Is the procedure a human rights violation?
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Yes. Removing healthy parts from a child’s sex organ violates fundamental rights. It needs to be an individual choice, not a parental option.
In general, yes. Circumcision cuts off healthy normal tissue without any immediate medical need. Amputation/Excision/Ablation, whatever you want to call it, is usually reserved for abnormal, unhealthy tissue.
Also, legally, in USA, the FGM law should be found unconstitutional for protecting vaginas from unnecessary cutting without protecting penises. This violates boys’ constitutional right to have equal protection under the law.
Yes.
The Australian Medical Association is currently talking about *banning* most non-religious circumcision. Most of their doctors are either circumcised themselves or married to circumcised men, but this is what they say in the summary statement of the paediatric policy on circumcision of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians:
“After extensive review of the literature the RACP reaffirms that there is no medical indication for routine neonatal circumcision.” (those last 9 words are in bold on their website).
The recent drive to promote circumcision in Africa has very little to do with HIV, and a lot to do with trying to justify circumcision. HIV doesn’t strike people at random, and any diversion from ABC (Abstinence, Being Faithful, Condoms) will cost yet more African lives. It’s ludicrous to suggest that men who’ve had the most sensitive parts of their penis cut off and told that it will protect them against HIV won’t have more unsafe sex. One study was also showing that circumcised HIV+ men are more than twice as likely to infect their wives as intact HIV+ men.
Female circumcision seems to have a protective effect against HIV (google “Stallings Tanzania”), but everyone seems very keen to keep that quiet. Most forms of female circumcision do not involve removal of the clitoris and in fact remove fewer nerve endings than male circumcision.
Of course, as would any medically unnecessary surgery be on a healthy, non-consenting individual.
As stated above, we prohibit forcing the exact same violation on females. Medical need is all that matters, as basic medical ethics dictate. Every other excuse is explicitly forbidden and subject to criminal prosecution.
There’s no valid reason to perpetuate this human rights violation for the genitals of infant males. Only our willful ignorance permits this ridiculous debate in the face of obvious truth. Without medical need, only the inherent risks exist.
At the very least, you’d think we could make it illegal to sell (or transfer for profit) the amputated tissue without disclosing the arrangement to the victim and his family.
Amputated foreskin is used in medical research and cosmetics and big pharma labs pay hospitals and doctors huge piles of cash for involuntarily vivisected human body parts.
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