted chlamydia in their lifetime, none of the 353 uncircumcised men reported having had it.”[45]

Regarding AIDS in particular, it should be noted that among the industrialized nations, AIDS is positively correlated with circumcision.[53, 54] Indeed, of the industrialized countries, the USA has by far the highest AIDS rate and the second highest circumcision rate, the latter second only to Israel.[54] This flies in the face of recent, widely reported but deeply flawed surveys of AIDS and circumcision in Africa, which did not control for the strong correlation between the circumcision status and the socioeconomic status of African men. Muslim men, for instance, tend to be both circumcised and non-promiscuous. In circumcising tribes, intact men may tend to be shunned by women, and to frequent prostitutes. In more secular African cultures, circumcised men tend to have access to the western model of medical care, and so are less likely to have easily treatable STDs such as gonorrhea, the presence of which causes genital lesions which promote the passage of the AIDS virus.[55]

Remarkably, a strong case has been made that medicine itself drives most HIV transmission in Africa through the use of dirty hypodermic needles, which are far more effective in HIV transmission than sexual intercourse.[56] Notwithstanding the World Health Organization’s rebuttal,[57] their admission of a 30% worldwide average rate of dirty needle usage hardly inspires confidence that iatrogenic HIV infection isn’t a major public health menace in AIDS- and poverty-stricken Africa, 6 as well as the rest of the developing world, where every year an estimated 10 million people are infected, and 1.8 million die, of lethal diseases transmitted by unsafe healthcare.[58] The WHO’s apparent success at keeping this long-foreseen iatrogenic holocaust, and its curiously ineffectual response to it, from ”the front pages of newspapers around the world” is a testament to the power, prestige and impunity of the holy church of medicine.

Other recent medical research has resorted to comparing the density of HIV receptors in the foreskin and cervix, concluding that the higher density of receptors in the foreskin is a rationale for circumcision. But a similar comparison between the inner labia and glans penis would probably argue for the practice of FGM. In any case, a causal link between intact male genitals and HIV transmission has never been demonstrated, and confounding factors, such as the pathogen-killing secretions under the foreskin, may well result in a net loss of biological defenses from MGM, even before the behavioral and structural anatomical consequences are considered.

For instance, the dried out internal organ which is the end of a circumcised penis provides less lubrication and so increases abrasion during intercourse, creating possible infection sites in both partners. This may account for the nearly 5-fold difference in US vs European male-to-female HIV transmission rates.[59] Abrasion is further exacerbated by the tightness of the penile skin, which can no longer slide freely on the shaft. Some circumcisions are cut so tightly that erection produces tearing in the penile skin, creating further sites for the passage of pathogens. Condoms are more likey to fall off of a circumcised penis, and American men are less likely to USE condoms[53] (the most effective line of defense against STD’s) probably because of the lack of sensitivity most of them already endure. Circumcised men are also significantly more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior such as anal intercourse, possibly in an effort to compensate for desensitization.[45, 60] Furthermore, a small amount of inner foreskin is usually left on the penis, and it’s well known that mucous membrane is more vulnerable to infection when it is dried out.[52] Finally, MGM’s adverse impact on sexual satisfaction for both partners may increase sexual promiscuity.

Finally we reach the deeply embedded cultural mythology which may be the real driving force behind medical MGM in the USA, the same irrational fear that drives FGM in Africa: that intact genitalia are somehow ”dirty,” that expert human intervention is needed to remedy unmentionable defects in the design of the most critical developmental objective of millions of years of evolution, the reproductive organs. But about 80% of the men in this world are intact.[2, 61] If male foreskin is such a pathologically disease-ridden piece of anatomical garbage, why aren’t men all over the world lining up at clinics to be cut? The fact is that in terms of the difficulty of maintenance, an intact penis is somewhere between the eyes and the mouth, in other words between low and medium maintenance. If doctors applied the same hygienic standards to the mouth as they do the penis, they’d cut off our lips and pull all our teeth. We spend far more time brushing our teeth than the second that it takes for an intact man to retract and rinse under his foreskin, and even in the absence of running water, urination (urine is a sterile liquid, by the way) serves to flush out the region under the foreskin and keep it clean. A study of 1000 young intact men, published in The Journal of Urology in 1973, found only 2% had a significant accumulation of smegma.[62] Intact male genitals likely require less maintenance than that of females. But of course the assumption is 7 that men are somehow incapable of keeping themselves clean. If there’s a grain of truth buried in that social edifice, could it be related to the shame and stigma attached to male autosexuality, of which medical MGM is only a manifestation?

On the basis of over a century of similarly ambiguous, sloppy, value-laden and selectively publicized research, the high priests of American medicine have successfully promoted and defended their idiosyncratic practice of genital surgery on six generations of normal, healthy, non-consenting boys, repeatedly indicting, but never managing to convict the foreskin for one malady after another. HIV is only the most recent example of this pattern. Even the US taxpayer has been drafted into the crusade, donating more than $35 million in medicaid payments per year for involuntary circumcisions, many of which would likely not have occurred without government subsidy.[63] But despite medicine’s most strenuous efforts, MGM, the USA’s most common surgical procedure, remains in search of a disease. But in any case, even the most enthusiastic claims of circumcision proponents must be weighed against its scientifically demonstrable drawbacks.[64] Indeed, routine circumcision can only be defended by ignoring the crucial erogenous value of the male prepuce, to both men and women.

When all the pseudo-medical diversions are disposed of, one is left with a number of useful observations regarding medical genital mutilation:

• No one volunteers to be tied down to a table to have parts of their genitals crushed and cut off without anesthesia. Therefore, it should be obvious even to those who haven’t seen a screaming baby boy being brutalized in a soundproofed hospital room, that ”routine” infant circumcision would not be so routine if children could defend themselves from doctors. Unburdened of the medical and social rationalizations for MGM, and facing the immediacy of his anguish, the child likely sees circumcision for what it is: a particularly brutal sexual assault and forcible amputation.
• The only operative ”indications” for routine infant circumcision are the phobias and ignorance of the parents and the powerlessness of the infant.
• The central issue of MGM is obviously human rights, specifically every human being’s right to a natural, complete, fully functional and ecstatic sexuality, free of forcibly imposed handicaps. Despite the medical establishment’s obsession with the purported pathologies of male genitals, doctors have no more right to enforce Victorian sexual mores on struggling, screaming children now than they did a century ago.
• The most virulent, chronic and debilitating pathology associated with male foreskin appears to be the compulsion to cut it off. As we’ll see below, the medicalization of this compulsion results in a particularly perverse and destructive form of child abuse. 8

Mechanics of Brutality

Now let’s examine how a typical medical circumcision is performed. First the child, after 9 months in the fetal position, is tied down spreadeagled and straight-backed in a circumstraint, a plastic board molded to the outline of an infant’s body, which is equipped with velcro straps. Next he is covered with a sheet which has a hole through which his penis is threaded. Then his penis is thoroughly swabbed with sterilizing solution. Naturally, this frequently provokes an erection. Some physicians deliberately provoke erections in order to judge the ”cutoff line” and to aid in the surgery itself. In any case, in the infant’s brand new, wide-open, pre-verbal consciousness, this is his first sexual experience: a torturous nightmare.[65, 66, 67, 68, 69]

Because the foreskin of an infant is attached to the head of the penis by the same tissue that bonds a fingernail to a finger, it must be skinned away before it can be cut off. So the doctor forces a metal probe between the foreskin and the head and tears apart this flesh (called synechia) which bonds them together. Next, the doctor has several options for the actual amputation. One commonly used device for this step is called a gomco clamp. This essentially functions as a thumbscrew for the foreskin. I am not making this up. Surgical scissors are used to cut a slit along the length of the foreskin in order to insert the metal ”bell” which serves as one jaw of the clamp. The foreskin is pulled over the bell and the other jaw of the clamp is attached. Then, by tightening a screw, the foreskin, one of the most densely innervated tissues of the body, is audibly crushed along two lines (inner and outer foreskin) around its circumference. The clamp is left on for a few minutes to promote blood clotting, then the foreskin is cut off at the crush line.[70, 71, 72] Afterwards, the raw, bleeding, formerly internal organ is wrapped in bandages and a diaper, and then repeatedly burned with urine and its breakdown product, ammonia, and exposed to infectious fecal matter while healing.

For many years the mainstream medical orthodoxy, put forth after it was no longer acceptable to torture children in the name of ”moral hygiene,” was that babies don’t feel pain. It wasn’t until 1978 that researchers even suggested using anesthetic during circumcision, and even today, most medical circumcisions are performed without anesthesia, according to the AMA.[73] This is in stark contrast to what is known about infant pain perception and its profound and lasting effects on the victim, as well as the plainly obvious reaction of the infant boy, who forcefully communicates his torment to anyone who will look and listen. Choking and breathing problems arise due to the continuous screaming. Surges in adrenaline and cortisol and large increases in heart rate, all established physiological indicators of torture, have been measured.[74] Some babies appear to go into shock.[75] Later, problems with sleep, mother-child bonding and breastfeeding, and increased sensitivity to stress and pain are all commonly seen after MGM.[76, 77, 78] To all appearances, the infant is left in a state of post-traumatic stress. Sometimes older boys have recurring flashbacks of their circumcision, a classic sign of PTS. Impaired bonding at this critical stage is well correlated with social dysfunction and even criminality later in life,[79] while breast feeding is known to have many health and psychological benefits for both the mother and baby,[80, 81, 82, 67, 83] contrary to American medical doctrine of only a few years ago.

In a definitive study of neonatal pain perception published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1987, the authors wrote: ”Numerous lines of evidence suggest that even in the human fetus, pain pathways as well as cortical and subcortical centers necessary for pain perception are well developed late in gestation, and the neurochemical systems now known to be associated with pain transmission are intact and functional.”[84] Research for a study on the efficacy of various types of pain relief during circumcision, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1997, was halted early because researchers began to question the ethics of subjecting their placebo group to MGM without anesthesia. Of 11 infants in the placebo group, two experienced prolonged periods of apnea, and one infant had an episode of projectile vomiting and a sudden ”lack of tone in limbs”.[85] Other immediate pain-related complications of infant MGM include heart injury, pneumothorax (a stress-caused life-threatening condition involving the introduction of air into the chest cavity), and gastric rupture.[74]

”I have assisted with about 200 [circumcisions] [...] Babies scream so hard that they end up with their faces red and mouths wide open with no sound coming out. I had to hold their heads to the side because some vomit from the pain. I always had to get close to their faces and stroke their cheeks because they would stop breathing. [...] Consoling is impossible. They shake and their eyes are wide open with panic. [...] Many of my consults are a result of trauma from the circs. The babies’ state of homeostasis is so messed up from the stress that they are no longer able to suck. Every IBCLC (lactation consultant) that I know will tell you how circumcision is a major source of feeding problems in the days following.”[86]

Federal law provides more protection from suffering to laboratory animals than to male infants. Lab researchers must adhere to an elaborate set of humanitarian guidelines when experimenting on animals, or risk fines and license forfeiture. Needless suffering is to be avoided, and anesthesia is an absolute necessity for surgical procedures, except when the animal is to be promptly euthanized.[87] A veterinarian would probably go to jail for circumcising a dog without cause, with or without anesthesia.

”Performing this extremely painful procedure without anesthetic has allowed researchers to study the parameters of extreme pain in experiments that would not have been allowed on laboratory animals. Using routine, unanesthetized circumcision as a model of stress, Porter et al. were able to examine the relation between cry acoustics and vagal tone in 49 (32 experimental; 17 control) 1 to 2-day-old, full-term normal, healthy newborns during the preoperative, surgical, and postoperative periods. Vagal tone was significantly reduced during the severe stress of circumcision. These reductions were 10 paralleled by significant increases in the pitch of the infants’ cries.” Male Circumcision: A Legal Affront. Christopher Price 1996[88, 89, 90]

The immediate psychological consequences of MGM are more readily discernable in older boys than in infants. The older child perceives the (usually anesthetized) operation as a sexual assault, and grief, rage, aggression, ”castration anxiety,” altered sexual identification, emotional withdrawl, reduction in intelligence test scores and regression to ”more primitive modes of expression”[91] are all commonly seen in recently GM’d boys.[92, 75]

The long term psychological impact of birth-related trauma is also relevant to the issue of MGM. Recent studies have found striking connections between birth trauma and adult post traumatic stress and suicide,[93, 94, 95, 96, 75, 67, 78, 97] and adult victims of infant MGM often exhibit a spectrum of symptoms including: • a sense of personal powerlessness

• lack of trust in others and life
• a sense of vulnerability to violent attack by others
• irrational rage reactions
• addictions and dependencies
• difficulties in establishing intimate relationships
• decreased ability to communicate
• emotional numbing
• reluctance to be in relationships with women
• anger and violence toward women[98]

Neurologically speaking, the life-long sexual sensory deprivation which results from circumcision has a profound effect on the neural organization of the brain, similar to that found in any amputee: corresponding neurons associated with states of sexual and emotional ecstasy die, and adjacent neural regions grow chaotically into the dead zone.[99] Furthermore, childhood victims of traumatic abuse tend to have a variety of brain abnormalities, reflecting a generalized rewiring of the brain to adapt to a hostile environment.[100] The psychological impact of such brain damage is likely to be far reaching.

