All Episodes
Previous Next
July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:09
The Danger of Circumcision | Tim Hammond and Stefan Molyneux
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, this is Stephan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Very pleased to have on the show Tim Hammett.
He's the founder and researcher behind the Global Survey of Circumcision Harm.
Now you can get this report and I strongly urge you to go and read this report at circumcisionharm.org.
We'll put the link in the low bar.
Thanks Tim for taking the time today.
My pleasure Stephan.
Now we of course in the world generally hear about the horrors and prevalence of female genital mutilation and we hear that a hundred million women are living with this invasion of their body integrity but as you point out male circumcision is an even wider problem which we rarely hear about.
What is the scope of the practice in the world of circumcising men?
Well, based on World Health Organization statistics, they estimate that up to 30% of the world's males have been subjected to some form of genital cutting as children.
And conservatively, very, very conservatively estimated, that's about 650 million males.
And we're talking about this issue being far more widespread than female genital cutting.
The female practice uh... is limited to the middle east and to some african nations and by the way i should also point out that as we understand female genital cutting from what we hear from western media that this is girls being singled out for this practice and in fact that is not true in every culture that circumcises girls the boys are also circumcised so in a perverse way they're kind of
equal opportunity cutters, but it is pretty limited to those Middle Eastern and African nations.
Male genital cutting, on the other hand, is far more widespread.
It's, of course, very common among Muslims, Jews, Americans, South Koreans, Filipinos, South Pacific Islanders, Australian aboriginals, some African tribes.
So it's a far more widespread problem that affects far more boys than does the practice of genital cutting affect girls. - Yes.
And you pointed out, of course, that, if I remember rightly, 60% prevalence of circumcision in America, which is one of the highest countries, certainly in the West, which performs this practice.
And you've actually done the calculations of how many men are living with this.
Yeah, many years ago, probably in the early 90s, I wanted to sort of get a sense for How many American men are living with a circumcision that they didn't ask for?
And I took figures just from 1940 to 1990 based on the Center for Health Statistics about the circumcision rate in each year and the number of births in each year and then calculated from that approximately and very conservatively speaking
uh... how many men were affected by this and my estimates are that today we have over sixty six million men who are living with uh... a circumcision that they didn't ask for
And of course if we take the higher end of the range of the estimates of immediate complications or harm at ten percent, that's over six million men who are not just living with the reduced sensation of having a third of the nerves in their penis hacked off at birth, but also living with complications after the fact that can have massively significant, not just physical of course, but psychological and psychosexual ramifications.
Yeah, this is something that is part of the equation that is not Well investigated.
When the American Academy of Pediatrics, for instance, comes out with a policy on infant circumcision, they only look at the immediate complications.
They have never done a study to track males from birth into adulthood to see what kind of complications they may have been living with later on, or they may have discovered later on.
And that I don't see how they can come out with a believable policy on newborn circumcision if they haven't looked at the long-term consequences and that's one of the things that I made a priority in my work on this issue is to really ask men how has this affected them and to give them a voice.
And what did you get back from that?
Well, I did a study in the early nineties, which was ultimately published in the British Journal of Urology International in 1999.
It was called a preliminary poll of men circumcised in infancy or childhood.
And that was an old school paper survey that when I announced the survey, people would have to write to me and get the questionnaire and fill it out and mail it back.
But that brought in over 500 responses over a three-year period.
The newest survey that I did in 2012 was an online survey and a thousand and eight men answered that survey.
The results are up at circumcisionharm.org and there was just a very wide range of physical, sexual, emotional, self-esteem
issues interpersonal issues with their family, with their spouses, and we can delve deeper into the specifics of it, but it was just a very wide range of problems that they had with this.
Oh, I would say let's delve.
I mean, this is information that people need to hear.
And I suffer from the general frustration that when a situation is affecting women, society goes insane and focuses on it.
And it's the worst thing ever.
But when an even more prevalent, and one could argue, equally damaging situation is affecting men, you know, male disposability rears its ugly head and it doesn't really matter.
You just got to soldier on and man up and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, yes, I'm very happy to delve into what these men are saying about the effects of this mutilation.
