GETTING SNIPPY WITH IT

I guess lots of people will chuckle at the news that one William Stowell is now suing the hospital that circumcized him as a new-born. He claims that he enjoys less sexual pleasure as a result. Actually, I think he has half a point, so to speak. I don’t think he should sue. And I don’t think the issue is sexual pleasure. (A lot of men seem to experience enough sexual pleasure to be finished in five minutes. With foreskin, they could be done in five seconds. Straight women and gay men have a good reason to worry about this.) It’s much simpler. In the absence of a pressing medical problem, it seems to me unconscionable to mutilate infants before they are able to give their consent. When they do this to baby girls, it’s called Female Genital Mutilation, and rightly abhorred. Slicing off your foreskin is nowhere near as damaging as removing the clitoris, of course, but it’s still damage. And damage should only be inflicted, it seems to me, with a person’s consent. I doubt if any grown man with an unmutilated penis would agree to the unnecessary pain and disfigurement unless he really had no better option. So why should we be doing this to children? The situation is even grimmer when you consider that all medical procedures have an error rate. The awful story recounted by John Colapinto about a boy brought up as a girl began with a botched circumcision resulting in the complete destruction of the baby’s genitals. Mercifully, the American Academy of Pediatrics just altered their guidelines to doctors and hospitals against routine circumcision of new-borns, after several generations of medically-enforced child abuse. How about amending it still further to recommend no mutilation unless there is a pressing medical need?