”The phenomenon of circumcision [...] serves a practical function of lowering excitability and distractibility quotients–sexual arousal–of pubescent males, i.e. biasing young males toward increased tractability which would enhance group efforts and less toward 11 individual goals of amorous exchanges. Neurological data suggest that early lesions of the prepuce/foreskin tissues would generate a reorganization/atrophy of the brain circuitry. This re-organization/atrophy, in turn, is suggested to lower sexual excitability. [...] Inferential data support the hypothesis that a practical consequence of circumcision, complementary to any religious-symbolic function, is to make a circumcised male less excitable and distractible, and, hence, more amenable to his group’s authority figures.” Abstract: A Biocultural Analysis of Circumcision. Ronald Immerman, Department of Psychiatry, MetroHealth Medical Centre, Case Western Reserve University, and W.C Mackey. SOCIAL BIOLOGY 1998, Volume 44, Pages 265-275.[101]

Aside from endorsing the sexual lobotomization of children for the purpose of social control, and their bizarre silence and indifference to the mass sexualized traumatization and imprinting of infants, psychiatrists have helped to perpetuate circumcision by branding anti-MGM activists as ”mentally ill,”[102] but these orwellian enforcers of ”behavioral health” have managed to overlook two likely and obvious psychological consequences of MGM:

• The early imprinting of excruciating pain on the pleasure networks of the brain likely encodes for sado-masochistic behavior in the adult.[67, 103]
• Sexual ecstasy isn’t localized to a particular part of the brain, it’s a global state of powerful low frequency waves of neural firing involving the entire brain. There’s every reason to believe that the sex drive is also a generalized property, or at least not localized to the neurons that the foreskin maps to. As a result, MGM neurologically blocks the fulfillment of the sex drive without affecting the drive itself. This is likely to be a recipe for what psychiatrists call ”obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

(Perhaps the Enron of the medical cartel is only looking out for its own future earnings. Between iatrogenic UTI’s, phimosis and HIV being used to promote MGM, the pathologization and treatment of childbirth,[104, 105] the hugely profitable ”erectile dysfunction” market, and psychiatry’s own penchants for pathologizing junk-fed, sleep deprived, sedentary kids and treating them with brain-damaging drugs, and pathologizing, shocking and abusing domestic abuse victims while working for their abusers,[106] the iatrocyclic business model appears to be widespread in American medicine)

Is this the kind of men we need in this world? Amenable to authority figures? Forever longing for possibly unattainable sexual fulfillment? Imprinted with a tortured, dissociative, objectified and utterly disempowered model of their own bodies and sexuality? Unable to lose themselves in the uniquely healing and self-transcending joy of the most fundamental communication of human intimacy?

Clearly, there is something other than medicine going on here.

From the Third International Symposium on Circumcision University of Maryland, May 22-25, 1994:

”Look at these hands. These hands have taken a newborn baby from his mother’s safe warm breast and his father’s sheltering arms, and these hands have tied this baby to a cold hard platter and served him up to the circumciser.
These hands have readied the scalpel, even as they caressed the brow of the terrified baby as he struggled for freedom and searched my eyes for compassion he did not find. A tortured being has sucked frantically on this finger in a hopeless effort to end the agony as his flesh – his birthright – is ripped from him and thrown in the garbage.
These hands have removed the diaper painfully adhered to the feces-covered wound between his chubby legs.
These hands have shielded my ears from his screams.
Nurses of America, I did not become a nurse to hurt babies, and neither did you. In 1992, with over 20 other nurses at St. Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I gave notice to my employers and declared I would no longer be an accomplice in the atrocity that is infant circumcision.
I have reclaimed my tattered soul and begun the process of becoming whole again.
I am a conscientious objector in the war against our infant brothers and sons, and it feels wonderful.
Nurses of America, wipe the blood from your hands and join me!”
Mary Conant, RN
[Mary Conant is one of the 24 heroic Conscientious Objectors to Circumcision nurses at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Santa Fe, NewMexico, and co-founder of Nurses for the Rights of the Child][107]

The 1999 report of the American Academy of Pediatrics task force on circumcision said: ”Existing scientific evidence demonstrates potential medical benefits of newborn male circumcision; however these data are not sufficient to recommend [it].”[108] The word ”potential” in this context means ”proposed but unproven.” But this is the state of affairs that has existed for decades, ever since medicine began trying to find a plausible and socially acceptable rationale for what it has been doing all along. Common sense dictates that the known, certain and major drawbacks of MGM outweigh the unknown, potential and slight benefits its advocates could conceivably claim given current knowledge. But at least the AAP has finally joined every other major medical organization in the world by no longer actively promoting MGM. Unfortunately, it’s doubtful such cautious backpedaling will do much to counter the pervasive culture of circumcision in American hospitals, which often necessitates extraordinary measures to protect the child.[109]

The AAP goes on to say ”to make an informed choice, parents of all infants should be given unbiased information.” But the report itself is biased in its disregard of the crucial moral, ethical Indeed, it seems medicine itself is a confounding factor which must be controlled for in any study of circumcision. 13 and legal question of whether parents have the right to irreversibly alter their child’s sexuality in the absence of clear and compelling medical justification. Doctors are ethically bound to refuse such requests from parents in any case. Furthermore, the profound ignorance of male sexuality which pervades both American medicine[13] and society at large (a telling measure of the strictly utilitarian value placed on male lives in this post-modern Victorian empire) makes a mockery of informed consent.

Legal Issues

The practice of MGM in this country violates numerous laws and international treaties, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,[110] the Convention on the Rights of the Child[111] and the UN Convention Against Torture,[112] not to mention the prime dictum of medicine: ”first, do no harm.” Furthermore, proxy consent of the parents is likely not legally applicable to an irreversible procedure which has no known medical purpose.[113, 114, 24, 115, 116] The current state of federal law with respect to genital mutilation is in clear violation of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees equal protection for both girls AND boys under the law.[117] The fact that this unsustainable legal state of affairs has never been reviewed in a court of law should be of small comfort to physicians, as more men become aware of what has been taken from them in the name of medicine, and pursue legal actions against their mutilators.[118] The first suit for proxy ”consented” infant circumcision was recently settled for an undisclosed sum.

Conflict of Interest

Aside from its inexplicable hatred of male sexuality and contempt for children’s human rights, the American medical establishment has a huge conflict of interest with regard to MGM. It has painted itself into a corner, first by profiting from the brutal enforcement of Victorian sexual oppression, and later by refusing to abolish this flagrant violation of human rights for fear of provoking public suspicion and legal liability. When the facts about the anti-sexual origins of this practice, and its explicitly targeted injury to male sexuality become widely known, the legal consequences will be devastating for the medical establishment. But in the process of protecting its institutional self interest, medicine has systematically undermined the basic social unit of society, the family, by cutting away much of the physiological basis for the emotional bonding that parents feel for each other. The consequences of this massive experiment in infant sexual molestation, torture, brain damage, sensory and ecstacy deprivation and sexual and emotional oppression can hardly be overestimated. Plausible connections with male impotence, female ”frigidity,” divorce, domestic violence, male criminality, drug addiction, post-traumatic stress and suicide, and the general state of inter-gender alienation are all promising topics for future research. 14

MGM is also a lucrative practice for medicine,[83] which charges, first, for the amputation and clinical facilities, and then profits from the sale of the baby’s purloined sexuality to biotechnology and cosmetics companies. This provides an economic incentive for the withholding of anesthetic: the MGM aftermarket requires a pristine product for tissue culture and research.[119, 120]

In short, parents would be ill-advised to rely solely on medical advice in reaching a decision on circumcision. Don’t expect to be reading about this impending social explosion in an AMA press release, there’s far too much money involved. As in politics, if you are not armed with the facts, you will become an instrument of other people’s interests.

Human Rights Context

Human rights is not a zero-sum game. The recognition of the harm of MGM in no way trivializes FGM. It is clear that most if not all forms of FGM practiced in the world today are more brutalizing, invasive and dangerous than the sterile, technologically sophisticated and surgically simpler practice of western medical circumcision. But the cultural and power dynamic, the disregard for the rights of the victim, and the senseless barbarity are the same, as is the unconscious social objective: the control and forcible diminution of young people’s sexuality. FGM is committed by older women against younger women, MGM is committed by older men against younger men. Genital mutilation is an equal opportunity, self-perpetuating, intergenerational form of sexual abuse.[121, 122, 123, 124, 125]

Human rights groups which claim to speak for the rights of children have a responsibility to research this issue carefully, apply the same principles of self-determination, bodily integrity and freedom from violence to boys as they have to girls, and add their voices to the campaign to put an end to this profoundly destructive hidden atrocity.

It is clearly not in the human rights interests of women for men to be sexually molested, traumatized and handicapped at a pre-verbal age and on a wholesale basis.

The Challenge

”Persons who have lost body parts must grieve their loss. The first stage of grief is denial of the loss. Fitzgerald and Parkes state that ’Anything that seriously impairs sensory or cognitive function is bound to have profound psychological effects’ [...] Circumcision causes the loss of a body part and all of its functions including a drastic loss of erogenous sensory function, so denial of loss is not uncommon in circumcised males. [...] This frequently results in circumcised fathers adamantly insisting that a son be circumcised. [...] Goldman states that some circumcised male medical doctors misuse the medical literature to support, rationalize, and justify their own loss; and to defend the practice of circumcision. Denniston reports that doctors ’who have been cut themselves may be unable to stop cutting others.’ ”[78]

The emotional, cultural and economic forces marshaled against the human rights of male children and their future lovers are enormous. Clearly, the medical institutions which have led us down this garden path are unlikely to remedy their own pathologies in the foreseeable future. The sexual rights of future generations will be won by a small but rapidly growing movement of human rights activists who brave ignorance, ridicule, a century of conventional wisdom and their own instinctive need for denial to respond to a human being’s highest calling: the defense of the powerless.

Please join us.

Social Theory and Biocomplexity

Thoughts on the social and human relational implications of MGM

Culturally speaking, male genital mutilation does not happen at random. It is highly correlated with authoritarian, monotheistic, patrilineal and militaristic cultures, where children, women and minorities are devalued, class stratification is high, and in some cases FGM is practiced as well.[126, 127, 61, 128, 129] (MGM world-wide is about 7 times more widespread than — and appears to be a precursor for — FGM) It’s not difficult to see how genital mutilation could arise not only as a consequence, but also function as a reinforcer of such dystopian and hierarchical cultures.

GM is fundamentally different from other kinds of bodily modifications such as body piercing or foot binding. It is directed specifically at a highly emotionally-charged sensory organ, as unique and irreplaceable as the eyes, as critical to human community and emotional connectedness as the ability to see and be seen, to speak and to hear speech, to hold and to be held. It is a mutilation and truncation of one seventh of the dimensionality of one’s perceptual space (sexual and spiritual perception being sixth and seventh senses, respectively), and the potential to experience and share love and ego-transcendent, joyful consciousness and its numerous psychological benefits. MGM is thus an assault not only on the individual, but on that individual’s future family and friends and, where widely practiced, on the community’s capacity for mutual goodwill, trust, self organization and local empowerment. A kind of ”social fragmentation grenade.” Perhaps this is why MGM was often inflicted on slaves and other conquered peoples in biblical times.

Men and women who are denied emotional fulfillment in human relationships must seek it elsewhere, and frequently channel their energies into the abstracted and manipulable meanings and rewards of state-sanctioned institutions such as workaholism/consumerism, professional sports (a surrogate for nationalism), statist religions and the ultimate form of state servitude, soldiering. Interfering with the sexual compatibility and satisfaction of men and women likely strongly affects mass social organization. Thus MGM’s social utility goes far beyond mere fertility control, into the realm of generalized social control.

Social control motivations for MGM are implied and explicit in authoritative religious texts:

According to [certain Islamic texts], [...] there are 72 wives for every believer who is admitted to Heaven, and not only for a martyr. The proof is a hadith which is collected by at-Tirmidhi in ”Sunan” (volume IV, chapters on ”The Features of Heaven as described by the Messenger of Allah,” Chapter 21: ”About the Smallest Reward for the People of Heaven,” hadith 2687).

It is also quoted by Ibn Kathir in his Tafsir (Koranic Commentary) of Surah ar-Rahman (55), ayah (verse) 72: ”It was mentioned by Daraj Ibn Abi Hatim, that Abu al- Haytham Abdullah Ibn Wahb narrated from Abu Sa’id al-Khudhri, who heard the Prophet Muhammad (Allah’s blessings and peace be upon him) saying: ’The smallest reward for the people of Heaven is an abode where there are 80,000 servants and 72 wives, over which stands a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine and ruby, as wide as the distance from al-Jabiyyah to San’a.’ Ibn Kathir explained in ’al-Bidayah wa an-Nihayah’ that al-Jabiyyah is the name of a suburb of Damascus. ”That those 72 wives are virgin is proved by the ayah 74 of the same Surah: ”No man or jinn has ever touched them before.” Naomi Ragen, Jerusalem Post Sept 6, 2001[131]

Combining such religious teachings with the sexual frustration likely experienced by traditionally circumcised and sexually repressed Muslim men has obvious utility for mass social control and manipulation.