I have a summary here and I'll just read some of the things that men were recording, which, by the way, I sent this this newest survey to the Canadian Pediatric Association.
I know the Canadian Pediatric Society, excuse me, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control.
None of them even gave me the courtesy of responding back to acknowledge that they received it, but it's on record that they have this information.
So if they're not even just acknowledging in their policies that there are men who are damaged by this, then they're being intellectually dishonest in my opinion.
But getting to the survey itself, 78% of the men were circumcised at birth.
We did not count anyone who was circumcised as an adult by choice because of course that's their choice.
And most of them were done in the hospital or a doctor's office.
Many of them are very highly educated and a lot of them are aware of the benefits and functions of the foreskin as well as how to identify circumcision harm.
So that's kind of like the starting point for the survey.
And then the harm was broken down into different categories.
So for physical harms, we had different choices for men to tick off what was affecting them.
Of course, 100% of the men suffered from partial or total loss of the foreskin.
That in itself is significant because the foreskin is a very large platform, densely innervated.
It's the only part of the penis that moves.
It's necessary for sexual stimulation, natural sexual stimulation.
72% of the men reported loss of the frenulum, which is the tissue on the underside of the head of the penis that connects the head of the penis to the foreskin.
63% reported having prominent scarring at the circumcision site.
56% little or no shaft skin mobility.
That means when they had an erection, it was a tight, painful erection.
Mietal stenosis, 24% of the men had reported that.
Mietal stenosis is when the opening of the penis closes either totally or partially due to the irritation from having a raw exposed glands.
Uh, as a, as a neonate in the diapers from urine and feces, uh, it becomes irritated and it closes up.
Um, skin bridges were very common.
10% of the men had skin bridges.
Uh, this is where, when the wound heals, the remaining foreskin remnant wanting to move forward to cover the glands, uh, actually that raw tissue fuses with the corona of the glands and creates a bridge of skin.
Sexually, dry keratinized glands, excess stimulation needed to achieve orgasm was reported by 59% of the men, erectile dysfunction, many reported either delayed ejaculation, 41%, or premature ejaculation at 18%.
And that's because everybody's different sexually.
And how you respond to this type of body invasion will be different for every individual.
I can go on with other psychological self-esteem harm.
Please do.
If you could, I definitely want to get this information out to people.
Okay, great.
73% of the men reported feeling that their human rights were violated.
And that stands to reason, because if you believe that everybody has the right to bodily integrity, unless there's some really pressing medical need, if you believe that girls have a right to their bodily integrity, then shouldn't it stand to reason that boys should have that same right protected by law?
71% were angry that this had been done to them.
61% felt mutilated.
50% felt betrayed by their mother for lack of protection by their mother.
No, excuse me, that was 55%.
50% felt betrayed by their father for not protecting them.
them 37% had shame over this issue 27% had violent thoughts or desire for retribution against their perpetrators 14% 14% had suicidal thoughts.
Recurrent nightmares about being attacked was reported by 10% of the respondents.
Low self-esteem.
It just goes on and on.
And many of the same factors that researchers are finding out about female genital cutting Apply also to males, because from the child's perspective, which we often forget about, the child does not understand what's happening.
The child just knows that it's being attacked.
It's having pain and trauma inflicted on that child.
And whether it's a girl in a dirt floor hut in Africa, or it's her brother in a dirt floor hut in Africa, Or if it's a little girl in Egypt in a hospital having part of her genitals removed, or a little boy in Egypt, or America for that matter, having part of his genitals removed, they don't understand.
They don't understand why this is happening to them.
And from what I understand of psychology, the earlier in life this happens, people tend to think, oh, well, they won't remember.
Well, it's a somatic memory, not a a cerebral kind of conscious memory.
And these are important issues for us all to be thinking about in terms of what are the long-term effects.
And these have not been studied by the medical community. - Although there certainly are some indications, the studies that I've read have pointed out that six months after being circumcised, the male body, the infant male body is still producing higher levels of cortisol or a stress hormone.
And that's pretty significant.
And what drives me crazy about all of this stuff, Tim, is the degree to which Americans get hysterical over waterboarding.
