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May 29, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:31
2985 Government Mandated Circumcision! | True News
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Hi, everybody.
This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
We have Georgiane Chapin.
She is the Executive Director of Intact America and the Secretary for Attorneys for the Rights of the Child.
And please, please go and check out the website at intactamerica.org.
They also have a very strong Facebook presence, which you should check out.
Georgiane, thank you so much for taking the time today.
My pleasure.
So, I was doing some research because, you know, you want to gird your loins in the circumcision topic and make sure you have as many facts as possible.
And it seems, you know, we're very much for anti-spanking, anti-circumcision, bodily, immoral, physical, emotional integrity of the child and so on.
Boy, it seems to be pretty hard to get these numbers down.
It seems to be a very tough battle to remind people how the physical integrity and health of the baby boy is certainly as important as the physical health and integrity of the baby girl.
I'm trying to find the male privilege in all of this, that there are so many people who are working so hard to end female genital mutilation, which is a barbaric practice, but it seems the boys kind of get skipped over in this conversation.
Why do you think that is?
Well, they certainly do.
You know, circumcision in America, which is the only industrialized Western country where it's considered a normal medical intervention, Despite lack of any medical necessity.
Circumcision in America is about 150 years old and it really is so much a part of the medical industrial culture that it really, it's embedded in every aspect of American culture including Prudery and secrecy about sex,
despite the fact that in some ways we talk about sex all the time, but we really don't know very much about sex, including fever service medicine, including a history of medical specialization and the co-optation of childbirth by medical specialists, where it used to be the purview of women and midwives.
So And including, obviously, very strong political pushback from religious, political pushback from religious groups, from the Jewish lobby especially, who I believe fear, and this is not to say individual Jewish people because they are stopping circumcision of their children.
Many of them are not doing that.
But the organized...
I think we're good to go.
then all eyes will really be on ritual circumcision and it won't stand up to any test.
And you can see that when you see the justifications go back and forth between religion, parental preference, parents' rights, doctors know best.
You know, people are scurrying like, you know, cockroaches when you turn on the light at night to find some kind of rationalization and justification for a completely unconscionable and unjustifiable practice.
So you're right.
I'd like to mention, though, you mentioned how difficult it is to get the numbers down.
the numbers have fallen from close to 90 percent 30 years ago 35 years ago to somewhere in the mid 50s and you know that is that is significant what I think is a good analogy though is if you look at what's going on now with same-sex marriage you don't need every individual in the country or 90 percent
or 80%, or even 70%, To have a really strong position against circumcision for it to fall out of favor within the culture.
You need a tipping point.
We don't know exactly what that number is.
But once you get to a certain tipping point of revulsion against the practice of tying down little babies, and that's going to come as people see children who are intact, who are doing just fine, and foreskins are not rising up in the night to strangle and foreskins are not rising up in the night to strangle the inhabitants of a household, people will become used to the idea that a boy with a normal penis is okay and doesn't threaten
So I believe that we're going to see an escalation of awareness against circumcision and an escalation of awareness that the intact male body is a normal phenomenon and an escalation of awareness that most men in the world are not circumcised and they do just fine.
They don't have rampant infections and they're not a risk to the life and health of themselves or others.
So I predict that the numbers will start to come down much quicker over the next, say, six to ten years.
We've seen a huge increase in the number of people talking about this issue.
And anybody who talks about it and comes to the conclusion like, oh, I really hadn't thought about that, but yeah, there's something wrong with it.
They don't go back.
There's no turning back.
They don't call you up the next day and say, you know, I know yesterday I said I thought it was really wrong to tie down a baby boy and cut off part of his penis, but I was thinking about it last night.
I really think that's like, okay.
It doesn't happen.
I think there is, among some people, the fear that there may be negative peer consequences.
You know, the old locker room thing that if you look different.
Now, I mean, I myself was not circumcised and I was around a whole bunch of boys who were circumcised and I can tell you completely frankly, I had never, ever one comment, not one thought, not one possibility of exclusion, not one funny look.
I mean, because first of all, that would be for boys to admit they're looking at other boys' penises, which generally boys are not one to do.
But there's no negative consequences from a social standpoint.