In Judaism, MGM has been endorsed as a wedge between married couples, where the socializing influences of ”civilization” can be brought to bear on people’s most private and sacred lives:

”[...] Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), better known as the ”Rambam”, was a medieval Jewish rabbi, physician and philosopher. He wrote:

”[...] man should not be hard and rough, but responsive, obedient, acquiescent, and docile. You know already His commandment... ”Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked. Be silent, and hearken, O Israel. If ye be willing and obedient.”

”[...] one of the reasons for it is, in my opinion, the wish to bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question, so that this activity be diminished and the organ be in as quiet a state as possible.”

”[...] The bodily pain caused to that member is the real purpose of circumcision. None of the activities necessary for the preservation of the individual is harmed thereby, nor is procreation rendered impossible, but violent concupiscence and lust that goes beyond what is needed are diminished. The fact that circumcision weakens the faculty of sexual excitement and sometimes perhaps diminishes the pleasure is indubitable. For 17 if at birth this member has been made to bleed and has had its covering taken away from it, it must indubitably be weakened. The Sages, may their memory be blessed, have explicitly stated: It is hard for a woman with whom an uncircumcised man has had sexual intercourse to separate from him. In my opinion this is the strongest of the reasons for circumcision.”[132]

In the sex-obsessed and -repressed USA, we find beautiful, often scantily-clad models used to market everything from cars to army careers, to circumcised men. No doubt a central pillar of our own state religion, corporate capitalism.

These tendencies to social fragmentation and alienation, deference to authority figures and compulsive economic production and consumption accrue many benefits to the state, while simultaneously impoverishing and disrupting community and family structures, contributing to a social context in which, for instance, authority figures in white coats, often compulsively reenacting their own trauma,[103] routinely bypass the most primordial, protective parental instincts in order to cut into the genitals of healthy newborn boys, a remarkable feat of mass indoctrination and social regimentation.

The disruption of social cohesion and solidarity, combined with sex-driven religious fervor, statereinforcing workaholism, MGM-reinforced sexual ignorance, denial, trauma reenactment, sadism and medical self-interest, help to make MGM a powerful promoter of its own perpetuation, as well as that of the social context in which it ”lives.” It is a node in a complex network of selfperpetuating causality which comprises a causality loop embedded and entangled in the social plane. In the chemical plane, analogous structures are often called metabolic cycles.

In short, MGM is an important component of one of many spontaneously arising, mutally reinforcing and collectively ”self”-selecting social processes which facilitate the disempowerment, dissociation, reorganization and integration (i.e. digestion) of the human community into the body of the state. George Orwell could not have devised a more cost-effective instrument of social control. Such is the natural genius of self-organizing complex adaptive systems, when left to their own devices.

The emerging science of biocomplexity is a recognition of the universality of self-organizing, life-like processes in the chemical, multicellular, neural-net, social and economic spheres. Understanding the profound implications of spontaneous self-organization — and its role in human relations, gender-specific oppression, the creation of social and economic hierarchies and the origins of consciousness and life itself — is of vital importance if we are to retrieve the reins of power from our own accidental creations, and ensure that society serves human needs, rather than the reverse. [133, 134, 135]

Epilog

Society reaps what it sows in the way it nurtures its children. Stress sculpts the brain to exhibit various antisocial, though adaptive, behaviors. Whether it comes in the 18 form of physical, emotional or sexual trama or through exposure to warfare, famine or pestilence, stress can set off a ripple of hormonal changes that permanently wire a child’s brain to cope with a malevolent world. Through this chain of events, violence and abuse pass from generation to generation as well as from one society to the next. Our stark conclusion is that we see the need to do much more to ensure that child abuse does not happen in the first place, because once these key brain alterations occur, there may be no going back.

Martin Teicher, Scars That Won’t Heal: The Neurobiology of Child Abuse. Scientific American; March 2002[136]

[...] Building upon the insights from these experimental animal studies, I conducted cross-cultural studies on 49 primitive cultures distributed throughout the world and was able to predict with 100% accuracy the peaceful and violent nature of these 49 primitive cultures from two predictor variables: a) the degree of physical affectional bonding in the maternal-infant relationship; and b) whether premarital adolescent sex was permitted or punished. There were 29 peaceful and 20 violent cultures in this study sample. There is no other theory or data base that I am aware of that can provide such a prediction of peaceful or violent behaviors and that can relate such findings to specific sensory processes and brain mechanisms of the individual.

It is the neuronal systems of the brain which mediate pleasure that regulate and control depression, violence and drug/alcohol abuse and addiction. This control and regulation is provided through the mechanisms of reciprocal inhibition. When the neuronal pleasure circuits of the brain are damaged by SAD-DNS (Somatosensory Affectional Deprivation/Denervation Supersensitivity) then they cannot perform their normative role of regulation and inhibition of those neuronal circuits that mediate depression and violent behaviors.

Dr. James W. Prescott, presentation to NIH panel on Anti-Social,
Aggressive and Violence-Related Behaviors and Their Consequences.
Center for Science Policy Studies, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, 9/93 [137]

[...]These findings overwhelmingly support the thesis that deprivation of body pleasure throughout life – but particularly during the formative periods of infancy, childhood, and adolescence – are very closely related to the amount of warfare and interpersonal violence [in a given society].

Dr. James W. Prescott, Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence.

The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists, November 1975, pp. 10-20. [129, 81]

If you really want to change the world, you have to change men. Male socialization is the key to the entire unsustainable system of global ecological destruction, oppression and murder which markets itself as civilization.[138] But you can’t change men if you don’t recognize their oppression. Being conditioned by our ancient, unconsciously self-organized social system as its instruments and conduits of social/structural power, males are subjected to a different set of carrots and sticks than females, but they are no more in charge of their own socialization than women are. Men’s oppression is in some ways more subtle and psychological than women’s, and in other ways more brutalizing, but in any case no less pervasive or destructive of the capacity for self-determination or self-actualization.

Society’s systematic oppression and trivialization of men’s rights and emotional lives is crucial to the alienation and diversion of their energy and creativity from family and community into prefabricated establishment-sanctioned masculine roles. Indeed, authoritarian cultures have a vested interest in the routine brutalization, pleasure deprivation and emotional circumcision of males for the purpose of conditioning the next generation’s ”collectively autocatalytic” hierarchy of authority figures. The colonization and recruitment of men’s bodies and minds begins with MGM. If you want to change men, help them come to terms with their own victimization.

Three Experiments for the Reader

The first is a thought experiment. Suppose an adult man was kidnapped off the street, tied down kicking and screaming to a table and forcibly sexually mutilated. Would this be a crime? If so, why is it not a crime when inflicted on an infant boy? At what age do males graduate from testosterone-tainted meat sculptures to sentient human beings?

The second is a social experiment. Try discussing this issue with others. You may find a great resistance, even among human rights activists of both genders, to the notion that males have rights which are being violated in this country. Whos (or rather, what) interest continues to be served by trivializing the human rights of one half of the population? From the standpoint of biocomplexity, division is the first step towards reorganization and assimilation. The tiresome reenactment of the divide-and-conquer strategy will continue until conscious people transcend it.

The last experiment can only be carried out by a circumcised man. Run your fingers lightly along the length of your erect penis. Where does it feel best? Right behind the head? Guess what: that’s all that’s left of your foreskin, and it’s not even the best part. Think about it: if sexual ecstasy is nature’s inducement to reproduce, where is the sensible place to put the most erogenous nerves? On the bottom of the feet? Behind the ears? At the back end of the penis? No, it would be at the front end of the penis, the part that would go inside the vagina.

Thankfully, mutilated men can greatly improve their sex lives via ”foreskin restoration”, a non-surgical skin-stretching process which is widely practiced in the USA. See the links below.

Final Note:

The medical and historical literature demonstrating the powerful impact of child abuse and pleasure deprivation on adult violence is extensive. In the early 20th century for instance, German parents were heavily influenced by a purportedly scientific approach to child-rearing promoted by German medicine. Many of the ”beneficiaries” of these methods, which consisted of systematic child persecution and pleasure deprivation,[139] grew up to join Hitler’s Nazi party and willingly committed unspeakable crimes against state-designated enemies and medically-designated ”inferiors,” seemingly without a capacity for empathy. Meanwhile, many of their fellow countrymen who had been spared such medicalized abuse risked certain death by attempting to rescue the scapegoats of the day.

Today, American medical interventionist and obstructionist birthing practices have predictably been implicated in long-term psychological problems in the child.[140, 141, 142, 143, 79]

With the world’s three dominant circumcising cultures being led into a major resource war, the task of mitigating the sociological consequences of wholesale child abuse and pleasure deprivation is more urgent than ever. People of good will, who value children as the sacred miracles that they are, must act to ensure that humanity survives its own childhood. ”Our” children deserve no less.

For More Information, see any of the resources (books, sites, articles) linked on this page: Are You Fully Informed? and/or look into the following:

”The Case Against Circumcision”

Paul M. Fleiss, MD
Mothering: The Magazine of Natural Family Living
Winter 1997, pp. 36-45.

”Infant Circumcision: ”What I Wish I Had Known”

Marilyn Fayre Milos
The Truth Seeker, ”Crimes of Genital Mutilation.”
(July/August) 1989; 1(3):3.

”The Unkindest Cut of All”

John M. Foley, M.D.
FACT Magazine, July-August 1966

”From Ritual to Science: The Medical Transformation of Circumcision in America”

David L. Gollaher
Journal of Social History Volume 28 Number 1,
Fall 1994, pp. 5-36

Videos from Nurses for the Rights of the Child:

”Facing Circumcision–Eight Physicians Tell Their Stories” and
”Nurses of St. Vincent–Saying No to Circumcision”
Cost: $25 each, order from: Nurses for the Rights of the Child
369 Montezuma #354, Santa Fe New Mexico 87501