Now, of course I'm not a fan of waterboarding, but that does not cause permanent bodily damage to what could arguably be the most sensitive psychological and physical manifestation of one's gender identity.
And so everyone's like, oh, we should waterboard or not.
This is this physical torture.
This is the permanent alteration and destruction of the most sensitive part of the male anatomy.
And that's torture.
And it does actually cause significant physical changes that can be tracked over time.
Yes.
And I would also argue that on the psychological level, which is just as important as the physical, there's a very good book that I would recommend.
It's It's available on Amazon.
It's called Circumcision, the Hidden Trauma by Ron Goldman, PhD.
And he is a psychologist and he goes into great depth about the studies that have been done about infant trauma.
The one you referred to is basically, as I recall, it was a reference to how boys react to their vaccinations.
And the circumcised boys have a much different reaction because it stimulates that somatic memory of trauma that they experienced when they were one or two days old.
Now some of the justifications of course put forward involve lowered incidence of UTI and possible protection against AIDS.
Have you pointed out though with regards to sexually transmitted diseases That one of the reactions is not uncommon for men who've been circumcised, is that they engage in two behaviors, right?
Hypersexuality, or I guess as you said we could judgmentally call promiscuity, and also because of the reduced sensation, particularly around the underside of the head of the penis, they can't use condoms, or they don't want to use condoms.
And so hypersexuality plus a lack of condom use being a direct result of circumcision would seem to go kind of against the let's make sure we don't spread more dangerous STDs around the world.
Well, exactly.
And that is one of the issues reported among the men in my survey is sexual compulsivity, to use a polite word, was prevalent among 24% of the men.
This, by the way, was also noticed in numerous studies of female circumcision, that when part of your Sensory organs are deprived.
There is a quite natural motivation to try to compensate for that.
And if you can't get it in quality, the only other option is in quantity.
And that is something that really needs to be looked at, especially with regard to these misguided campaigns in Africa.
The so-called voluntary male medical circumcision campaigns that so far, my understanding is they have circumcised six million African men who voluntarily went into this thinking they would be protected from HIV.
And as one doctor, Dr. Christopher Guest in Canada from the Children's Health and Human Rights Partnership puts it in a video called Circumcision, the whole story.
He says, you have two choices.
You can wear a condom every time, or you can cut off part of your penis and wear a condom every time.
And that's really what it boils down to.
Now, are there any benefits that have been tracked long term?
Again, it's hard to say that this justifies anything.
You know, I'm sure you've heard the argument that, well, you could cut off the breast tissue of little girls and then by golly they'd grow up and not get breast cancer.
So you can find as far as I understand it somewhat statistically low grade positive benefits but that's never applied to any other situation.
We don't say to babies well you might get appendicitis so after you're born we're going to remove your appendix and you know it's important to remember that a lot of the babies who receive circumcision receive Either no anesthetic or a topical anesthetic, which I just find insane.
And we don't see this about any other.
Well, there could be some other benefit to removing X, Y, and Z healthy tissue on your body, but this does float around as justifications for circumcision.
Well, I wouldn't call them justifications.
I would call them rationalizations for doing something that's already a custom, particularly in our culture in North America here.
The fact of the matter is that for every alleged benefit that circumcision can accomplish, there is a non-surgical option.
For example, urinary tract infections.
Little girls get these at higher rates than little boys do.
What do we do for little girls?
We give them antibiotics.
Why can't we do the same for boys?
The whole argument about penile cancer and cervical cancer, we now know from studies that this is caused by the human papillomavirus.
Right now, we have an HPV vaccine that's being encouraged to be given to girls to protect them from cervical cancer when they become sexually active.
Well, the studies show that if you vaccinate boys with the HPV vaccine, you can help protect them from contracting the virus and passing it along.
HIV and any other sexually transmitted disease, the most effective strategies that have worked across the world have been what a lot of organizations like to call the ABCs.
And that's abstinence, I'm blanking out what the B stood for, but the C stands for condoms.
And basically, you limit the number of sexual partners, you try to stay as monogamous as possible and use condoms.