It's just another one of those scurrying cockroach phenomena.
Let's find some reason to...
To put forth for the boy's own good.
You're going to keep him from getting teased.
Well, good luck.
You know, if children are going to tease other children, they're going to find lots of things.
And probably most of the things that they would tease children about would be what would be visible on a daily level.
You know, maybe the silly shirt that someone wore to school or somebody got braces or, you know, what's in another boy's pants or in another girl's pants is...
I agree with you.
Seldom the subject of scrutiny.
No, I never heard a thing.
I was made fun of much more for my fountainhead of the colony's fruity accent than I was for anything that occurred below the belt.
I'd like to get to the law case that is, to me, having looked at government inequity for many years, I still find it pretty shocking.
We'll get to that in a sec.
But to address some of the most common objections that people have towards uncircumcised penises.
And the reality, of course, remember, it's about a third of the skin of the penis that is being removed.
Oh, intact penises.
Yeah, intact penises.
Unmutilated intact penises.
It is a third of the skin that is being taken away.
It is the most sensitive skin that the male body has.
And it is usually done either with a local anesthetic or no anesthetic.
The shock to the child's body registered in cortisol and adrenaline levels is profound and reliably predicts increased stress responses up to six months after the fact.
So it is a massive body trauma that is inflicted upon the baby where the baby has to be held down or tied down.
And of course, because it's a cut on the most sensitive area of the baby's body where there's acidic urine coming out, it remains painful for quite some time.
So, I mean, let's at least be frank about the body trauma that is occurring.
And people say, well, it's worth it because, you know, lower UTIs.
One in three men do get UTIs apparently in the course of a lifetime.
Lower UTIs, lower penile cancer and so on.
I wonder if you could address the cost-benefit analysis that some people seem to bring to the table.
Well, there's no...
There's no cost-benefit analysis that shows that money is saved.
Let's start on the UTI issue.
Yes, there's possibly a slightly lower relative risk, not absolute risk, but instead of 1% of boys getting a urinary tract infection in their first year of life, an intact person.
Among intact boys, perhaps it's 1.1%.
These are made-up numbers, but for simplicity's sake, so it's a marginal difference.
One of the things we know is that a common cause for a UTI or an inflamed penis in an intact child is that parents have been taught incorrectly that they must pull the foreskin back to wash under it.
It's like you have to Peel back someone's fingernail to wash under it.
The foreskin is naturally attached to the head of the penis.
That's called physiologic phimosis.
Phimosis means the foreskin is attached to the penis.
It's totally normal in a child.
So a lot of these are created, a lot of these infections are created by the parents or the doctors or a nurse or a well-meaning somebody else or an ill-meaning somebody else, forcing back the skin on the The child's penis, creating bleeding.
The other thing, of course, that we know is that girls get UTIs also, and that a round of a generic antibiotic for a child's urinary tract infection is probably at most a couple of dollars, and it takes care of the problem right away.
Various parts of our body are susceptible to infection.
Our teeth get...
But we don't pull out our normal teeth in order to prevent cavities.
You don't remove body parts to prevent.
You don't cut off someone's nose and give them a prosthetic because the nose is the most common site of skin cancer.
You just don't remove body parts for that.
As far as penile cancer, it's one of the rarest cancers.
Breast cancer in men is more common than penile cancer in men.
It usually occurs, if at all, and as I said, it's extremely rare, very late in life.
And again, you don't preemptorily cut off a body part to prevent it from becoming sick.
Penile cancer is an insignificant cause of morbidity or death anywhere in the world, but especially not in developed countries.
Again, let's look at The fact that the U.S. is the only country that routinely circumcises baby boys, let's look at countries in Europe, say, where circumcision is very rare, and the rates of urinary tract infections, penile cancer, are the same or lower in those countries.
They have much more to do with other factors.
So those are, again, completely after-the-fact rationalizations.
Again, we don't remove body parts to keep them from From causing us trouble.
Otherwise, we'd be removing a lot of body parts.
All girls' breasts should be removed.
What is the breast cancer rate?
It's very, very high.
We could prevent breast cancer in women if we removed their breasts either in childhood or even post-menopausal or post-childbearing years, but we don't do that.