http://www.nocirc.org

http://www.doctorsopposingcircumcision.org

http://www.circinfosite.com

http://www.circumstitions.com

http://www.cirp.org

http://www.noharmm.org

http://www.mothersagainstcirc.org

http://www.circumcision.org

http://www.mgmbill.org

http://www.circumcisionandhiv.com

http://nurses.cirp.org

http://www.studentsforgenitalintegrity.org

http://www.intactamerica.org

http://www.asnatureintended.info

http://www.icgi.org

http://www.theridgedband.info

http://www.notjustskin.org

http://www.drmomma.org

http://www.stopinfantcircumcision.org

http://www.sexasnatureintendedit.com

http://www.sexuallymutilatedchild.org

http://www.sicsociety.org

http://www.arclaw.org

http://www.norm.org

http://www.tlctugger.com

http://www.mothering.com

http://www.quran.org/khatne.htm

http://www.jewsagainstcircumcision.org

http://www.catholicsagainstcircumcision.org

References

[1] CIN CompuBulletin Circumcision Information Network Volume 2, Number 13, 12 April 1995 22 Two letters to The Lancet, Vol 345, P. 927, 8 APRIL 1995 http://www.cirp.org/news/cin/1995.04.12
[2] Circumcision: The Uniquely American Medical Enigma Edward Wallerstein Urologic Clinics of North America, Volume 12 Number 1, February 1985, Pages 123-132. http://www.cirp.org/library/general/wallerstein/
[3] Immunological Functions of the Human Prepuce by P M Fleiss, F M Hodges, R S Van Howe Sexually Transmitted Infections (London), Vol. 74 No. 5, Pages 364-367. October 1998. http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/STD/fleiss3/
[4] In Physicians’ Own Words: A Short History of Circumcision in the U.S. http://www.sexuallymutilatedchild.org/shorthis.htm
[5] Sexual Surgery, A Short History of Circumcision http://www.cirp.org/pages/riley/sexsurg
[6] Answers to Your Questions about Infant Circumcision National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers http://www.nocirc.org/publish/pamphlet3.html
[7] Common Circumcision Myths Exploded http://www.norm-uk.co.uk/myths.html
[8] The Prepuce: Specialized Mucosa of the Penis and its Loss to Circumcision J.R. Taylor, A.P. Lockwood and A.J. Taylor British Journal of Urology, Volume 77, 291-295, February 1996. http://www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/taylor/
[9] The Prepuce: Anatomy, Physiology, Innervation, Immunology, and Sexual Function C.J. Cold and J.R. Taylor British Journal of Urology (1999), 83, Suppl. 1, 34-44 http://www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/cold-taylor/
[10] Separated at Birth: Did Circumcision Ruin Your Sex Life? Mark Jenkins Men’s Health, pages 130-135,163 - July/August 1998 http://www.noharmm.org/separated.htm
[11] The Lost List Gary Harryman NORM Southern California http://www.norm-socal.org/lost.htm
[12] Foreskin Sexual Function/Circumcision Sexual Dysfunction Geoffrey Falk http://www.cirp.org/library/sex function/ 23
[13] The Foreskin, Circumcision and Sexuality Debunking Masters and Johnson Hugh Young http://www.circumstitions.com/Sexuality.html
[14] ”Sight Without Color”: Some Statements by Men Circumcised as Adults Circumcision: What Your Baby Can’t Tell You http://www.sexuallymutilatedchild.org/sight.htm
[15] Complete, As Nature Intended Karen Squires BirthLove, The Revolutionary Passion of Mothering (access requires membership) http://www.birthlove.com/pages/health/complete.html
[16] The Effect of Male Circumcision on the Sexual Enjoyment of the Female Partner O’Hara K, O’Hara J. BJU International, January 1, 1999, Volume 83, Supplement 1, Pages 79-84, http://www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/ohara/
[17] Original motivations for ”medical” circumcision in the West Geoffery Falk http://www.cirp.org/pages/whycirc.html
[18] Female Circumcision / Recent History in U.S. Medicine Bottom of http://www.noharmm.org/research.htm
[19] From Ritual to Science: The Medical Transformation of Circumcision in America” David L. Gollaher Journal of Social History Volume 28 Number 1, Fall 1994, p. 5-36 http://www.nocirc.org/articles/gollaher.php
[20] Female Circumcision in the United States Bottom of http://www.cirp.org/pages/female/
[21] Episiotomy: Ritual Genital Mutilation in Western Obstetrics http://www.changesurfer.com/Hlth/episiotomy.html
[22] Complications, risks, adverse effects of circumcision Geoffery Falk http://www.cirp.org/library/complications/
[23] Complications of Circumcision N. Williams and L. Kapila BRITISH JOURNAL OF SURGERY,Volume 80, 1231-1236, October 1993. http://www.cirp.org/library/complications/williams-kapila/
[24] Circumcision of Healthy Boys: Criminal Assault? Gregory J Boyle, J Steven Svoboda, Christopher P Price, J Neville Turner Journal of Law and Medicine, Volume 7, February 2000, Pages 301-310 http://www.cirp.org/library/legal/boyle1/ 24
[25] Newborn male circumcision: Needless and dangerous Robert Leon Baker, M.D. Sexual Medicine Today, Volume 3, Number 11, November 1979, Page 35-36 http://www.cirp.org/library/general/baker1/
[26] Circumcision: A Study of Current Practices Thomas J. Metcalf, M.D., Lucy M. Osborn, M.D., MSCM, E. Mark Mariani, M.D. Clinical Pediatrics 1983, Volume 22: Pages 575-579. http://www.cirp.org/library/procedure/metcalf/
[27] Medical Journal Articles Documenting the Complications of Circumcision John Erickson http://www.sexuallymutilatedchild.org/compli.htm
[28] Circumcision Complications Hugh Young http://www.circumstitions.com/Complic.html
[29] Estimated U.S. Incidence of Neonatal Circumcision Complications Affecting Males Born between 1940 and 1990 (immediate and physical complications only) Tim Hammond http://www.noharmm.org/incidenceUS.htm
[30] The Common and Not-So-Common Complications of Routine Infant Circumcision Mary G. Ray October 17, 1998 http://www.mothersagainstcirc.org/botch.htm
[31] Case Report John H. Ngan, F.R.C.S. and Michael Mitchell, M.D. Online Pediatric Urology, February 15, 1996 http://www.infocirc.org/fourn.htm
[32] An Analysis of the Accuracy of the Presentation of the Human Penis in Anatomical Source Materials (Two thirds of depictions of the human penis at five Los Angeles California campus bookstores and two biomedical libraries were found to be anatomically incorrect) Gary L. Harryman Presented at The Seventh International Symposium on Human Rights and Modern Society: Advancing Human Dignity and the Legal Right to Bodily Integrity in the 21st Century Georgetown University, April 4-7, 2002 Published in Flesh and Blood: Perspectives on the Problem of Circumcision in Contemporary Society G. C. Denniston, F. M. Hodges and M. F. Milos (editors) Plenum Press; 2003 25
[33] Lack of consent in Louisiana The Advocate, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 17 March, 2000 http://www.circumstitions.com/Law.html#heart
[34] Hygienic Care in Uncircumcised Infants Lucy M. Osborn, MD, Thomas J. Metcalf, MD, And E. Marc Mariani, BS Pediatrics, Volume 67, Pages 365-367, March 1981 http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/hygiene/osborn1/
[35] Factors Affecting the Practice of Circumcision Daksha A. Patel, MD; Emalee G. Flaherty, MD; Judith Dunn, PhD. American Journal of Diseases of the Child, Vol 136, Pages 634-636, July, 1982. http://www.cirp.org/library/procedure/dpatel/
[36] Circumcision and Urinary Tract Infection Geoffery Falk http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/UTI/
[37] Myth: Circumcision Inevitable Later Mary G. Ray, 1997 http://www.mothersagainstcirc.org/later.htm
[38] Cohort study on circumcision of newborn boys and subsequent risk of urinary-tract infection. Teresa To, Mohammad Agha, Paul T Dick, William Feldman THE LANCET, Volume 352, Number 9143: Pages 1813-1816, 5 December 1998. http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/UTI/to2/
[39] Breast-feeding and Urinary Tract Infection Alfredo Pisacane, MD, MSc, Liberatore Graziano, MD Gianfranco Mazzarella, MD, Benedetto Scarpellino, MD, Gregorio Zona Journal of Pediatrics, Volume 120 Number 1, Pages 87-89, January 1992 http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/UTI/pisacane1992/
[40] Letter from Hiroyuki Kayaba to Geoffrey T. Falk, 13 December 1996 concerning UTI rates found in: Analysis of Shape and Retractability of the Prepuce in 603 Japanese Boys Hiroyuki Kayaba, Hiromi Tamura, Seiichi Kitajima, Yoshiyuki Fujiwara, Tetsuo Kato and Tetsuro Kato JOURNAL OF UROLOGY, Volume 156 No. 5: Pages 1813-1815, November 1996 http://www.cirp.org/library/normal/kayaba/letter1.html
[41] Risk of Urinary Tract Infections Among Uncircumcised Boys Remains Minimal Mary G. Ray, 1997 http://www.mothersagainstcirc.org/uti.htm
[42] Care of the Intact Penis James E. Peron, Ed. D. 26 Midwifery Today (November) 1991; Issue 17:24. http://www.cirp.org/pages/parents/peron1/
[43] Care of Intact Boys Answers to Your Questions About Your Young Son’s Intact Penis Geoffery Falk http://www.cirp.org/pages/parents/care/
[44] Conservative Contemporary Treatment of Phimosis: Alternatives to Radical Circumcision Robert Van Howe, MD, FAAP. http://www.cirp.org/library/treatment/phimosis/
[45] Circumcision in the United States Prevalence, Prophylactic Effects, and Sexual Practice Edward O. Laumann, PhD; Christopher M. Masi, MD; Ezra W. Zuckerman, MA Journal of The American Medical Association Volume 277, Number 13: Pages 1052-1057, April 2, 1997 http://www.cirp.org/library/general/laumann/
[46] United States Circumcision Incidence Geoffery Falk http://www.cirp.org/library/statistics/USA/
[47] Penile Cancer and Circumcision Clark W. Heath, Jr., M.D.; Hugh Shingleton, M.D. Letter from American Cancer Society to American Academy of Pediatrics http://www.cirp.org/library/statements/letters/1996.02:ACS/
[48] Penile cancer, cervical cancer, and circumcision Geoffery Falk http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/cancer/
[49] Electronic responses to: Male circumcision linked to lower rates of cervical cancer Fred Charatan British Medical Journal,27 April 2002; Vol. 324, Page 994 http://bmj.com/cgi/eletters/324/7344/994/a
[50] Rebuttal to another biased study Shonky statistics used to link intactness with cervical cancer Hugh Young http://www.circumstitions.com/Cancer-cervNEJM.html
[51] Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy Edward Wallerstein New York: Springer Publishing; 1980 chapter 13, pages 128, 131 27
[52] Circumcision and Sexually Transmitted Infections Geoffery Falk http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/STD/
[53] Circumcision and HIV Infection: Review of the Literature and Meta-analysis R. S. Van Howe MD FAAP International Journal Of STD and AIDS, Volume 10, Pages 8-16, January 1999 http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/HIV/vanhowe4/
[54] Circumcision Status, HIV Infection and AIDS Geoffery Falk http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/HIV/
[55] Probability of HIV-1 transmission per coital act in monogamous, heterosexual, HIV-1-discordant couples in Rakai, Uganda Ronald H Gray, Maria J Wawer, Ron Brookmeyer, Nelson K Sewankambo, David Serwadda, Fred Wabwire-Mangen, Tom Lutalo, Xianbin Li, Thomas vanCott, Thomas C Quinn, and the Rakai Project Team The Lancet, Volume 357: Pages 1149-1153, 14 April 2001 http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/HIV/gray2/
[56] Unsafe healthcare ”drives spread of African HIV” Press Release, 20 February 2003 The Royal Society of Medicine London, UK http://www.rsm.ac.uk/new/pr126.htm
[57] Expert group stresses that unsafe sex is primary mode of transmission of HIV in Africa Press Release, 14 March 2003 World Health Organization http://www.who.int/mediacentre/statements/2003/statement5/en/
[58] Deadly Needles, Fast Track to Global Disaster Reynolds Holding, William Carlsen San Francisco Chronicle Tuesday, October 27, 1998 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/1...
[59] Circumcision and HIV Hugh Young http://www.circumstitions.com/HIV.html
[60] The importance of ethnicity as a risk factor for STDs and sexual behaviour among heterosexuals Hooykaas C; van der Velde FW; van der Linden MM; van Doornum-GJ; Coutinho-RA (authors probably misinterpreted results, see comment on CIRP) Genitourinary Medicine, Volume 67, Number 5: Pages 378-83, October 1991 http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/STD/hooykaas1/ 28
[61] America Alone in Circumcising Most Newborn Males 82% of the World’s Men are Intact Mary G. Ray, 1997 http://www.mothersagainstcirc.org/majority.htm
[62] Human Subpreputial Collection: Its Nature and Formation Satya Parkash, S. Jeyakumar, K. Subramanyan and S. Chaudhuri The Journal of Urology (Baltimore), Volume 110, Number 2: Pages 211-212, August 1973 http://www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/parkash/
[63] Medicaid Wastes Millions of Tax Dollars on Medically Unnecessary Circumcisions International Coalition for Genital Integrity http://www.themenscenter.com/intact/2001/GIAW4.htm
[64] A Cost-Utility Analysis of Neonatal Circumcision Robert S. Van Howe, MD, MS, FAAP Medical Decision Making, Volume 24 Pages: 584-601, November-December 2004 http://www.cirp.org/library/procedure/vanhowe2004/
[65] Letter from Eileen Marie Wayne, MD British Journal of Urology August 1997 http://www.sexuallymutilatedchild.org/emw2bju.htm
[66] Fetal Erection and its Message to Us Mary S. Calderone, MD Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S. SIECUS Report May-July 1983:9-10 http://www.siecus.org/siecusreport/volume11/11-5.pdf
[67] Genital Pain vs. Genital Pleasure: Why the One and Not the Other? James W. Prescott The Truth Seeker(San Diego) (July/August) 1989;1(3):14-21. http://www.cirp.org/library/psych/prescott2/
[68] Ending Circumcision: Where Sex and Violence First Meet Jeannine Parvati Baker, M.A. Birth Psychology Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health http://www.birthpsychology.com/violence/baker.html
[69] Circumcision and Psychological Harm Dr Janet Menage, MA, MB, ChB. http://norm-uk.org/psycheff.html
[70] Circumcision procedure (Gomco) Patient Care Magazine, March 15, 1978, pp. 82-85. http://www.cirp.org/library/procedure/gomco/ 29
[71] Circumcision Methods (Plastibell) http://www.mothersagainstcirc.org/plastibell.htm