So that's the way to prevent sexually transmitted diseases.
It's not through cutting off fully functional, healthy body parts, especially from people who can't consent.
Well, in particular, in reference to Africa, I can't imagine that such a brutalized continent can benefit at all from an additional mutilation of its citizens.
That's only, to me, going to end up provoking more adult violence.
Now, with regards to how men, and of course women, you have in your presentation, which we'll link to below, interviews with Egyptian women and men, There is a sense of well, it was it didn't do me any harm.
It was great for me.
And I'm happy.
I look like my dad, you know, all this sort of stuff.
And one hesitates, of course, to tell people that their own lived and vocalized experiences are incorrect.
But there does seem to be a sort of after this because of this rationalization for the mutilation that these babies have experienced.
Is that a fair way to put it?
Yeah, the interviews that I've seen online with Egyptian women talking about their circumcisions, they say very clearly, no, this hasn't affected us at all in any negative way.
Now, one could argue that that's denial.
Well, if that's denial among women who, as young girls, had their genitals cut, men are not that much different from women as human beings in this regard.
that why would the same not be true for men who had this part of their body amputated at such an early age uh... jc racy uh... wrote a journal article in which he looked at amputations of the lower extremities and he basically found that the earlier in life uh... this kind of amputation he wasn't talking about circumcision but you know talking about loss of a limb the earlier in life this happens
The better able the person is to adapt.
And whereas we learn how to use our full faculties with two hands and two legs, if for some reason you have any of those amputated early in life, you develop very profoundly interesting skills like the people who can write with their feet because they have no hands or whatever.
But that's not an excuse to inflict this on young children just because We know that they can adapt.
Right.
And I've always been sort of confused by the people who say, it's not done me any harm.
Like a man gets circumcised, a woman gets female genital mutilated.
And they say, well, it hasn't done me any harm.
There's no change.
Compared to what?
You have no capacity to know what your life would have been like for a man if you hadn't had a third of the nerves in your penis hacked off with probably no anesthetic or a minor anesthetic.
How on earth could you possibly compare your experience to if you hadn't?
I mean, it's impossible, and this is why I can't take people who say that seriously.
They can say, well, you know, I can live with what I've got, but I have no idea of knowing how it could have been different otherwise.
And so when people are very certain, and I guarantee you there'll be comments in the video below this, where people say, well, it hasn't done me any harm.
And it's like, how could you possibly know that?
It's kind of like being born colorblind.
If you don't know, if you were born without a proper eyesight and you weren't able to see color or you didn't, you were born without depth perception, you have no idea what it's like being a fully sighted person.
And I think the same applies to this issue.
You know, when you've been deprived of an organ early in life, you have no idea.
And of course, some people dismiss that as okay, they don't know what they're missing.
Well, true, that may be true.
But is that any excuse for imposing this, this deficit upon a young child?
You could understand it if they were born that way.
And There are very, very rare instances where boys are born without a foreskin, and that's called apostia.
And that's considered a birth defect by the medical community, yet what are we doing to young boys but inflicting a defect upon their genitals?
And it's something that I got from the interview when the men were talking about their erections.
You know, it is such a delicate operation and it's usually done, you know, fairly rapidly.
It's a sort of conveyor belt of cucumbers.
When a man gets an erection, if the foreskin has been cut off too short, then the stretching of the skin can actually make the erection extremely uncomfortable.
The thought of having to live with discomfort every time you have an erection, that could never really be far from your mind, particularly during a sexual encounter.
Well, I personally have suffered from that.
As someone who was born in the US in the mid-fifties, As a young man, my erections were very tight, very painful.
And if you can imagine, you're talking about doing surgery on an organ that's probably half the size of your pinky finger.
Any slight mistake on there is going to be magnified in adulthood.
And doctors, the penis doesn't come with a dotted line on it to tell the doctors where to cut.
So They are guesstimating how much tissue to remove.
They have no idea how large that penis is going to become in adulthood.
And this is why people say, well, it's better to have it done in infancy because they won't remember it and it's not painful.
Well, studies have proven it is painful.
It's traumatic.
