ambivalance, part 2
If you are an otherwise scientifically minded person, yet ambivalent towards circumcision, chances are, this has been done to you or the men in your culture.
While I want to avoid going too deeply into the lies and fallacies used to purport it, it’s clear that some level of this is needed for those that haven’t dug as deeply. The real thing is, arguments about cleanliness are ridiculous, false, and, cause/effect wise, this would be like cutting off your finger to prevent a minor paper cut on it.
Needless to say, most americans are completely uninformed of proper foreskin care none the less do they even realize that it’s actually completely attached and non-retractable until nearly puberty, that said, any notion of cleaning would be completely irrelevant to childhood. This is furthermore disturbing due to the lack of any informed consent, given it’s supposed to be the cure for this so called ailment.
The other notion of ‘childhood cure’ for this is supposed notion of reduced UTI’s in boys, but this is a huge misnomer as well. For whatever tiny fraction of difference this makes, which is again fairly insignificant, there’s a much larger group of children who get UTI’s, and that’s girls, and we do not recommend routine surgery to ‘fix’ this in that case, either.
Other articles regarding flawed studies about reduced chances of HIV and STD infection often completely ignore the fact that proper protection is indefinitely better, and that the real problem is most of those countries is poor education and poor health resources in general. It also doesn’t address the issue of men spreading it to woman at all, either. Not to mention many countries in africa already practice it, and guess what, still having an aids epidemic.
Really what we’re seeing here is poor attempts to find a disease for this cure. The real truth is, it’s harder for these people on the medical side, especially in america, who’ve been performing these surgeries for profit and without digression, that there seems to actually be motivation for finding reasons to do it.
I personally only believe it should take one person to stand up and say I wish I’d had the choice, and this issue should be over with. It’s clearly without consent, and serves no immediate purpose towards cleanliness or preventing any sexual disease in a child, who would not be sexually active anyway. That said, if it was that important, it could wait, but the real truth is, most of those people would never have it done later, and most of the people proposing it very well know that. And that is why this needs to stop. This is abuse.