[72] Instruments Used in the Circumcision Industry Tim Hammond http://www.noharmm.org/instruments.htm
[73] Neonatal Circumcision American Medical Association Report 10 of the Council on Scientific Affairs http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/13585.html
[74] Pain of circumcision, pain control Geoffery Falk http://www.cirp.org/library/pain/
[75] The Psychological Impact of Circumcision R. Goldman BJU International, Volume 83 Supplement 1, Pages 93-102, January 1, 1999 http://www.cirp.org/library/psych/goldman1/
[76] Circumcision, Breastfeeding, and Maternal Bonding Geoffery Falk http://www.cirp.org/library/birth/
[77] Effect of Neonanatal Circumcision on Pain Response Anna Taddio, Joel Katz, A Lane Ilersich, Gideon Koren The Lancet, Volume 349 Number 9052: Pages 599-603, March 1, 1997. http://www.cirp.org/library/pain/taddio2/
[78] Psychological, neurological, and sociological impacts of circumcision Geoffery Falk http://www.cirp.org/library/psych/
[79] The Long Term Consequences of How We Are Born Primal Health Michel Odent, M.D. Birth Psychology Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health http://www.birthpsychology.com/primalhealth/primal6.html
[80] A Woman’s Guide to Breastfeeding American Academy of Pediatrics http://www.aap.org/family/brstguid.htm
[81] Excerpts from: The Origins of Human Love and Violence James W Prescott, Ph.D. Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Journal Volume 10, Number 3: Spring 1996, pp. 143-188. http://www.violence.de/prescott/pppj/article.html 30
[82] Position Statement: The Effects of Circumcision on Breastfeeding National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers (NOCIRC) http://www.nocirc.org/statements/breastfeeding.php
[83] The Case Against Circumcision Paul M. Fleiss, MD Mothering: The Magazine of Natural Family Living, Winter 1997, pp. 36-45. http://www.cirp.org/news/1997:Mothering/
[84] Pain and its Effects in the Human Neonate and Fetus K.J.S. Anand, M.B.B.S., D.Phil., and P.R. Hickey, M.D. New England Journal of Medicine. Vol. 317 No 21: Pages 1321-1329, 19 November 1987. http://www.cirp.org/library/pain/anand/
[85] Comparison of Ring Block, Dorsal Penile Nerve Block and Topical Anesthesia for Neonatal Circumcision: A Randomized Controlled Trial Janice Lander, PhD; Barbara Brady-Freyer, MN; James B. Metcalfe, MD, FRCSC; Shermin Nazerali, MPharm; Sarah Muttit, MD, FRCPC. Journal of the American Medical Association Volume 278 No. 24, pages 2157-2162, December 24/31, 1997 http://www.cirp.org/library/pain/lander/
[86] Circumcisers: What drives their knives? Michael Glass http://www.cirp.org/pages/cultural/glass0/
[87] Animal Welfare Act and Regulations United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service National Agricultural Library http://www.nal.usda.gov/awic/legislat/usdaleg1.htm
[88] Male Circumcision: A Legal Affront Christopher Price, M.A. (Oxon) A submission in December 1996 to the Law Commission for England and Wales in response to Consultation Paper Number 139 – Consent in the Criminal Law http://www.cirp.org/library/legal/price-uklc/
[89] Neonatal Pain Cries: Effect of Circumcision on Acoustic Features and Perceived Urgency Fran Lang Porter, Richard H. Miller, and Richard E. Marshal Child Development, 1986, Volume 57, Pages 790-802. http://www.cirp.org/library/pain/porter/
[90] Newborn Pain Cries and Vagal Tone: Parallel Changes in Response to Circumcision Fran Lang Porter, Richard H. Miller, and Richard E. Marshal Child Development 1988, Volume 59, Pages 495-505. http://www.cirp.org/library/pain/porter2/ 31
[91] Psychological Effects of Circumcision Gocke Cansever British Journal of Medical Psychology Vol 38: Pages 321-31. http://www.cirp.org/library/psych/cansever/
[92] Responses to: McFadyen,A. (1998) Children have feelings too. British Medical Journal: 316:1616 http://www.bmj.com/cgi/eletters/316/7144/1616/a
[93] Perinatal Origin of Adult Self-destructive Behavior Jacobson B, Eklund G, Hamberger L, Linnarsson D, Sedvall G, Valverius M Acta Psychiatr Scand, Volume 76, Number 42, Pages 364-371, October 1987. http://www.cirp.org/library/psych/jacobsen1/
[94] Can adverse neonatal experiences alter brain development and subsequent behavior? Anand KJ, Scalzo FM Biology of the Neonate, Volume 77, Number 2: Pages 69-82, February 2000. http://www.cirp.org/library/pain/anand4/
[95] Obstetric care and proneness of offspring to suicide as adults: case-control study B. Jacobson, professor emeritus, and M. Bygdeman, professor British Medical Journal 1998;317:1346-1349 (14 November) http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/317/7169/1346
[96] The Role of Activity in Developing Pain Pathways Maria Fitzgerald and Seullen Walker Proceedings of the 10th World Congress on Pain, Progress in Pain Research and Management Vol. 24 Edited by Jonathan O. Dostrovsky, Daniel B. Carr, and Martin Kaltzenburg IASP Press, Seattle, 2003 http://www.cirp.org/library/pain/fitzgerald2/
[97] A Preliminary Poll of Men Circumcised in Infancy or Childhood T. Hammond BJU International (83, Suppl. 1), pages. 85-92, January, 1999 http://www.noharmm.org/bju.htm
[98] Neonatal Circumcision Reconsidered John Rhinehart Transactional Analysis Journal Volume 29, Number 3, Pages 215-221, July 1999 http://www.cirp.org/library/psych/rhinehart1/
[99] Male neonatal circumcision trauma and brain damage Geoffery Falk http://www.cirp.org/library/psych/brain damage/
[100] McLean Researchers Document Brain Damage Linked to Child Abuse and Neglect http://www.mclean.harvard.edu/PublicAffairs/20001214 child abuse.htm 32
[101] A Biocultural Analysis of Circumcision Ronald S. Immerman and Wade C. Mackey Social Biology 1998, Volume 44, Pages 265-275. http://www.cirp.org/library/psych/immerman2/
[102] Insanity in the American Psychiatric Establishment (author unknown) http://www.math.missouri.edu/ rich/MGM/insane.html
[103] The Compulsion to Repeat the Trauma: Re-enactment, Revictimization, and Masochism Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD Psychiatric Clinics of North America, Volume 12, Number 2, Pages 389-411, June 1989 http://www.cirp.org/library/psych/vanderkolk/
[104] Doctor Dangers (in childbirth) Compiled by Leilah McCracken BirthLove, The Revolutionary Passion of Mothering (access requires membership) http://www.birthlove.com/pages/doctor dangers.html
[105] The Future of Suicide Primal Health Michel Odent, M.D. Birth Psychology Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health http://www.birthpsychology.com/primalhealth/primal9.html
[106] A Brief Economic Overview of Psychiatric Practice http://www.math.missouri.edu/ rich/MGM/psychonomics.html
[107] ”Look at these hands” Deeper Into Circumcision: An Invitation to Awareness Third International Symposium on Circumcision University of Maryland, May 22-25, 1994 http://www.sexuallymutilatedchild.org/hands.htm
[108] American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force on Circumcision Circumcision Policy Statement - 1999 Pediatrics, Volume 103, Number 3, Pages 686-693, March 1, 1999 http://www.cirp.org/library/statements/aap1999/
[109] Protection of Infant Boys from Wrongful Circumcision in American Hospitals A Guide for Parents George Hill http://www.cirp.org/pages/parents/protection/
[110] Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) UN General Assembly http://www.cirp.org/library/ethics/UN-human/ 33
[111] Convention on the Rights of the Child U.N. General Assembly Document A/RES/44/25 (12 December 1989) with Annex http://www.cirp.org/library/ethics/UN-convention/
[112] UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cat.html
[113] Male Non-therapeutic Circumcision Male and Female Circumcision: Medical, Legal, and Ethical Considerations in Pediatric Practice (Denniston GC, Hodges FM and Milos MF eds.) Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 1999, New York; 425-454 http://www.cirp.org/library/legal/price2/
[114] Therapeutic and Non-Therapeutic Medical Procedures: What are the Distinctions? Margaret A. Somerville Health Law in Canada, vol. 2, no. 4, 1981, pages 85-90. http://www.cirp.org/library/legal/somerville1981/
[115] The Ashley Montagu Resolution to End the Genital Mutilation of Children Worldwide Petition To The World Court, the Hague James W. Prescott, Ph.D. Adopted by the Fourth International Symposium on Sexual Mutilations, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland, August 9-11, 1996. http://montagunocircpetition.org/
[116] Attorneys for the Rights of the Child http://www.arclaw.org
[117] US Constitution: Amendment 14, Section 1: Citizen rights not to be abridged http://www.law.emory.edu/FEDERAL/usconst/amend.html#14sec-1
[118] Circumcision Lawsuits http://circumvent.org/Lawsuits.htm
[119] Medical Journal Articles from 1969 to 1998 Documenting The Use of Human Foreskins in Medical, Pharmaceutical, and Other Commercial Enterprises http://www.sexuallymutilatedchild.org/fibro.htm
[120] Foreskins For Sale http://www.sexuallymutilatedchild.org/f4sale.htm
[121] Similarities in Attitudes and Misconceptions toward Infant Male Circumcision in North America and Ritual Female Genital Mutilation in Africa Hanny Lightfoot-Klein http://www.fgmnetwork.org/intro/mgmfgm.html 34
[122] To Mutilate in the Name of Jehovah or Allah Sami A. Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh http://www.cirp.org/library/cultural/aldeeb1/
[123] FGM vs. MGM http://www.angelfire.com/ca5/intact/fgm.html
[124] Contrasting American Association of Pediatrics positions on FGM and MGM Hugh Young http://www.circumstitions.com/AAP.html
[125] Male Genital Mutilation: Feminist Study of a Muted Gender Issue Seham Abd el Salam, Cairo, June 1999 http://www.noharmm.org/muted.htm
[126] The Geography of Genital Mutilations James DeMeo The Truth Seeker, (San Diego) pp 9-13, July/August 1989 http://noharmm.org/geography.htm
[127] World Incidence of Genital Mutilation - Maps Hugh Young http://www.circumstitions.com/Maps.html
[128] CIRCUMCISION: A Riddle of American Culture Reed D. Riner, Ph.D. Presented at The First International Symposium on Circumcision, Anaheim, California, March 1-2, 1989. http://www.nocirc.org/symposia/first/riner.html
[129] Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence James W Prescott, Ph.D. The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists”, November 1975, pages 10-20 http://www.violence.de/prescott/bulletin/article.html
[130] Injections Temporarily Turn Slacker Monkeys into Model Workers Alan Zarembo Los Angeles Times August 12, 2004 Originally at: http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-workaholic12aug12.story, now archived at: http://www.math.missouri.edu/ rich/MGM/oldrefs/www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sciworkaholic12aug12. story
[131] From A Distance: Mass murder, sex and paradise Naomi Ragen Jerusalem Post, September 6, 2001 Originally at: http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/09/06/Columns/Columns.34250.html, 35 now archived at: http://www.math.missouri.edu/ rich/MGM/oldrefs/www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/09/06/Columns/Columns.34250.txt
[132] Extracts from: The Guide of the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides Translated by Shlomo Pines University of Chicago, 1963. http://www.cirp.org/library/cultural/maimonides/
[133] Emergence: From Chaos to Order John H. Holland 1999 Perseus Press
[134] Investigations Stuart A. Kauffman 2000 Oxford University Press
[135] Signs of Life Richard Sol´e and Brian Goodwin 2000 Basic Books
[136] The Neurobiology of Child Abuse Martin H. Teicher, Scientific American, March 2002, pages 68-75 http://www.nospank.net/teicher2.htm
[137] Excerpts from Presentation by Dr. James Prescott Panel on NIH Research on Anti-Social, Aggressive and Violence-Related Behaviors and Their Consequences Center for Science Policy Studies, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, 9/93 Birth Psychology Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health http://www.birthpsychology.com/violence/prescott.html
[138] Study twelve years of ”secret” history on google’s archive of misc.activism.progressive (of which I’m a moderator) at http://groups.google.com/groups?group=misc.activism.progressive for an idea of what I’m talking about. The disconnect between public perception and independently verifiable reality borders on mind control. For example, search m.a.p for ”cia torture” (without the quotes) or ”cia drugs”, or ”stockwell”, ”mcgehee”, ”ruppert”, ”palast”, ”tailwind”, ”northwood”, ”brzezinski”, ”9/11”, ”Prescott Bush” or ”voting machines”. Also see: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/02 11 02 lucy.html, http://www.math.missouri.edu/ rich/911/ and http://www.ratical.org/. Welcome to the Matrix.
[139] The Political Consequences of Child Abuse Alice Miller The Journal of Psychohistory V. 26, N. 2, Fall 1998 http://www.geocities.com/kidhistory/politica.htm 36
[140] Immigrants go from Health to Worse Bruce Bower Science News September 19, 1998 http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn arc98/9 19 98/fob1.htm
[141] Immigration Blues: Born in the USA: Mental-health deficit Bruce Bower Science News Dec. 18, 2004 http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20041218/fob2.asp
[142] Medicalized Birth Trauma http://www.math.missouri.edu/ rich/MGM/birthUSA3.txt
[143] Mental Illness Strikes Babies, Too (an exercise in iatrocyclic medicine) Randy Dotinga HealthDayNews April 16, 2003 http://www.drkoop.com/newsdetail/93/512690.html (Thanks to Dave Ratcliffe for htmlizing and giving this paper its first home on www.ratical.org, the most visionary site on the web) In memory of John A. Erickson, a tireless child- and future-rights activist. See his website at www.sexuallymutilatedchild.org This document is online at: http://www.math.missouri.edu/ rich/MGM/primer.html Note: Due to the dynamic nature of the internet, some of the above referenced links may become invalid over time. I will attempt to keep them updated, but you should be able to find them archived (along with much of the rest of the web) at http://www.archive.org/ 37