But babies, they get If they're lucky enough to get any anesthesia and most doctors still do not give anesthesia because they're fearful because anesthesia can kill a newborn if it's administered improperly.
So the lucky ones get some anesthesia and it's either a topical anesthesia or it's something called a dorsal penile nerve block which involves sticking needles into the penis Which itself is traumatic and painful just to try to numb the penis for this more traumatic surgery, but it's not fully effective.
And as an adult, it's your choice.
You know why you're doing it.
You're going to get full anesthesia during and analgesics afterwards.
And it's a fully grown organ.
So you're better able as a physician to determine how much tissue to remove.
And yet another part of this equation, infancy versus adulthood.
As infants, we males are born with the foreskin fully adhered to the head of the penis.
There's tissue in between the foreskin and the glands penis called the synechia.
It's similar to what kittens and puppies have between their eyelids when they're born.
Their eyes do not open.
Sinechia dissolves slowly and they're able to open their eyelids.
The same thing happens with the separation of the foreskin and the glands that takes years.
Sometimes not until after the boy has finished puberty at age 18 does that foreskin fully separate from the head of the penis.
So to take a one or two day old infant and to circumcise him, before you do any cutting of the foreskin, The physician has to insert a blunt probe into the opening of the foreskin and basically forcibly separate that tissue, which is the first painful part of the procedure.
And so you're taking this undeveloped organ and interrupting its development, basically.
And so that's another reason why if you're going to Pursue circumcision.
In my opinion, it's best to do it as an adult, your own consent, and working on a fully developed organ, not an immature newborn.
Well, of course, I can imagine just how few men would choose to have this procedure done as adults as opposed to having it inflicted upon them.
And you know, it's not like you need a lot of protection from STDs when you're three days old.
But let's talk about some of the motivations.
I mean, of course, there are ugly cultural practices that have lasted for large amounts of time, you know, just based on cultural inertia and so on.
But there are dollar factors that are pretty significant involved in this.
And there was a state in the US, we've got it, the truth about circumcision is a presentation we'll link in the low bar.
But there was a state that moved the cost of circumcision off government subsidy or government sponsorship and there was a significant drop in the practice of circumcision just when the parents had to pay a few hundred dollars for it rather than have it be done by the government.
Now the price of a lifetime of potential sexual dysfunction and problems and aftereffects and shame and guilt and anger and suicidal thoughts and problems with your parents' relationship, relationship with your parents, that the gap between doing this gruesome barbaric medieval procedure and not doing it is a couple of hundred dollars?
I mean, this is completely astounding to me.
Yeah, the history of circumcision in Anglophone nations, primarily the UK, Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand, is very interesting.
In brief, this got started for us as Western Anglophone speaking people.
It got started in the Victorian era, the late 1800s, as a means to stop masturbation or to prevent masturbation.
And people think, well, that's crazy.
Well, you have to go back to their way of thinking.
Most of the men of that era were intact.
They had foreskins.
They knew that sexual stimulation happened by the movement up and down of the foreskin on the penile shaft.
So they naively thought, well, cut that off and he can't masturbate and you'll save him from blindness and epilepsy and insanity and all this.
And by the way, these doctors, these very same doctors, were advocating carbolic acid on the clitoris to stop girls from masturbating.
So what happened is that whole thing grew into a social custom.
And when Countries outside of the US adopted national health plans like the NHS in the UK.
They looked at all of what they were going to cover and they looked at this issue of circumcision and they say, this is not medically necessary, we're not covering it.
The circumcision rates plummeted in the UK.
The same thing happened in Canada in the 80s and 90s, province by province, as each provincial health plan delisted circumcision, the circumcision rates Plummeted.
Australia, the same thing.
The US is a unique example because we have a for-profit health care system.
Fortunately, most of the state Medicaid programs do not cover this, and it's illegal for them, by the way, to cover infant circumcision because they're mandated by federal law to only cover medically necessary treatments.
However, private insurance will often pay for this.
And that is enough for parents to say, oh, sure, yeah, I can get it covered by my insurance plan.