We consider that a horrifying proposition.
And I've read, and I have no idea about the medical validity of any of these, but there are certain sites that claim that female genital mutilation can provide offshoot health benefits, lower rates of HIV transmission and so on.
But I don't think that any sane person in the world would say, ah, even if we could dig up some minor medical benefits or even significant medical benefits to female genital mutilation, that this would suddenly become an acceptable thing.
That's correct.
And that shows you better than anything else that this is not about...
Not about prevention or medicine.
It's totally cultural.
Imagine proposing a prospective experiment where we remove the inner labia of a thousand girls and we leave the inner labia of another thousand and we watch to see who develops STDs, genital herpes, urinary tract infections.
And what you'll do is, when you see the revulsion that a suggestion like that would mean, or the ridicule that it would mean, you hear things like, well, that wouldn't help anything.
That wouldn't keep, you know, or even if it did, you can't do that.
And there's your argument for boys, too.
There's simply no logic behind the predilection of mutilating men's genitals.
And it's odd in a Christian country as well, a Christian culture, for it to be prevalent at all.
I mean, certainly, I think back as far as the 15th and 16th centuries, the popes were saying that you risk your eternal salvation if you circumcise, and there is a strong history of anti-circumcision in Christianity.
So, it was the mid-19th century, primarily as an anti-masturbation aid of all the crazy reasons to do something.
I don't realize it's not an ancient practice for Christians.
No, certainly not.
It is an ancient practice.
I mean, circumcision and the mutilation of genitalia goes back many, many thousands of years and all kinds of, um, you know, uh, uh, visual, you know, representation of this.
The Mayans did, you know, mutilation of the male genitals and, um, circumcision is, or some element of genital mutilation is common in some tribal cultures, uh, The Australian Aborigines and certain African cultures.
But the circumcision that in the Western world persists is really part of the Jewish and Muslim history.
It comes out of Egypt.
In the mid-19th century, as you say, circumcision was proposed in the U.S. and in English-speaking countries, U.S., U.K., as a way to prevent boys from masturbating.
The common thread is that Maimonides himself, a great Jewish philosopher, recognized in the 11th, 12th century that the foreskin was a source of great pleasure and that one way to make sure that boys kept to their studies was to keep them from putting their hands on their penises.
He also talked about the fact that women preferred men who were intact.
I don't know how he knew that.
But he talks about that.
So it's doubly interesting that modern physicians and modern Jewish advocates for circumcision will say circumcision does not reduce sexual pleasure or sexual sensation when that has really always been, in Western culture, the justification for the procedure.
So you kind of can't have it both ways.
There's a lot of having it both ways.
The foreskin is an insignificant flap of skin.
Why does anybody want to keep it?
And the flip side is, well, why is it so important to cut it off?
Why are you so desperate to cut it off if it's that insignificant and that minor little piece of skin?
Why don't we just leave it alone?
Sorry to interrupt, but the question of, well, women prefer circumcised penises.
I'm no theologian and certainly no philosopher of history, but I don't recall an over-concern with female sexual pleasure as being the hallmark of many religions throughout history.
That's probably a really good point, right?
Not to mention what women prefer or what men prefer about women is really just actually a If that's a rationalization, that's really kind of an outrageous thing to be putting forth.
If we find that men prefer, in certain sub-Saharan African countries, women who've been sewn up and get pleasure out of that, are we going to purport that women all over the world should have their vaginas tightened so that men can enjoy them more, whether that causes stress or pain to women?
I mean, that's just such a...
People's bodies are their own, and they should be able to be left alone to make the decisions about their own bodies, whether they're men or women or people who are born intersex or conjoined twins.
People's bodies are their own.
They don't belong to anybody else, and they should be left alone.
Now, let's turn to this case that is currently going on.
I know there's been some premature resolution, or at least some legal resolution.
The case of the woman who, I think she had a six-month relationship with a fellow.
They broke up, and she had an agreement that there was going to be circumcision.
She changed her mind.
She went on the lam.
I think for three months, was caught.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, because I think these are the kinds of landmark cases that do raise circumstances.
What is normally just an unthinking response for people to the birth of a boy to something that can actually be discussed.
