queerbychoice (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
queerbychoice) wrote2001-12-02 10:34 am
queerbychoice) wrote2001-12-02 10:34 am
The Continuing Violent Sexual Assault Upon Male Babies by Their Parents and Doctors
Cuedus just brought up circumcision in his journal and thereby reminded me that it's been almost a month since I last gave my "Stop Assaulting Male Babies" speech to anyone, and even longer than that since I last gave it here on LiveJournal. So it's time to repeat it.
The vast majority of circumcisions are performed without anaesthetic, upon defenseless babies, without consent.
"Parents should be wary of anyone who tries to retract their child's foreskin, and especially wary of anyone who wants to cut it off. Human foreskins are in great demand for any number of commercial enterprises, and the marketing of purloined baby foreskins is a multimillion-dollar-a-year industry. . . .Also see plenty of other websites on the subject.
The after market for human foreskin is where the real money is made. Foreskins are sold to biomedical companies, which use them in the manufacture of insulin. They're also sold to middlemen, who package them for sale to research companies that in turn use them for biochemical analysis. Corporations such as Advanced Tissue Sciences (ATS), Organogenesis, BioSurface Technology, Genzyme, and Ortec International are taking cells from amputated foreskins and experimenting with artificial skin. Products like Dermagraft-TC, which sells for about $3,000 per square foot, are grown from the cells in infant foreskins and used as a temporary wound covering for burn patients. One foreskin contains enough genetic material to grow 250,000 square feet of skin."from "Foreskins for Sale"
The vast majority of circumcisions are performed without anaesthetic, upon defenseless babies, without consent.
"Are parents told that their baby's foreskin will be sold? Are they asked if their baby's foreskin may be sold?To cut off a person's body part without their permission should not be legal. It's illegal in the United States for a parent to lick or suck a baby boy's foreskin, yet it's perfectly legal for the same parent to CHOP IT OFF. Think that reasoning over a while.
Who is the legal owner of a baby's foreskin after it's been cut off? (Who is the legal owner of a baby's foreskin before it's cut off?)
Is it ethical to cut off a baby's foreskin, charge his parents for the operation, sell his foreskin without telling his parents, and keep the money? Is it legal?
Are the foreskins of children and adults being sold too?
Are other parts of people's bodies being cut off -- or out -- and sold without their knowledge or consent?
If someone cuts part of another person's body off -- or out -- and sells it without obtaining signed legal consent from the person cut, and the person who buys it makes money from it, who does that money rightfully belong to?
Do Diane Sawyer and Bill Kurtis (Investigative Reports) know about this?"from "Foreskins for Sale"
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(Anonymous) 2001-12-02 02:02 pm (UTC)(link)I had my own foreskin removed long ago, and I couldn't be happier about it. I don't know why the gay community has chosen to so fetishize a lump of tissue that we can do quite well without.
-Mike (http://www.epenthesis.org)
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(Anonymous) 2001-12-02 02:16 pm (UTC)(link)-Mike
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I do not believe I have enough information to make a final judgment on the accuracy of either of those claims. The one argument that sticks in my head as being most persuasive, however, is that men with less sensation are more likely to resist using condoms, and men whose foreskins were clumsily removed when they were tiny babies - at a time when it's extremely difficult to judge how the penis will grow later and thus the risk of doing greater damage by cutting off too much is drastically increased - tend to be at vastly greater risk of having less sensation.
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(Anonymous) 2001-12-03 05:50 am (UTC)(link)It's not about tissue, it's about the percentage of the cortex that's devoted to the area. When an infant is circumcised, that piece of cortex is reassigned and every bit of sensitivity remains. It's only when an adult is circumcised that there's less feeling than there once was or might have been. (One might argue that circumcising an infant would eliminate the risk of it having to be done for medical reasons in adulthood, thus preserving more sensitivity overall than it takes away.)
This is one of those arguments that sounds too appealing to put down, but simply doesn't add up.
-Mike
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Be serious. Sensitive tissue matters. It's not an issue of size - the clitoris has 8,000 nerve endings in it whereas a man's entire penis has only 4,000 [source available here] - but it is an issue of the number of nerve endings, and when you cut off the foreskin you cut off some nerve endings. You also expose the remainder to a lot more constant friction and thereby risk of damage than it was designed to be exposed to. Both the glans penis and the glans clitoris have protective hoods that cover them when not in use because this helps to protect them from injury. To remove that protection is to take a risk with your penis that evolution did not feel was worth risking.
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CONSENT is all-important.
If you choose to rid yourself of any piece of your own flesh, that's perfectly within your rights. But no one has the right to remove any piece of anyone else's flesh without consent.
And although a case can be made that humans could do without a large number of the body parts they've evolved to possess (appendixes, tonsils, whatever), I do not believe that humans have evolved any body parts which are actually detrimental to their survival. DNA tends to be remarkably well-designed most of the time, and the vast majority of illnesses which we like to search for genetic "causes" for (many types of cancer, for example) could actually be averted if we simply didn't subject our bodies to the environmental risks that we do.
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