Doubleday's Vaccine Additive Offer

On January 29, 2001, Jock Doubleday offered $20,000 to the first U.S. licensed medical doctor or pharmaceutical company CEO to publicly drink a mixture of standard vaccine additive ingredients.

The $20,000 offer had no takers.


On August 1, 2006, Doubleday increased the offer to $75,000.

The $75,000 offer had no takers.


On June 1, 2007, Doubleday added a monthly increase of $5,000.

As of Feb 1, 2010, the offer stands at $240,000.


The offer will continue to increase by $5,000 per month until an M.D. or pharmaceutical company CEO, or any of the relevant members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (including liaison representatives, ex officio members, chairman, and executive secretaries, see the list of eligible ACIP candidates), agrees to drink a body-weight calibrated dose of the vaccine additives that doctors routinely inject into children in the name of health.

This offer has no expiration date unless superseded by a similar offer of higher remuneration.

Note: Doubleday recently added Lawrence Kaplow to the list of eligible participants. Lawrence Kaplow is a writer and executive story editor of the House M.D. episode "Paternity," in which the main character states that avoiding childhood vaccines is akin to starting a baby-coffin business.



Jock Doubleday is the director of Natural Woman, Natural Man, Inc., a California 501(c)3 Nonprofit Corporation. Contact Doubleday at: director@spontaneouscreation.org


Standard Vaccine Additive Ingredients entails ingredients and additive ingredients, other than the active agent(s), standard and present in vaccines, including, but not necessarily limited to: sodium ethylmercurithiosalicylate (or thimerosal, a mercury derivative - still in many vaccines in trace amounts), propylene glycol (aka polyethylene glycol, one type of antifreeze), phenol (a disinfectant dye), phenol red, formaldehyde (a preservative and disinfectant), ammonium sulfate, aluminum hydroxide, aluminum phosphate, benzethonium chloride, polysorbate 20, polysorbate 80, sorbitol, polyribosylribitol, MRC5 proteins, betapropiolactone, neomycin, neomycin sulfate, streptomycin, polymyxin, polymyxin B, amphotericin B, gentamicin sulfate, tri(n)butylphosphate,freeze-dried polysaccharide antigens (from Neisseria meningitidis), monosodium glutamate (MSG), potassium monophosphate, potassium diphosphate, human serum albumin, washed sheep red blood cells, porcine (pig) pancreatic hydrolysate of casein, embryonic fluid (chicken egg), hydrolyzed gelatin (calf and cattle skins, cattle bones and pork skin), calf serum, fetal bovine serum, fetal rhesus diploid cells (FRhL-2 cell line), African green monkey kidney heteroploid cells (Vero cell line), and human diploid cells (human foetal tissue), in the forms and proportions standard in the vaccines in question.

Isn't It Poisonous? Breastfeeding During Pregnancy

by Veronika Sophia Robinson
Founder and Editor of The Mother Magazine
posted with permission


Paul, Bethany [my daughter] and I were in a town hall one evening, when one of the mediums there for a psychic event pointed me out and said that another baby was coming along. "No chance," I thought. "I'm breastfeeding on cue." Natural fertility and all that, I thought smugly.

Idjeeeeet! Breastfeeding is a great natural contraception when you exclusively breastfeed.
If there's more than a six hour gap between breastfeeds, even on occasion, and your menstrual cycle or some bleeding has returned, then breastfeeding is not an effective contraceptive.

Interestingly, in a lot of cultures where the claim for breastfeeding as a contraceptive is derived, couples tend not to have sex in the first two years after their baby's birth. This paints a rather different picture to 'exclusive' breastfeeding being a natural contraceptive. These cultures hold the breastfeeding relationship sacred, and abstain from sex. Interestingly, tandem nursing in indigenous cultures is also rare, because abstinence naturally leads to a greater age gap between children. Most modern western women tend to have sex soon after giving birth, don't feed on cue, and are well nourished - so they can easily become pregnant again, as well as nurse through pregnancy and sustain two or more children at the breast.

Bethany had been eating a few different fruits, so was no longer exclusively breastfed at 15 months. I had one menstrual cycle, then *bingo*.

It was once Eliza had made herself known, that a friend urged me to contact La Leche League, the international breastfeeding support group, promising me I'd find like-minded people there. I thought I'd give it a go. It was life-changing in so many ways.

I soon learned there was no need to wean Bethany, and as long as we were both happy to continue the breastfeeding relationship, she could suckle right through pregnancy.

Funny what you learn from other people along the way though. "Isn't it poisonous for her to receive your breast milk when you're pregnant?" was just one of the many questions I fielded. Where on earth would anyone get an idea like that?

Bethany suckled away throughout my pregnancy. Near the end of gestation, however, my milk dried up, and I found her suckling excruciating. She didn't seem at all bothered by the lack of milk, though of course it's possible that she was extracting something, and I just didn't have the same ability when squeezing it out myself. Paul was invaluable at keeping her amused so I could get plenty of rest and relaxation.

The drying up of milk in pregnancy is very common. So common, that many toddlers use this time to self-wean. Not my Bethany. Perhaps she knew what liquid gold was in store for her.

I believe the number one reason for a child weaning during the first few years of life, or in pregnancy, is because she energetically picks up her mother's discomfort and resentment at sustained breastfeeding. There's a lot of pressure on the child, from other people, to wean. In a place 'beyond' words, the child is hearing that breastfeeding is no longer acceptable.

One of my favorite images is of Bethany breastfeeding while I labored in the birthing pool. It looked like we were both having a bit of fun in the spa! Bethany was 22 months old. In retrospect, she was such a little girl, and it must have really knocked her world upside down to have a baby come along then. Bethany's toddlerhood benefited enormously from the continuation of our breastfeeding relationship.

Eliza's birth was not the idyllic waterbirth at home that we'd planned. Instead, I was told it was illegal to have a home-birth in New Zealand if you're more than ten days past your due date. Ironically, it wasn't until Eliza's fourth birthday that I found out that this is untrue, and a midwife's own policy can be over-ridden. Any policy can be overridden by a parent signing a disclaimer - taking responsibility, in writing, and accepting the outcome. Take back your power and do what you feel is right, rather than what you're told you 'should be doing'.

We went into hospital against my better judgment; my waters were artificially ruptured. Hindsight has a reputation for being a wonderful thing! As soon as you interfere with birth you're asking for problems. Birth doesn't like to be told what to do. My baby wasn't ready, and I knew it. I should have stuck to my guns, and refused consent. But I didn't.

Eliza presented with shoulder dystocia. (Her shoulder got stuck coming out of the birth canal). All ten pounds and four ounces of her were put in my arms. She was blue. We ended up in NICU for a variety of reasons, which, looking back, was unnecessary; and a lot of it was to do with unacceptable mistakes made by the 'experts' at the resuscitation table. The next few days were a steep learning curve, as we endured the world of plastic cribs, and staff that seemed hell-bent on giving every baby in sight fake milk, despite having 'Breastfeeding Friendly' posters over all the
walls.

Although many women have fed a toddler over their large belly while growing a new baby, a lot don't continue breastfeeding when finding themselves pregnant again, because, aside from books at La Leche League and other breastfeeding support groups, there's very little information available.

We don't tend to see breastfeeding in pregnancy, for the simple reason that most women who are still breastfeeding after infancy, usually stop breastfeeding in public.

What does the toddler gain from breastfeeding in pregnancy? This seems to be top of the question list. As soon as most people see a kid walking, or wearing shoes, or worse, talking, they can't reconcile that with breastfeeding. A toddler has every bit as much to gain from breastfeeding as an infant. Physically, they receive an immunological boost from every breastfeed. They continue to develop their jaw and facial muscles in a way that doesn't happen with bottle-feeding. Weaning before the age of two increases the risk of illness (1-7). Breastfeeding helps a toddler adjust to life with a new sibling, by them being included in the breastfeeding process.

There is no scientific evidence whatsoever to suggest that breastfeeding in pregnancy causes
harm to mother or baby. Some people are concerned that the nipple stimulation of breastfeeding
in pregnancy might lead to contractions. There is again, absolutely no evidence, scientific or anecdotal, to suggest labor being brought on early by this. As you're eating nutritious foods and resting well, there's absolutely no reason why you can't breastfeed, grow a baby and nurture your own body.

If you're concerned about anemia, please avoid resorting to a doctor's prescription for iron tablets. Apart from not being natural, they'll make you constipated, which is the last thing you need. Try dried apricots, or have a spoon of organic, unsulphured blackstrap molasses each day. Either off the spoon or blended with rice milk and a banana.

Other natural sources of iron include:
split peas
cooked lentils
hummus
kidney, adzuki, pinto, white and black-eyed beans
tahini
almond butter
uncooked quinoa
tomatoes
kale
potatoes (keep the skin on!)
broccoli
peas
nori seaweed
hijiki seaweed
prunes
apricots
blackstrap molasses
tofu
iron fortified cereals
cashews
sesame seeds
oat & wheat bran
figs
hazelnuts
almonds

How commonly we accept toddlers being pacified by blankies, dummies and plastic bottles, yet the situation where a child has these needs met naturally through full-term breastfeeding leads to cultural disgust.

The most obvious and natural place to gain nutrition and nurturing is at our mother's breast. Children don't forfeit their independence because they weaned naturally - far from it. Knowing their relationship with mother is secure, gives them a firm footing in the world. It's often quoted that breastfed children have a higher IQ than their artificially-fed peers. There's a good reason for this, which I've elaborated on in my book chapter, "Who's the Dummy?"

Emotional intelligence is more important, in many ways, than intellectual strength. Our children receive many gifts from being breastfed; and certainly with more long term breastfeeding, we see that children have a higher self-esteem, and a sense of being accepted and valued. In our arms they learn intimacy, the most valuable gift for relationships. We provide them with warmth and comfort.



References

1) American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Breastfeeding. Breastfeeding and the Use of Human Milk. Pediatrics. Feb 2005;115(2): 496-50.

2) The American Academy of Family Physicians. Position Paper on Breastfeeding. 2001.

3) Dettwyler KA. A Natural Age of Weaning.

4) Dettwyler KA."A Time to Wean" from Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives, 1995.

5) Novello A, MD, US Surgeon General, "You Can Eat Healthy," Parade Magazine (11 Nov 1990): 5.

6) World Health Organization. Global strategy on infant and young child feeding. 16 April 2002.

7) World Health Organization. Innocenti Declaration: World Declaration and
Plan of Action for Nutrition. Rome, December 1992.

Facebook to Ban Breastfeeding Advocacy Group for "Obscenity"

Cassie nurses her son, Nathan, on Florida's Panama City Beach, June 2008

PRESS RELEASE

For immediate release

FACEBOOK TO BAN BREASTFEEDING ADVOCACY GROUP FOR "OBSCENITY"

Lactivist group faces termination from Facebook after "embarrassing" the social networking site in a high profile media awareness campaign last year.

The group of nearly 250,000 members faces threats of removal after a media blitz that chastised the social networking site for its draconian policies toward breastfeeding mothers. The campaign, which garnered national and international attention in over 25 languages from various media outlets around the world, was featured on CNN, CBS News and the Dr. Phil Show among others. Members believe the current threat is directly related to the embarrassment caused to Facebook’s bosses.

Administrators of the group, Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding is Not Obscene! (Official petition to Facebook), were told by the social networking site that the group was in violation of copyright infringement policies. When pressed for details by the group’s admin, Facebook responded by changing the accusation to say the group was posting nudity or sexually explicit material and sending harassing messages to members.

Ms. Joseph says she believes the harassment is due to the social networking site being embarrassed that such a large number of people are against their policies of branding breastfeeding photos as "sexually explicit content."

"We have no idea what they are talking about and they refuse to explain the charges," said Gillian Joseph, an administrator of the group, living in Edinburgh, Scotland. "We checked our pages but cannot see any copyright infringements, and we've certainly sent no harassing messages. Now they are saying it's because we're uploading obscene photos."

The support and advocacy group, which boasts close to 250,000 members from all over the world, wishes to normalize the sight of breastfeeding mothers and children. It currently contains over 4,500 discussion threads on parenting topics, and over 5,700 photos – though many of these have already been removed by Facebook.

"To shut the group down would not only end valuable support, but give a message to the world that breastfeeding babies are somehow obscene. It's just absurd,” said Debra Balcaen, a Winnipeg resident and administrator of the group.

"It is unfortunate and hypocritical that Facebook's administration has targeted this breastfeeding advocacy group for alleged violations when at the same time they happily endorse sexually explicit material from third party applications and paid advertisements."

Note To Editors:

Initial emails from Facebook were sent on 2/2/10 to the administrators of the group. All responses were handled by Gill Joseph, and the full email exchange can be provided upon request.

During previous campaigns, articles about the group have been featured in The Washington Post and Fox News in the United States, in The Guardian and The Times in the U.K., and in The Globe and Mail and The Ottawa Citizen in Canada.

