German court bans circumcision of young boys

[mijopaalmc]

I can understand if parents have a legitimate concern about their baby's health, but I have spoken to my own mother and other parents from that generation and they have said that "that's just what you did back then". Circumcision was almost uniformly done for no other reason other than some kind of social expectation. They didn't have interviews discussing the pros and cons; they asked you "do you want your son circumcised?" and the standard response was "well sure, everybody else does it, right?"

And I have trouble believing that parents, when faced with similar decisions, actually are capable of making informed decisions about, for instance, how to differentiate between medically necessary orthodontia and cosmetic dentistry.

The issue that I am objecting to is one of rhetoric rather than one of procedure.

 

[TheGoldcountry]

Even if parents are misguided, or even outright lied to, there is a difference between performing a surgery or medical procedure based on a perceived need, rather than societal pressure.

No parent has all the answers (nor any doctor.) But I see a clear difference between a parent who does something for (what they think) is in the child's best interest, rather than "going with the flow"

 

[JJM 777]

My example is confined to the most minor cleft lip conditions, and does not involve cleft palate at all.

The condition does not prevent a child from speaking, eating, or breathing.

That would be, um, 1% of cleft palate cases?

It simply prevents him from looking like other children. It is "corrected" purely for cosmetic reasons.

Let us try something else than cleft palate, which obviously is a genetic mutation, something gone wrong from the perspective of medical health:

protruding ears

In many countries these are routinely corrected, because they are a known source of problems in social relations and self-esteem, at least in childhood and teenage. Owners of these get bullied and have a harder time being popular on the mating market.

I fully support routine corrections of protruding ears, and I fully oppose routine circumcisions.

 

[mijopaalmc]

Even if parents are misguided, or even outright lied to, there is a difference between performing a surgery or medical procedure based on a perceived need, rather than societal pressure.

No parent has all the answers (nor any doctor.) But I see a clear difference between a parent who does something for (what they think) is in the child's best interest, rather than "going with the flow"

And doctors often cites medical reasons for circumcision. Just because your parents went along with societal "pressures" doesn't mean that all parents do.

 

[Meed]

Reading this thread is like watching NASCAR.

 

[mijopaalmc]

Reading this thread is like watching NASCAR.

Every so often there's a crash?

 

[Meed]

Every so often there's a crash?

They drive around in a circle 200 times.

 

[mijopaalmc]

They drive around in a circle 200 times.

Every so often there's a crash...the only reason that anyone watches in the first place.

 

[Meed]

Proves that watching NASCAR is a better way to spend time than reading this thread. Unless you replace "crash" with "offer to display one's dick to everyone".

 

[ddt]

My example is confined to the most minor cleft lip conditions, and does not involve cleft palate at all.

Need a hand in moving those goal posts? First you use the wrong term, and then you suddenly confine yourself to a very small subset of cases.

 

[Rolfe]

Your rules.

I'm not sure if you're misunderstanding me deliberately, or not.

You were bringing up examples of procedures which are carried out on adults, because they want them done. Nobody is going to remove large chunks of skin from a baby because of corrected obesity, for example. (And if a young baby had suffered extensive burns and required skin grafts, then of course the procedure would be done, but this is not something that would be done to a healthy infant.)

I'm giving you an example of a procedure which is pretty closly analagous to circumcision. Removal of toenails from normal healthy newborns.

Toenails are specialised skin structures, just as the prepuce is. They're "bits of skin". Toenails have a protective function on the end of the toe, but by and large we can actually do without them. Toes with the toenails removed look a little bit different, but they don't look gross. That part of the body is routinely covered, anyway. Removing the toenails makes hygiene easier, in that you don't have to keep cutting the things and cleaning beneath them. It prevents or lowers the incidence of a number of medical conditions such as ingrowing toenails and onycholysis. Some people actually need to have their toenails pulled in adulthood as a result of developing these conditions.

So why don't we advocate pulling out babies' toenails ar a week old? Wouldn't it be better, because they heal so well at that age, and they won't remember the pain, and it'll be over and done with?

I'm trying to provide an analogy which lacks just one element. Pulling out toenails was never a Bronze Age superstition which was carried down to the present day, and it has never become fashionable.

The advantages and disadvantages of toenail-pulling seem to me to be pretty closely aligned to the advantages and disadvantages of circumcision. Take away the religious element, and you might as well propose toenail-pulling as circumcision, for future hygiene and prophylactic benefits.

So why is it OK to allow parents to amputate their baby's prepuce, but not to pull out his or her toenails?

Rolfe.

 

[Wuglife]

So why is it OK to allow parents to amputate their baby's prepuce, but not to pull out his or her toenails?

Rolfe.

The person with whom you are arguing does not care about the concept of logical consistency.

 

[jdp]

Therapeutic, adj., pertaining to results obtained from treatment.

Therapeutic exercise - exercise for the purpose of preventing muscular atrophy...

