"The Unkindest Cut," 20/20, ABC-TV,
January 22, 1999
Like most other reports about circumcision, this report failed
to acknowledge the one consideration that makes all other
considerations irrelevant:
that circumcision without consent of the circumcised (the
circumcision of children and babies) is foreskin amputation by
force and therefore a Human Rights violation, not a medical
issue -- for exactly the same reason cutting any other healthy,
normal, functional part of another person's body off without his
or her consent would be a Human Rights violation, not a medical issue.
The report failed to mention many other facts and considerations
that an honest report would have included, including the following:
- The foreskin is erogenous tissue.
- The vast majority of intact males value their wholeness --
even beyond price -- and wouldn't want to be circumcised even if
all the alleged medical benefits of circumcision were real.
- Many circumcised males bitterly resent that someone cut part
of their penis off when they were too young to protect themselves.
- Babies are as sensitive to pain as anyone else -- if not
more so.
- Most babies are given no anesthetic when they are
circumcised.
- Anesthetics don't always work and are never 100% effective.
- Having a needle stuck into his penis is itself painful for
a baby.
- From the baby's point of view, having his foreskin torn
from his glans and cut off is torture.
- Babies have had their entire penises burned off while being
circumcised and then been surgically changed into "girls."
- Males circumcised as adults have reported losses of
as much as 90% of their ability to experience sexual sensation
after being circumcised,
as well as inability to get or to maintain an erection, difficulty
ejaculating, and inability to ejaculate.
- Growing numbers of women are reporting a strong preference
for intact partners.
- Thousands of circumcised men have re-covered -- and thousands
more are in the process of re-covering -- their denuded glans by
various stretching and surgical techniques.
- The marketing and trafficking of foreskins stolen from human
babies is a multi-million-dollar-a-year racket.
-- all facts that ABC had to be aware of and all, therefore,
documentation by their absence of ABC's attempt to deceive its
viewers.
The report didn't even mention that some babies die as a
result of circumcision.
Barbara Walters misquoted the
American Academy of Pediatrics
1989 Report of the Task Force on Circumcision when she
stated: "In 1989 the American Academy of Pediatrics said that
there were medical benefits of circumcision." The
Report really states: "Newborn circumcision has
potential medical benefits and advantages as well as
disadvantages and risks." [Emphasis added.] Barbara Walters
omitted "potential" and "disadvantages and risks."
Authoritative documention of infant circumcision deaths can be found at
"Deaths Do Occur As a Result of Circumcision ... No One Knows How
Many" and Other Authoritative Statements About Infant Circumcision
Deaths and many other Internet sites, including
Circumcision Information Resource Pages and
NOCIRC.
Go back to "Current Sources of False and/or Misleading
Information About the Foreskin and Circumcsion."
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