Yes.
She changed her mind and then nothing happened.
She just became aware and I like to think it's because the movement, the intactivist movement has grown so much and there's so much information out there.
We know, for example, that she was influenced by material from Intact America and other organizations that work against genital cutting of boys.
But because the father wasn't pressing the issue, nobody did anything.
And then a couple years ago, when the boy was about three, I guess, a year and a half ago, the father got it into his mind that he wanted to see the son circumcised.
And she objected because she had become aware that circumcision wasn't necessary, that it was risky.
The child also had had some kind of an adverse reaction to anesthesia.
He had had a seizure when he woke up from anesthesia.
For a procedure, I'm not sure what the procedure was.
So that was something that also scared her, because she knew that an older child would need to be put under general anesthesia.
So she said no.
And they ended up in court, and the judge said, you signed this contract, you signed this agreement, so you've got to let the kid be circumcised.
And she didn't have very good legal representation.
They didn't raise a lot of points that they should have.
They never raised the rights of a child.
They talked about the child's well-being and all kinds of euphemisms about the child's probably being made fun of in the locker room.
People are allowed to change their minds.
Isn't that foundational?
If a woman says, oh, I'd really like to have sex with you, and then she changes her mind, you respect that.
Of course people are allowed to change their minds.
You give your insurance card here in the U.S., of course, because you don't get in if you don't.
And you give your insurance card and you sign on the dotted line and you sign a consent for the surgery and you get to the operating room and you say, you know what?
I changed my mind.
What do you think they're going to do?
They're going to say, we have your form.
We have your credit card.
Sorry, buddy.
They're going to knock you over the head and remove whatever it was they were going to remove.
You're right.
People change their minds all the time.
Contracts are revisited all the time.
And the judge sided with the father, treated the child, treated as a normal contract, treated the child as though he were a sofa or a television set that they had agreed to distribute in a certain way.
She only, after she lost the appeal...
And the judge told her if she didn't sign a consent form, and of course the quality or even the nature of that consent form is itself a problem, because it's certainly not a medical consent.
You know, when you're going to have a surgery or a treatment, you have to sign a consent that the doctor or the hospital administers an informed consent procedure.
As vacuous as it often is, it's still administered by the Entity that's going to do the surgery or the treatment, so I don't know what she signed, what she was asked to sign, and she refused.
So she repaired with the child to a domestic violence shelter, which after interviewing her extensively, decided she had legitimate fear of her ex, and she and the child needed to be protected, and she spent 80-something days in that shelter and did not show up in court for a subsequent date.
And the judge sent the police, the sheriff, finally found her in another county in this shelter, arrested her, incarcerated her, and gave the child to the father.
She then was, after 80 days in jail and, no, sorry, 80 days in hiding and several days in jail, taken into court in handcuffs and leg shackles and forced to sign...
Well, she first said no and then she buckled and signed some kind of so-called consent.
But as I said, it cannot possibly be a legitimate consent.
It cannot be anything that any physician...
Any physician or hospital would have to be crazy to rely on it because it was signed under complete coercion.
She was literally shackled.
And it really does, I mean, we know that injustices are done every day, but this just boggles the mind.
Oh, and I mean, this is like something, sorry to interrupt, this is like something out of the Gulag Apikalaga, where you are signed confessions to crimes against the state, to being a capitalist reactionary saboteur, and we all recognize that those confessions, as George Orwell writes in 1984, everybody recognizes those confessions are coerced and have no basis.
The idea that you can basically have a gun to someone's head, And pretend that what they do after that has anything to do with consent is kafkas.
I've heard about these executions in China where the prisoners who are going to be executed have given their permission for their organs to be so-called donated.
I mean, this really is reminiscent of that.
It's really quite astonishing.
And you're right.
The consent is not a valid consent.
This case is not over.
The father has custody of the child.
The child, he had asked the court to allow him to take the child out of state for this circumcision, which he still seems hell-bent on getting done for his now almost five-year-old child.
And they have, the court gave him permission to take the child out of state.