Therapeutic anticoagulant - the use of anticoagulants to decrease the tendency of the blood to coagulate and cause thrombosis

(from Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary)

So "therapeutic" is not used solely to describe the correction of an existing diseased or deformed condition, but to describe the prevention of an undesirable condition (muscular atrophy, thrombosis, increased susceptibility to urinary tract infections, etc.) Q.E.D.

I am not entirely sure I agree with your assessment of these definitions. I think in both of your examples a prescription for Therapeutic exercise or Therapeutic anticoagulant would have been made because of someone's individual existing condition. I don't disagree with you that these concepts are clearly strongly related but as Rolfe followed up with:

You need to understand that therapeutic and prophylactic are two quite different terms in medical discourse. This is a medical discourse. Anything done to a healthy patient with the intent of preventing disease is prophylactic. It is not therapeutic. Anything done purely for appearance is neither, it is cosmetic.

Most of the definitions I've found seem to indicate that something that is therapeutic is a treatment or intervention being done to cure disease, repair damage, or correct deformity. http://www.onelook.com/?w=therapeutic&ls=a

Some do include a definition, similar to what you propose, "serving or performed to maintain health" but I think this relates more to addressing chronic conditions, therapeutic use of cholesterol lowering drugs for example or your anticoagulant example.

I think they need to be distinct for an important reason, the bar for evaluating the acceptability of something done for a prophylactic reason needs to be necessarily higher than for something done for a therapeutic reason. The reason being that in the former case, the individual is healthy. And when this is cast into the context of prophylactic reasons done via proxy consent, the bar needs to be raised even higher still, again because we start off with the one essential fact, the individudal is healthy.

So I find the two concepts to be related but not necessarily the same:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/therapeutic

 

[pgwenthold]

Circumcision was almost uniformly done for no other reason other than some kind of social expectation.

Was? It still is! (and isn't, I should add)

There is no way that you can explain the patterns in circumcision in the world without invoking a cultural influence. Oh, it just so happens that 95% of European parents decide that it is not medically justifiable and don't do it, but only 50% (or whatever the current number is - much less than 95, for sure) of american parents make that decision? The medical issues are exactly the same in europe as they are in the US, so it can't be due to that.

This is what made me realize the huge societal component that comes into play here.

 

[pgwenthold]

Even if parents are misguided, or even outright lied to, there is a difference between performing a surgery or medical procedure based on a perceived need, rather than societal pressure.

Somewhere earlier in this thread (or the norwegian one) I talked about the excuses that people have for circumcising their kids in the US. Most of them are variations on the "he will be shunned for being different" theme, whether it is being different from dad or from the other kids in the lockerroom, or, my favorite, shunned by girls who find it unattractive. Because I know that when my sons were born, the one thing going through my head was, "How can I improve his chances of having sex with superficial girls?"

I didn't make those reasons up. They are all ones I have heard.

 

[Soapy Sam]

I guess the only way to make sure nobody is doing snip jobs on the fly would be compulsory inspection, every morning during Appel.
I approve the move to make this sort of thing illegal. Tolerance is all very well, but how far should tolerance extend?

 

[Rolfe]

How do they make sure nobody is doing female genital cutting on the fly at the moment?

"Because people will do it anyway under uncontrolled conditions" hasn't been a good reason for not banning anything else that bloody well ought to be banned. It takes time to change attitudes, but knowing that if they do this they are breaking the law tend to change quite a large proportion of attitudes pretty quickly.

Rolfe.

 

[mijopaalmc]

Somewhere earlier in this thread (or the norwegian one) I talked about the excuses that people have for circumcising their kids in the US. Most of them are variations on the "he will be shunned for being different" theme, whether it is being different from dad or from the other kids in the lockerroom, or, my favorite, shunned by girls who find it unattractive. Because I know that when my sons were born, the one thing going through my head was, "How can I improve his chances of having sex with superficial girls?"

I didn't make those reasons up. They are all ones I have heard.

Funny the aesthetic angle is heavily emphasized when dealing with orthodontia, and there is often questionable necessity (and sometimes efficacy), yet no-one insists that orthodontia is "mutilation".

 

[Rolfe]

Technically, extracting healthy teeth could be described as a mutilation. I already pointed out that ear piercing, face-lifts and breast reduction are mutilations. It's a word. It's quite remarkable how many people get their knickers in a twist about it. You'd almost think they were a bit defensive, or compensating or something.

Rolfe.

 

[mijopaalmc]

Technically, extracting healthy teeth could be described as a mutilation. I already pointed out that ear piercing, face-lifts and breast reduction are mutilations. It's a word. It's quite remarkable how many people get their knickers in a twist about it. You'd almost think they were a bit defensive, or compensating or something.

Rolfe.

And pretending that that word doesn't carry emotional weight is where your argument completely fails. While a practice may "technically" be mutilation, by your definition, in general society, "mutilation" bears an extremely negative connotation. Therefore, telling parents that they are mutilating their children by having them undergo certain dental procedures evokes an equally negative reaction. What you are proposing is tantamount to "redefining" a word and expecting people to use it as it has been redefined without paying attention to the word's history.