And the interesting thing about the insurance plan is in the mid-90s, I organized a letter writing campaign by men to contact their health insurers to write letters, explain why they felt infant circumcision was not medically necessary, and inquire as to whether their insurance companies paid for it or not.
And I have on file very, very revealing letters from Blue Cross Blue Shield and other health insurers that say, oh, we know this is not medically necessary.
We know this is a social custom.
But from a consumer satisfaction standpoint, we cover that, which means they're all afraid that if they're the first ones to delist this as a covered procedure, they're going to lose business.
So the money factor is important.
And the other interesting thing about this in terms of money is it can cost several hundred dollars to have this done.
Majority of infant circumcisions in the US are done by OBGYNs.
These are the ones working with the mother during the birth process and they're often the ones who will do the circumcisions, which to me doesn't make sense because they're specialists in female genitalia.
Why are they performing male genital surgery?
The information that the moms and fathers-to-be receive about circumcision.
The topic, of course, will almost inevitably come up if there's a male in the womb.
What is the information that is being given to the moms and dads?
It seems to me that either the right information is being given, in which case, why would they do it?
Or the wrong information is being given, in which case, aren't there potential liability issues?
Well, you've hit on two issues there because the information varies wildly across the board.
In most cases, it's very scant.
There's very little information about the complications.
But what's even more egregious in my mind is they're not educating the parents about the functions and benefits of the foreskin.
So how can parents make a decision as to whether to cut this part of their boy's genitals off if they're not being educated As to what the functions are, that's one issue.
The other issue is that they are solicited for this surgery.
If you're going into the hospital with a baby girl that you're expecting, you get a sheath of paperwork to sign off on.
The mail pile is the same, except it has one extra piece of paper and it's a circumcision consent form.
And I have heard time and time again from parents who have been badgered by nurses and doctors and hospital staff.
Oh, you're going to have your son circumcised, aren't you?
And they have to repeatedly say no.
But even then, parents find they get the bill.
And if they've left their if they kept their son intact, They get a bill that says circumcision.
Even some people who've had daughters have looked at the bill in detail and they've seen circumcision.
It is so ingrained in the U.S.
medical system for this that there's, I believe, quite a bit of fraud going on on this issue.
The other aspect of this equation is there have been studies that have shown that with a certain percentage of the population of parents, you can give them all the information in the world, including the fact that their child could die from this procedure, and babies do die from this procedure, and complications immediately afterwards.
And you can give all this information to parents and they'll still go ahead with it.
And if their present doctor won't do it, they'll take their son to another doctor to do it.
Because circumcision and all genital cutting customs around the world have a very large emotional component.
It's not a reasonable, rational thing to do.
It's very much emotional.
And that's why it's often difficult to educate parents to opt out of circumcision because they have strong family or cultural or religious ties to the practice.
And that's one of the biggest obstacles in this.
Now of course I'm thinking in particular of the Jewish community wherein there is a multi-thousand year tradition and a covenant with God for circumcision.
Do they have any options if they wish to remain good Jews to avoid this procedure?
Yes, a lot of progressive thoughtful Jews are adopting a new ritual called Brit Shalom.
The original one is called Brit Milah which involved the cutting.
Brit Shalom is a non-cutting ceremony that welcomes the Jewish boy and the Jewish girl into the covenant with the Jewish community.
And it's gaining popularity even in Israel.
And there's a wonderful book out.
You can find it on Amazon called Celebrating Brit Shalom.
There's also a wonderful website called BeyondTheBris.com, which unites parents and other interested people in the Jewish community in exploring this issue and really affirming their Jewish identity, their connection with the past, through a ceremony and a ritual that doesn't harm the baby.
Right.
Well, so if people want to do something about this worldwide scourge of infant mutilation, what is it that you would suggest that they can How can they act to further get better information out to parents to reduce this?
What do you say in America?
Is it every 26 seconds some little boy is mutilated for life?
What can people do?
Well, the first thing they can do is get educated on the issue.
Make sure they have the right information.
They can get involved in various genital autonomy organizations.
There is an organization called Genital Autonomy.
Another one called Intact America, Attorneys for the Rights of the Child, Doctors Opposing Circumcision.