One slight bit of gratification for me is that the reason he gave for that was that the 1,200 letters that Intact America sent out to all of the urologists in the state of Florida apparently had good effect, so he has not been able to find a urologist in the state of Florida to operate on so he has not been able to find a urologist in the
And letters are going out all over the country to urologists and pediatric surgeons, and we are hoping that those will have the same effect that the letters that have already gone out had in Florida.
What kind of media coverage is occurring for this situation?
A lot.
Until she was dragged into court in prison garb and shackled, it was mostly local Florida coverage with bloggers who are interested in tactivism and who are interested in the rights of boys to have their bodies respected.
Talking about it, but now it's really hit the national and international news.
There have been some wonderful pieces coming out of the UK, some wonderful opinion pieces in the mainstream press, and there was a good AP article by a Florida reporter, and it's basically gone national.
So the coverage is growing.
I Imagine that until the next thing happens, and I'm not sure what that is, I hope it's not an announcement from the father that the boy has been circumcised, but I imagine the coverage will die down.
But, you know, with every issue like this, with every event like this, the awareness that's raised does have a cumulative effect.
And we are quite sure that the travesties of this case...
And the astonishment that most people feel that anybody would force the circumcision of a four and a half year old, five year old boy will have a lasting impact on the public's attitude toward the surgery.
Not to mention the boy's attitude towards his father, to say the least.
Now, as far as things to do, I'm very much a, you know, we've got values now, let's find some way to enact them.
But one of the things that I found encouraging, and naturally as any activist also depressing, was the degree to which there are financial considerations involved in circumcision.
And I think it was in Arkansas where they dropped coverage for circumcision, thus a couple hundred dollar bill would have been presented to the parents for circumcision, and circumcision rates dropped precipitously.
So it's one of these subsidized things in particular for poorer people, that if they get the bill themselves, suddenly they seem to find reason and empathy for their kid.
What do you think are the major steps that need to be taken?
Obviously there's awareness raising and so on.
What do you think are the major steps that need to be taken that people can do to really help this along?
Right.
Well, certainly what you're referring to is Medicaid coverage, which Medicaid is the federal and federal state program that pays for services to low-income people.
And no federal money, Medicaid or Medicare, which covers the elderly, no federal money is supposed to be used for medically unnecessary surgery.
Now, we know that that's an idealistic statement, and what's medically necessary can be argued a lot.
We do know, however, that the routine removal of a normal foreskin is not medically necessary.
And the states that have dropped Medicaid coverage for circumcision have seen plummeting rates of circumcision surgery.
Florida, interestingly, when this boy was born, did not cover neonatal circumcision, and that is why this child was not circumcised at birth, because Florida didn't cover it, and nobody wanted to pay for it.
So now Florida has reinstated coverage, or at least covers circumcision of older children if they can get a diagnosis, hence that phony diagnosis of phimosis, which is just an inherent prepuce.
I'm sorry, people might not know what that means.
The foreskin is attached to the head of the penis.
Again, that's what phimosis means, but phimosis is normal in a child.
It could be a problem in an adult.
Not always, but could be.
If you can get a diagnosis and a doctor will put down a diagnosis on a piece of paper and send it to Medicaid, he can get paid for circumcising an older child.
Clearly, private insurance companies are variable.
Some do and some do not cover So that's one step, and the public should advocate vociferously with their state legislators not to use taxpayers' money to pay for unethical and or unnecessary surgery of any kind.
But neonatal circumcision, of course, is the most common childhood surgery, so that's a good place to start.
So that's one step.
Another step of this is to recognize that there are already laws that should be protecting boys.
So, for example, the consent laws should be considered, they should be strictly applied.
So a parent is not authorized to give consent, so-called consent, for a procedure that's not necessary to save the life or the health of the child.
So you can't take your baby into the doctor and say, you know, I lost my finger in a car accident when I was 17.
I don't want my son to have more fingers than I do, or I want him to feel comfortable.
So let's remove one of his fingers.
You can't do that.
You can't take your child to the dentist and say, remove all of his healthy teeth.
And some of these examples, when you give people, think, oh, that's a silly example.
Well, this is the...
Arguably, the most important part of our anatomy is our reproductive system, right?
That's the reason why we have the rest of our bodies.
Without that transmission, there are no people.