The group has administrators in Canada, the U.S., UK and Australia who can be contacted on request, but main contacts for media purposes are:

Gill Joseph
email: kamagrian@blueyonder.co.uk
phone: +44 7800 987 844 +44 7800 987 844

Stephanie Muir
email: babieslovemilk@yahoo.ca
phone: +1 613 761 9109 +1 613 761 9109

Please note that email may be a better first contact choice, as both women are professionals and mothers of young children themselves.

Emma and her husband, Seb, at the Montréal Breastfeeding Challenge in October 2008, with their daughters. Their photo appeared in the Journal de Montréal, a major newspaper in a city of 3.5 million. Emma wonders, "If Montrealers can handle it, then why can't Facebook?"

Folic Acid BEFORE Pregnancy

by Danelle Frisbie


I was recently surprised to find that only 7% of women polled in OB/GYN clinics were aware that folic acid should be taken for 30-90 days before becoming pregnant. This same time frame holds true for healthy sperm production if you are trying to become pregnant. When a father-to-be stops smoking, limits or stops alcohol use, starts taking vitamins and eating right, exercising, and making other health-conscious choices, his sperm development and integrity are impacted as well. It is wise to implement these choices for both men and women at least 90 days before trying to conceive. This appears to be the best way to ensure healthy sperm, mature vial eggs, and an optimal conception and healthy pregnancy.

Having a healthy baby means making sure you are healthy, too. And one important thing you can do to help prevent serious birth defects in your baby is to get enough folic acid every day - especially before conception and during early pregnancy.

What Is Folic Acid?

Folic acid, sometimes called folate, is a B vitamin (B9) found mostly in green leafy vegetables like kale and spinach, oranges, and enriched grains (some whole grain cereals). Repeated studies have shown that women who get 400 micrograms (0.4 milligrams) daily prior to conception and during early pregnancy reduce the risk that their baby will be born with a serious neural tube defect (a birth defect involving incomplete development of the brain and spinal cord) by up to 70%.

The most common neural tube defects are spina bifida (an incomplete closure of the spinal cord and spinal column), anencephaly (severe underdevelopment of the brain), and encephalocele (when brain tissue protrudes out to the skin from an abnormal opening in the skull). All of these defects occur during the first 28 days of pregnancy - usually before a woman even knows she's pregnant.

For this reason it is so important for all women of childbearing age to get enough folic acid - not just those who are planning to become pregnant - but anyone who may potentially become pregnant. Because only 50% of all pregnancies are planned, any woman who could become pregnant may want to fill her plate with green leafy veggies and snack on oranges on a regular basis.

Researchers still are not sure why folic acid has such a profound effect on the prevention of neural tube defects, but they do know that this vitamin is crucial in the development of DNA. As a result, folic acid plays a large role in cell growth and development, as well as tissue formation.

Getting Enough Folic Acid

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that all women of childbearing age - and especially those who are planning a pregnancy - consume about 400 micrograms (0.4 milligrams) of folic acid every day. Adequate folic acid intake is especially important 30 days before conception and at least 90 days after to reduce the potential risk of having a baby with a neural tube defect.

So, how can you make sure you're getting enough folic acid?

In 1998, the Food and Drug Administration mandated that folic acid be added to enriched grain products - so you can boost your intake by looking for breakfast cereals, breads, pastas, and rice containing 100% of the recommended daily folic acid allowance. For many women, however, the fortified foods in their diet isn't enough. To reach the recommended daily level, you may want a vitamin supplement.

During pregnancy, you require more of all of the essential nutrients than you did before you became pregnant - after all, you're growing another human! This does not mean you need double the calories, but you do need more nutrients and minerals. The best advice I've heard is to "eat to taste" - i.e. listen to what your body (and your baby) is telling you it needs. And then make smart choices to meet these needs.

Use the natural sugars in fruits or honey or pure maple syrup or milled flax, to satisfy cravings for sweets. Use seasoned vegetables and salt to taste when you are craving something salty. Try a locally-made, Stonyfeild, or other organic brand of natural yogurt or ice cream when you need something smooth and creamy. Munch on nuts and seeds and raw vegetables and fruits when you need the 'crunch'.

Prenatal vitamins should not replace a well-balanced diet - we get far more benefits from consuming whole foods in their natural forms, with their nutrient-rich vitamins and minerals, than we do from manufactured vitamins. However, taking prenatal vitamins can give your body - and, therefore, your baby - a cushion of protection of these essentials in case any are lacking from the foods you consume. Many health care providers now recommend taking a folic acid supplement in addition to your regular prenatal vitamin. Even if there are days (post-conception) where 'morning sickness' gets the best of you and the prenatal vitamins are too much to handle, a folic acid supplement is easier to pop. There is typically no problem in taking a prenatal vitamin every other day, or even every 3 days, with a folic acid supplement on the days in between.

One of the best folic acid supplements I've found for women who suffer with morning sickness (or anyone interested in an 'easy' folic acid tablet) is Trader Joe's dissolving B6/B12/Folic Acid, pictured above. These are tiny little tablets that dissolve quickly and effortlessly in your mouth. No swallowing necessary. Ubber quick, easy, and 'painless' - even on those days when your stomach tells you otherwise. If you have a Trader Joe's near you, check them out. Or, have a friend mail you a bottle - they are worth the $1.30 in postage and one small bottle contains enough for your first 100 days. Other whole foods and health stores likely offer a similar product - ask at Whole Foods, Heritage (VA Beach), Roots (Cedar Falls), or your local health supply vendor.

In addition to folic acid, research suggests that consuming adequate amounts of omega-3 (an essential fatty acid) is important to optimal pregnancy health and the development of baby (especially his brain!). While you are shopping around, grab a bottle of organic krill or fish oil capsules, or similar product, and some organic milled flax seed (to throw in and on everything you cook). Implement these items into your daily routine as well -- both before and after conception -- to ensure you are getting the omega-3 you and baby needs.


Note: Two recent meta-analysis studies related to the levels of Vitamin A in cod liver oil suggest that this particular form of omega-3 is not ideal (as I previously was in the habit of recommending and taking daily myself). Dr. Mercola, who also long-supported the use of cod liver oil for omega-3, discusses his revised recommendation here.


For additional information on measures you can take before pregnancy to ensure an optimally healthy conception, gestation, and baby, see Ogle's excellent book, Before Your Pregnancy: A 90 Day Guide for Couples on How to Prepare for a Healthy Conception.

2010 MGM Demonstration/March in Washington

2010 Schedule of Events

17th Annual Demonstration and March
Against Infant Circumcision
United States Capitol - Washington. D.C.
March 26th - April 1st, 2010

~

March 26th - April 1st, 2010
US Capitol Demonstration
West Lawn of the US Capitol
Daily from 9:00am till dusk.

4:00pm March 30th, 2009
March from the US Capitol to the White House

~

March 30th, 1997 the U.S. Female Genital Mutilation Bill took full effect.
This will be the 13th anniversary of girls being protected by federal law from any form of genital cutting for non-medical necessity.

March 28th-April 3rd is Genital Integrity Awareness Week.
April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month.

~

We have plenty of banners and signs to carry during the march or to display while at the Capitol.
If you have something you'd like to say, feel free to bring it along.
We'll also have extra placard material and markers here with us.


Some attendees will be staying at the Best Western Capitol Skyline:

Best Western Capitol Skyline Hotel
10 I Street SW
Washington, DC 20024-4299
United States
Phone: (202)488-7500
Fax: 202-488-0790


email to inquire about where others will be staying if you'd like to book at the same location

~

Two important things we can do are to educate and demonstrate.
We make efforts to educate on a daily basis.
We must also demonstrate to further the awareness of this issue.

Join Us!

The FGM Bill was enacted on September 30, 1996, and prohibits female genital mutilation (FGM) of minors, also known as female circumcision.

The criminalization subsection took effect 180 days after the date of enactment - March 30, 1997. For this reason, it is generally recognized as the effective date of the FGM Bill.

We need to use this day to ask our lawmakers to eliminate the sexist exclusion of male minors from this law and to provide all non-consenting human beings protection from genital cutting without medical need.



A few photos from last year:

The cherry blossoms will be blooming...
It's the perfect time to venture to D.C.

Everyone, all ages, welcome!

Good chats with great people on the grassy lawn in front of the Capitol

See you in D.C.!

email: IntactInternational@gmail.com with questions

FREE SHIPPING on Tshirts & Onesies

Hi All!

Just wanted to let you all know that the fabulous company, Spreadshirt, who makes these t-shirts, onesies, etc. for men, women, kids and babies, has FREE SHIPPING from now till Feb 10th on any order of $35. It's a great deal and they are wonderful items - good quality, look great, and stand up nicely to many washes. We've ordered oodles of these items for ourselves and gifts and have always been pleased.

The women's sizes tend to run just a tad smaller than 'average' - so if you typically wear a size Large (and are ordering an adult shirt) you may want an XL. The men's sizes seem to be average. For toddlers - our son usually wears size 2T, but I've purchased 3T and 4T for him from this site and they work great - with a little room to spare. The onesies tend to be about average in size, and are listed with measurements as well.

Items on this page are just a sampling of what you'll find. There are several categories to browse (Breastfeeding, Birth, Attachment Parenting, Diapers, Intactivism, CoSleeping, Babywearing, etc., or you can 'search all categories' at once.)

If you need a color/phrase/style you don't see, let me know and I will pass along the word. While I do not make, sell, or ship these items, I do help to organize those that are related to Attachment Parenting so they are more easily found.

Email: peacefulparents@gmail.com with ideas/suggestions.

SALE CODES FOR FREE SHIPPING (Through Feb 10th) ARE:

United States: FEBSALE
Canada: CADFEBSALE

*If at any time the above code does not work,
for your Free Shipping use this one:
United States: FEBSALE2
Canada: CADFEBSALE2

Put in the code at checkout.

And send us a picture when you get a chance. We love to see our birth and babies activists in action!

What is done to children...

What is done to children,

They will do to society.

~ Karl Menninger

Thanks to Jamie and Nick for putting these 2 powerful images together. One of the men who created this image is intact, the other was cut against his will at birth. BOTH are gentle, good men, active in working toward a more peaceful world for everyone.

The original version of this image, by the late John Erickson, can be viewed here.

Why are these images being displayed as Erickson once did with his?

"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr

Nothing is more destructive to gentle parenting and a peaceful world than the complete disregard for the basic human right of bodily integrity of a helpless newborn baby.

Are we saying all babies subject to genital mutilation grow up to commit violent acts against others? To perpetuate what was done to them?

No.

Does the overall violence done to boys have an impact on male culture, expectations, and the way boys and men are socialized?

Absolutely.

There are multiple levels to both crimes pictured here. And there are many social scientists who have demonstrated the two (male violence and violence done TO males) are directly related to each other.

This is a SOCIAL ILL.

It does not mean that parents who've chosen circumcision are inherently 'bad' -- in fact, there are many wonderful, loving parents who allowed their son(s) to be cut before they had accurate and complete information. Today, they are bravely and honestly working to make the world a more peaceful place for the men and women who come after them. To enable their sons to make different choices for their grandsons.

It is because this occurs daily in U.S. culture that we cannot remain silent on the issue. It must be brought to light. It is an urgent, pressing issue that needs attention NOW.

Human babies are just as valuable as adult humans, and are equally deserving of protection from assault under law.

For further information on male violence in society, see any of the phenomenal research by Dr. Jackson Katz.

For Hygeia Halfmoon's thoughts on this subject, see her post, Cutting Boys Cuts to the Core.

For more from Jamie, see his videos in Circumcision Take 3.

To become FULLY informed on the subject of circumcision, check out any and all of the resources on the subject. Here is a page of listings with books, sites, and articles on the topic.

Idle Parenting: Leaving Kids Alone

by Tom Hodgkinson

posted with permission

An unhealthy dose of the work ethic is threatening to wreck childhood. Under a tyrannical work-obsessed government, years that should be devoted to play and joyful learning are being stifled by targets and tests. Leisure time is being invaded by the commercial and escapist virtual worlds of the computer.

Pushy parents don't help by making childhood a stress-filled time of striving and competing.

Our children's days are crammed full with activities: ballet, judo, tennis, piano, sport, art projects. At home they are entertained by giant screens and computers. In between, they are strapped into cars and made to listen to educational tapes. Ambitious mothers force hours of homework on bewildered 10-year-olds, hanging the abstract fear of "future employers" over their heads.

Then they buy them a Nintendo Wii, the absurd, costly gadget that's supposed to bring some element of physicality to computer games. It's only a matter of time before children have their own BlackBerrys.

I think of the New Yorker cartoon of two kids in a playground, each staring at a personal organiser and one saying: "I can fit you in for unscheduled play next Thursday at four." All these activities impose a huge burden of cost and time on the already harried parent. They leave no room for simply mucking about. They have the other unwelcome side effect of making the children incapable of looking after themselves. When they are stimulated by outside agencies, whether that be course leader, computer or television, they lose the ability to create their own games. They forget how to play.