There are many organizations that they can get involved with and work with to change the situation for the better for boys as well as girls.
And I should point out that one organization in particular, Genital Autonomy, works across the board for the rights of all children, male, female, and intersex children, which is another issue that deserves its own show.
But they're having genital surgeries imposed on them as well, and they're speaking out as adults that they should not have been subjected to this.
But genital autonomy works for all children.
And Americans should really be working, in my opinion, for passage of The ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
In that convention, Article 24 states that all governments should work to the elimination of harmful traditional practices against children.
And there's only two countries in the world that have not ratified this convention yet.
One is Somalia, which doesn't have a functioning government, and the other is the United States.
And if we want to work to protect children, we need to make sure that the U.S.
signs on and ratifies the U.N.
Convention on the Rights of the Child.
And certainly, the political action is one aspect I would strongly urge people as well.
Everybody knows someone who's, you know, they're getting settled down, they're thinking of having kids, or maybe there's a pregnant family member or friend.
Descend upon them, you know, and Be engaging, be provocative, be informative, maybe even be annoying.
You know, throw your body between the child and the brutalizing knife.
Get them the information that they need to make a better decision.
Because of course, one of the things, I'm a parent, and one of the things I'm sort of aware of is my daughter is going to come of age, you know, in a decade or two.
And I really have to think about what the ethics and morals are going to be like in sort of 15-20 years.
Because those are the ethics and morals that parents are going to be judged by.
And that which is going to, which seems to be common sense and tradition and so on now, in 15 or 20 years, let's just say 20 years for someone who's pregnant, your child is going to look at you steeped as a new adult in the morals of her time and his time.
Not in the morals of thousands of years ago or 150 years ago at the time when they didn't want children to get hairy palms from touching themselves.
And you need to think forward in terms of how are you going to be judged as a parent by the morals of 20 years ago.
You know, there was a time when racism was more prevalent and more acceptable and so on.
And now, of course, it's not acceptable and rightly so.
And you're going to be judged by those standards.
So if you're going to inflict this on your child, your child is going to sit across that red checkered kitchen table with all of the information that you rejected and is going to say, why?
Why did you do this to me?
If you're the father, they're going to say, well, did it happen to you?
And if you say yes, then you'll say, well, if it happened to you, why did you inflict it on me knowing all the problems?
And if no, well, why did you inflict something on me that you didn't even have done to you?
And the moms and the dads are going to be grilled with all of the information and the slow, steady progress of morals.
And I would really like for parents to not be subject to that kind of cross-examination because it's not going to be pretty.
Well, I agree, Stephan.
And I think that's already happening.
The men in our survey have already reported in large numbers that they've talked to their parents and said, why did you do this?
And they're already grilling their parents over this issue.
It's not something we have to wait 20 years for.
And the other point I would like to make about that is sometimes it's futile to intervene when people are in the pregnancy process.
This conversation needs to happen much, much earlier as a societal discussion.
We need to be reaching out to late high school students and college students to get them to debate this issue, understand how complex it is, and come to a moral and ethical and human rights judgment that says, yeah, I've had a lot of time to think about this, and that's not going to be done to my child.
Well, you know, this sort of momentum of history argument, which I understand and I sympathize with, And people have got to understand that same argument was used to justify slavery.
Well, you know, all societies all throughout the world have had slaves for hundreds of 100,000 years.
And who are we to get in the way?
I mean, there's no tradition in human history older than slavery.
And nonetheless, it was wrong and needed to stop.
Well, listen, I really, really appreciate Your time, Tim, and this, of course, the multi-decade effort that you've put, and, of course, the enormous number of male traumatizing events that you have prevented through your actions and your efforts.
So please, please, everyone, circumcisionharm.org.
Get educated.
Educate other people.
There's no reason why this ancient, and I'd like to say medieval, except it's Victorian in a lot of the Western countries, this barbaric practice does not need to continue.
And let's, for once, give the same care and compassion to little boys that we do for little girls and understand that the horror of female genital mutilation is at least equal by the horror of male genital mutilation.
Thank you again so much Tim for your time.
▲
Export Selection