So what about cutting off part of a boy's genitals is more normal or less ridiculous than talking about cutting off his fingertip or the tip of his tongue?
So that is another step.
The other steps include simply talking about it.
Men who have been circumcised...
Who wish they hadn't been are coming out every day and saying that.
Some are saying it in rage.
Some are saying it in grief.
Some are saying it very matter-of-factly.
But until people start speaking out, and again, I go back to what I mentioned about the same-sex marriage or the gay rights movement.
Until people were willing to use their names and speak out, then it's easy for everybody to...
Pretend like this is not an issue.
Another issue is equal protection.
We have a law in this country passed in 1996, the Female Genital Mutilation Act, that says it is illegal to so much as draw a drop of blood from a minor female's genitals.
We have equal protection laws.
So that is roundly discriminatory law.
And in fact, one of the questions that was asked in the Florida federal court in a preliminary hearing was the judge asked Heather, the young woman's lawyer, are you saying that if we prosecute somebody for circumcising their daughter, They could contend that they can't be prosecuted because that law is unconstitutional.
And I thought that was a big step that that question was asked in federal court.
I'm not sure it's going to sprout wings and fly today, what he said in federal court.
But there is absolutely an equal protection problem in this country when you have a law prohibiting genital mutilation of girls and nothing to protect boys.
So that is another step.
And the other is, you know, another is just simply learning the facts and debunking all of the myths around circumcision.
Men in countries that don't circumcise boys who've lived their entire lives with normal penises don't have higher rates of anything except normal penises and probably sexual satisfaction than men in countries where circumcision is practiced.
So no higher rates of STDs, no higher rates of HIV, no higher rates of urinary tract infection, no pathology as a result of having been able to keep their intact foreskins.
Right.
Well, I certainly appreciate the work that you're doing.
I think the big swing will probably come when somebody wins a malpractice suit against somebody who circumcised the child as medically unnecessary and brutal.
that may still be a ways away.
But I think you'll find it, as we can see with the Florida doctors that you guys mailed out notices to, when they fear liability, then suddenly wisdom seems to prevail.
Sadly, we are still not a species that makes a lot of decisions based on moral principles, but there seems to be a fair amount of follow-the-money and self-interest involved.
So whatever we can do to promote the people who want it, actually paying the direct costs immediately financially and in the long term when their kids turn around to them and say, why on earth did you do this to me?
That is a very valid question.
There have been a number of malpractice suits.
And one of the problems, again, the law kind of follows public opinion.
So as long as you have judges on the bench, I would argue as this judge in Florida, I think you and I would probably agree at the likelihood that he is a circumcised man.
Once you have judges on the bench, a sentence, As long as you have judges on the bench who are circumcised themselves, who've probably circumcised their sons, it's going to be harder to get a judicial opinion that circumcision is a big deal.
And so that without the consent of the baby, or even in cases where the parents sign no consent and the baby was so-called accidentally circumcised, it's been hard to get recoveries.
But I believe that that is growing, and as you said, we need to make doctors highly aware that We're good to go.
Georgianne, I really, really appreciate the work that you're doing.
I have always been somewhat concerned about the degree to which this seems to be branding males for disposability.
You know, sort of a foundation of our civilization is that, you know, worship the women and dispose of the men in war and in homelessness and so on.
I've always had...
I'm not asking you to agree with that necessarily.
My particular concern is that this is kind of like a mark of livestock ownership for men to be circumcised, which is why women...
I think it's very important, not just for sexual gratification, not just for medical ethics, but I think if we can Swing society around to viewing men and women in an egalitarian way in every circumstance and in every condition I think will be a long way further to a fairer and just and more peaceful society.
So I certainly really appreciate the work that you guys are doing.
IntactAmerica.org, we'll link to it below.
I hope people will go and look you guys up on Facebook.
Get informed.
This is one of these things that people can do.
I can't do much about Federal Reserve policy or foreign policy or anything like that, but I can talk to people about not gently mutilating their voice.
This is something you can do.
Everyone can do this.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yes, you're right.
And thank you so much for spending the time on this issue.
I really appreciate it.
All right.
Thanks very much, and I'm sure we'll talk again.
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