I recall when our eldest child, a victim of chronic over-stimulation by his anxious parents, screamed "I need some entertainment!" during a bored moment. A chilling comment, particularly from a five-year-old. What now? What next? These are the questions our hyper-stimulated kids will ask. What has happened to their own imagination?

There is a way out of this over-zealous parenting trap, a simple solution that will make your life easier and cheaper. It will make your kids' lives more enjoyable and also will help to produce happy, self-sufficient children, who can create their own lives without depending on a Mummy substitute. I call it idle parenting and our mantra is: "Leave them alone."

The welcome discovery that a lazy parent is a good parent took root when I read the following passage from a DH Lawrence essay, Education of the People, published in 1918: "How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning."

To the busy modern parent, this idea seems counter-intuitive. Aren't we always told to do more, not less? All parents have a nagging sense that somehow we are doing it all wrong and that more work needs to be done. But the problem is that we put too much work into parenting, not too little. By interfering a lot, we are not letting children grow up and learn themselves. The child who has been overprotected will not know how to look after himself. We are too much in children's faces. We need to retreat. Let them live.

Welcome to the school of inactive parenting. It's a win-win situation: less work for you and better for the child, both in terms of enjoying everyday life and also for self-reliance and independence. I am not advocating slobbish neglect. (Maybe I went too far with my idle parenting when I dozed off on the sofa in front of the woodburning stove, while "doing the childcare", as the ugly modern phrase has it, to be woken by the screams of a toddler who had placed his hands squarely on the hot metal and burned his fingertips.) Clearly we don't let our children jump out of windows or go about with unchanged nappies. There is carefree and there is careless, and there is a difference.

But to create a household free of care would be a wonderful thing. It has become obvious to me, watching our three children grow up, that the more they have been ignored, the better. The eldest had a surfeit of anxious parental supervision and is still the trickiest and most needy (although we're working on it). The second had a little less attention and she is more self-sufficient. The third was born on the bathroom floor and has had to get on with his own life. And he is perhaps the best of all three at playing. Certainly he is the most comical.

The great thing about children is that they like being busy. Since parents like being lazy, it makes sense for the children to do the work. This idea was partly explored in the 19th century, when children as young as five were sent into the factories. The fact that meddlesome liberals have since introduced child labour laws does not need to prevent the idle parents exploiting their own offspring.

One morning, not so long ago, V and I refused to get up. I imagine we were hung over. At about nine o'clock, the bedroom door swung open and in walked Arthur, then six, with two cups of tea. A lot can be achieved by lying in bed. Simply by doing nothing, you can train children to do useful things. During the last holiday, we found we were lying in bed till 10 or 11. By abandoning our kids, they had taught themselves how to get up, make themselves breakfast and play.

Paradoxically, the idle parent is a responsible parent because at the heart of idle parenting is a respect for the child, a trust in another human being. It is the irresponsible parent who hands the child over to various authorities for its education and care, whether that is childminders, schools, CBeebies or the virtual world of Habbo Hotel. Or it is the parent who tries to impose his own vision on the children and does not simply let them be.

Another great advantage of being idle is that it avoids causing resentment in the parent. There is nothing so corrosive or pestilent as resentment stewing in the breast. Imagine making all those sacrifices, putting yourself out for your children, going without, and then they go junkie on you. No, there is no room for martyrs in the world of the idle parent. Our happiness comes first. And that is the right way round. As a cab driver said to me the other day: "My kids are happy because we're happy." Do not suffer. Enjoy your life.

The idle parent is a stay-at-home parent. Not for us costly leisure pursuits at the weekend. We reject the cheap thrills of expensive padded plastic fun palaces, zoos and days out in general. We find fun in our own backyards. We make aeroplanes out of cereal packets and it's amazing how many catching and tickling games you can play with your kids while sitting on the sofa.

The idle parent is a thrifty parent. We don't work too hard and therefore we can't expect to be rolling in cash. With thrift comes creativity. "Waste is unpoetic, thrift is creative," as GK Chesterton wrote. With no money, you start to discover your own inner resources. You make things and draw. Put a pile of A4 paper on the kitchen table, along with a stapler, scissors, crayons and glue, and you'll be amazed at what your children come up with. Forget digital gewgaws. Go analogue. It's more fun and a lot cheaper. Put a bird feeder outside the kitchen window. Fun does not need to be expensive.

We don't care about status and career advancement and how we are perceived by others. We are free of all of that rubbish. We simply want to enjoy our lives and to give our children a happy childhood. What greater gift could there be from a parent? If our children tell their friends in later life that they enjoyed their childhood, I would count that as a great achievement. Better to have a happy childhood than a high-achieving one that brings a big psychiatrist's bill in adult life.

Idle parents are sociable. We recognise the importance of friends. They lighten the burden. A myth of modern society is the idea that "you're on your own in this world". Instead of talking to friends and neighbours, anxious people seek advice in books, websites and internet forums. We resist asking for help or admitting weakness. Be weak! Give up! You can't do everything. Lower your standards. Get friends to help you. Organise little nurseries at your house where parents can chat and kids can play while you ignore them.

I love DH Lawrence's idea of childcare. He says babies should "be given to stupid fat old women who can't be bothered with them… leave the children alone. Pitch them out into the streets or the playgrounds, and take no notice of them." Do not view them as raw material to be moulded into an obedient slave for the workplace of the future. Let them play. And yes, get your friends around. Life is so much easier when the work is shared. Friends bring laughter and joy. There's no sadder sight than the lone parent, pushing her child around the gloomy municipal park, trying to tell herself that she is having a good time.

My idea of childcare is a large field. At one side is a marquee serving local ales. This is where the parents gather. On the other side, somewhere in the distance, the children play. I don't bother them and they don't bother me. I give them as much freedom as possible.

But the life of an idle parent is not so easy. Children do not always adapt to the anti-consumerist model that the natural parent promotes. They want stuff. Children get in your face. They make a terrible mess. They scream and whine. And the mother and father seem to disagree on pretty much everything, from paint colours to mealtime manners, as a matter of marital policy.

There are more worries. Is it mean to deny a child an iPod Nano for his birthday and instead give him a ball of string and The Dangerous Book for Boys? Should I really put a broadband connection in the tree house? Should I work even harder so that they can go skiing and wear expensive trainers? Would I be less grumpy if I drank less alcohol?

Sometimes we doubt our own gospel. So over the coming weeks, I hope to outline an enjoyable parenting philosophy in Weekend, while acknowledging that it isn't always easy.

I will confess my many parenting errors. I am a disaster-prone, chaotic layabout and so should warn you not to listen to my advice. Certainly my friends say the idea of me advising other parents on childcare is absurd.

With that caveat in mind, let us go forth, throw away the rule books, forget what other people think and enjoy family life and all its joys and woes.

Manifesto of the idle parent

We reject the idea that parenting requires hard work
We pledge to leave our children alone
That should mean that they leave us alone, too
We reject the rampant consumerism that invades children from the moment they are born
We read them poetry and fantastic stories without morals
We drink alcohol without guilt
We reject the inner Puritan
We fill the house with music and laughter
We don't waste money on family days out and holidays
We lie in bed for as long as possible
We try not to interfere
We push them into the garden and shut the door so that we can clean the house
We both work as little as possible, particularly when the kids are small
Time is more important than money
Happy mess is better than miserable tidiness
Down with school
We fill the house with music and merriment

Tom Hodgkinson is editor of The Idler magazine and author of the best-selling How to be Free and How to be Idle.

Supermodel Gisele Bündchen: I Had a Waterbirth at Home Without Pain

by Danelle Frisbie © 2009

While I am not much of a 'star-gazer' myself, it is always beneficial when those in the media do things that shed light on natural and gentle birth and baby-care practices.

Recently, another celebrity mom joins the list of those who have birthed babies peacefully at home. Supermodel, Gisele Bündchen, brought her son, Benjamin, gently into this world via home waterbirth on December 8th. Media headlines rumored that Bündchen had gone into labor and was whisked away to a Boston-area hospital. Rather, she corrects reporters, "I gave birth at home in my bathtub."

Bündchen birthed in a physiological manner - no drugs, no interventions. "I wanted to be conscious and present for what was happening," she said. "I didn't want to be anesthetized. I wanted to feel." Her homebirth team consisted of her husband, Tom Brady, her mother, sisters, and her midwife.

It is part of the gentle wonder of waterbirth (and especially of homebirth) that women everywhere have come to love giving birth in this way - often without pain. This was the case for Bündchen as well. She says her birth "wasn't painful, not even a little bit. The whole time, my head was so focused – every contraction, the baby is closer, the baby is closer. So, it wasn't like, 'Oh, what pain.' It was, 'With every contraction, he is getting closer to me.'" How perfect! Just as birth should be.


After birth 'recovery' was equally as quick for Bündchen as other waterbirth/homebirth moms across the world have found. "The second day, I was walking, I was washing dishes, I was making pancakes in the kitchen."

Prior to birth, Bündchen did not know the sex of her new baby and wanted to keep it a surprise for her birthing day. "I wanted the emotion of finding out [at birth] if it was a boy or a girl,” Bündchen told the press. Although Brady knew they would be welcoming a son, he kept the news to himself at Bündchen's request. "I'm really the only one that knew,” Brady, 32, said. “She's a very intelligent woman. I wanted to find out and she didn’t. So she said, 'Go ahead.' It would be a surprise for her."

The most difficult part of Bündchen's birthing day ended up being the selection of a name for her new son. The couple wanted a name that would sound good in both English and Bündchen's native tongue, Portuguese. Bündchen liked David (pronounced 'Davi') but Brady was not a fan. She also had Joaquim as a selection... but in the end, it was Benjamin that was chosen. Benjamin will also share both last names, and learn of his dual heritage as he grows. "He's also Bündchen, he's not just Brady," notes Bündchen. "And he certainly won't stop being Brazilian." But no matter what life brings the supermodel and her new son, "for me, there is no name. He is my benzinho (beloved)," said Bündchen.

Bündchen, from Três de Maio, Brazil, is currently the highest paid model in the world, and also the 16th wealthiest woman in the entertainment world. This past fall, Bündchen was named a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, and said she was doing her best to maintain a healthy, natural family lifestyle while settling into her new home in the Boston area (where her husband is quarterback for the New England Patriots). A recent reporter described Bündchen as having such, "simplicity and spirituality" that she "shows she has concern with living well, being happy, and now, with being an excellent mom."

'Born at Home' and 'waterbaby'
onesies and tshirts available here

Sleep Training: Higher Stress, Lower Serotonin May Increase SIDS

by Liz DeMar
author of the Hybrid Life blog


I happened to catch the NBC Nightly News this evening where I heard about the latest development in SIDS research. My interest was piqued even before I heard the full story: How would this compare to research done by Dr. James McKenna? What does it mean for those who share sleep (co-sleepers)? What would be the mainstream media response?

According to the study:

“Lower levels of the hormone serotonin may help explain why some infants succumb to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).”

I have a bit of experience with wonky levels of serotonin. In my experience with generalized anxiety disorder, my serotonin levels were negatively impacted following a period of extreme stress. Extreme stress. You know -- like the stress that a baby would feel if his parents laid him in the crib and walked out the door. Like the anxiety that would flood his little body as he wailed and waited for them to come back to him. Like the despair he would feel when they did not.

Could this new research possibly support the theory of a link between "sleep training" and SIDS?

This latest study could be an affirmation of McKenna’s position that babies are safest when they sleep within an arm's reach of their mothers, and breastfeed on cue. Serotonin is a hormone that exists primarily in the gut of a human being. It regulates intestinal movement and operates optimally when 'fed' and cared for. (A hungry baby, for example, will have serotonin levels that are off kilter). Serotonin is also highly responsible for other central nervous system functions - the regulation of mood, sleep, muscle movement, appetite, learning and memory. Serotonin works as a calming hormone in the body, while cortisol (a stress hormone) spikes when distressed.

A co-sleeping baby never experiences this rise of stress hormones (such as cortisol) from being left alone to cry-it-out. Rather, a baby sleeping near his mother feels the security of her body, her warmth, her regulatory breath, right beside him. A co-sleeping baby is happy. Research demonstrates that a co-sleeping baby has natural, normal, regulated levels of serotonin. (1, 2)

Unfortunately, that’s not the way that the mainstream media may present the results. Already we see reactions like this from the medical community:

“I think the message is there is something inherently wrong in some of these babies.”

Really? Is there “something inherently wrong” with these babies?

Or perhaps something inherently wrong with the way we are being taught to parent?

For healthy infant sleep research, see articles here.

For more on the physiological detriments of sleep training, see these resources.

Turn your crib into a co-sleeper and benefit from sharing sleep! Watch this video and see how others have done the same.

References:

1) Gerhardt, S. (2004). Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby's Brain. Brunner-Routledge: New York.

2) Sunderland, M. (2006). The Science of Parenting: How today's brain research can help you raise healthy, happy, emotionally balanced children. DK Publishing: New York.