The Completely Unregulated Practice of Male Circumcision: Human Rights’ Abuse Enshrined in Law? By John Geisheker

We are witnessing a disturbing tend to “enshrine” male circumcision into law, shielding the practice from health and safety regulation of any kind. This trend precedes any honest attempt to assess “morbidity,” the unavoidable complications of any surgery, especially poignant for this unregulated and pre-germ-theory practice. Without a thorough assessment of morbidity, all bioethical discussions are, logically, premature. The author details a “permissive and incautious” milieu, including a lack of qualifications for circumcisers, rudimentary training, septic non-clinical settings, withheld anesthesia and analgesia, sub-optimal surgical protocols, a lack of back-up resources, minimal post-operative observation, minimal legal remedies, and other shortcomings. It is argued that serious inquiry must ethically precede blanket legal protections accommodating atavistic adult urges.

From New Male Studies: An International Journal - Vol. 2, Issue 1, 2013, pp. 18-45.

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Religious circumcisions are crimes says court (Germany)

Religious circumcisions are bodily harm and thus a crime, a German court ruled this week, in what was dubbed a precedent-setting decision. 

Non-medical circumcision is a "serious and irreversible interference in the integrity of the human body,” the Cologne district court ruled. 

This criminalises religious circumcisions performed by Jews and Muslims, the Financial Times Deutschland newspaper said on Tuesday. It says circumcision should be considered a crime of bodily harm.

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EMALE Issue 99 (June 2011)

In this month's issue:

improve your health with a dose of culture

getting to the bottom of men’s health

Men’s health SERVICES Update

Men’s Health Victoria Network Meeting

can't stop hormone-fuelled risk-takers

future events

• Manshine 2011 June 10 - 13 2011 Ewen Maddock Dam, Landsborough Sunshine Coast
• National Men's Health Gathering 2011 September 19 - 22 2011 Perth Pan Pacific Hotel

news briefs

• AFL supports PCFA work in Balls4Life program
• San Francisco mulls circumcision ban: Is procedure mutilation - or good medicine?
• Rural men’s wellbeing and community support

The Circumcision Debate: Is it Normal or Barbaric?

I am an uncircumcised man. This has never bothered my wife, Nicole. Or so I thought. “It’s like your penis is wearing a turtleneck,” she’d sometimes say, benignly. As such, there was never any doubt in my mind that, should my wife and I ever produce a miniature me, he would also go uncircumcised. We would leave his little thing alone. No snip-snip, just like Daddy. Until, that is, the late-September day when we brought our newborn son home from the hospital. It was chilly, and the tightly wrapped baked potato of a boy felt warm in the crook of my arm. “We’re getting Dalton circumcised,” my wife said as she fastened the potato into his car seat. “What?” I said. “Since when does he need that?” “Ever since uncircumcised penises are weird.” She paused before adding, a little backpedally, “Except yours, of course. Yours is OK.”

U.S. Circumcision Rate Drops to Just 33%!

In a recent article published in The New York Times, Roni Caryn Rabin reported on the Centers for Disease Control's recent news that the U.S. circumcision rate had fallen significantly between 2006 and 2009. "A little-noted presentation by a federal health researcher last month at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna suggested that the rate had fallen precipitously — to fewer than half of all boys born in conventional hospitals from 2006 to 2009, from about two-thirds through the 1980s and ’90s," her article said.