[...] There is a market in baby foreskins: [...]

[...] There is a market in baby foreskins. HT to Tyler Cowen. [...]

If doctors were cutting off infant girls’ labia and selling the tissue to companies or institutions, people would be outraged. Why do we continue to tolerate the sexist double standard? All children, both boys and girls, have a right to protected from unnecessary genital surgery. All children have a right to genital autonomy.

This is not the topic I am most passionate about so I usually don’t enter these debates. However, if my child died based on a COSMETIC PROCEDURE I elected for him for “personal reasons,” damn right I would feel bad about it and I am sure I would regret my decision for the rest of my life.

Intactivists did not harrass the woman. She put the story forth on a public blog and some commented on HER story. The circumcision did kill the child and it was her decision to go ahead with it although she knew he had a heart condition and any stress could kill him. There were comments that infant circumcision has risks (that she decided to ignore) and she apparently had been warned about the risks and chose to ignore them.

Every year, more than 200 babies die of complications or accidents of their circumcisions. Everybody wants to believe it can’t happen to their baby but it does more than twice a week in The US.

Frank

Actually, some benefit was found in circumcizing women, about HIV and other STIs. I still don’t agree it should ever be done.

And in Africa, where HIV is passed heterosexually overwhelmingly, circumcized men think they’re “immune” after the cut, and don’t wear condoms any more than they did before.

The Vatican being stupid about condoms (wanting abstinence-only stuff) REALLY doesn’t help. The Pope is basically enacting a genocide by HIV, because he wants them to be more religious than basically half the planet.

I’d love to send one of these guys a whole bucket of foreskin-enriched face cream.

@Mistress_scorpio

You are an incredibly evil person. I can only hope you experience the loss of sensation through forced genital cutting, that way you would understand how I feel about what you just said.

Time for some mythbusting/debunking…

“The origin of this myth is based on an Oprah show where she showed a face cream “made out of foreskins”. This is a gross exaggeration and misinterpretations of the truth. Foreskins can be used to create firbroblasts- a type of cell that works as a culture to grow other types of cells. The face cream contains the hormonal residue resulting from the growth of skin cells from the foreskin fibroblast. The skin cells can be used for burn victims and wound healing. So it’s a far cry from the little pieces of chopped foreskins anti-circs will want you to believe.”

“Anti-circ activists Dr. Paul Tinari claimed that one foreskin is worth $100,000. Lies, lies, lies. An obvious display of ignorance in simple business administration. One foreskin can be used for years, evendecades to produce miles of skin and generate as much as $100,000. However, that doesn’t mean that’s what it’s worth. A machine may produce millions of dollars of a single product, however, that doesn’t mean that the machine itself is worth millions. What it generates, is worth millions, the actual worth of that machine is much less.”

“Finally, as stated above, one foreskin can produce miles of skin for decades, therefore not many are needed. Doctors are certainly not making the big bucks with the couple of bucks they could get from a foreskin. Furthermore, foreskins are usually donated by the parent, meaning that the doctors dont’ see a penny from those. Conclusion? Doctors who recommend circumcision either as a therapeutic or prophylactic procedure certainly don’t do it get their greedy hands on a buck and a half. It’s more likely that many of them have enough experience to realize that there are indeed medical benefits to circumcision.”

More ‘common lies about circumcision’… http://bit.ly/2fUoOm

Maybe circ discussions should go the way of abortion discussions on this board.

Circumcision is completely unnecessary except in rare cases. The vast majority of parents blindly go along with doctors’ recommendations, which are based more upon sheer ignorant, barbaric tradition than anything else.

But there is a certain little “Oliver Stone-esqe” part lodged deep in my primitive monkey brain that wonders if there might just be some bit of conspiracy at work here. Much the same way that big pharma encourages behaviors (in both doctors and patients) that only help to sustain and create their patientbase, it would seem that hospitals have lots to gain by furthering the public’s outdated and unjustifiable bias towards circumcision.

And the Christian part of my primitive monkey brain wonders where we get off questioning the value of something that God designed? Who are we to assume that the foreskin is worthless and should therefore be butchered off? Should we then turn our knives to other portions of babies’ anatomy that we have insufficient understanding of?

For those of you who say that circumcision helps prevent the transmission of STDs and offers less risks to be infected with AIDS, the real way to think about it is: if you protect yourself and the people you have intercourse with, then it doesn’t matter whether you’re circumsized or not. What matters is the use of condoms. It’s 2010 after all.

This is why I joined H.O.O.P.
Hands Off Our Penises.

Merv: Why are you being unnecessarily hostile? Joyce wasn’t being incendiary, she was voicing a medical opinion (which has some value to it) in a neutral tone!

For both Merv and Hugh7, why don’t you read at least read the wikipedia article before making unfounded assertions? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision_and_HIV. The mere fact that “the WHO and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) stated that male circumcision is an efficacious intervention for HIV prevention” should warrant recognizing it as a legitimate medical opinion.

(And to ward off an obvious criticism: I did check the Wikipedia article’s citations. Feel free to go through them yourselves.)

Pathetic article. Terrible journalism. She mentions that companies will pay thousands of dollars for a single infant foreskin (!) and yet does not bother to extrapolate that this may give doctors a financial incentive in continuing to perform circumcisions or to advocate for routine infant circumcision.

She uses the inaccurate word “snipped” in relation to circumcision, which minimises and trivialises the reality of the operation and the pain that the infant endures. She refers to the foreskin inaccurately as a “flap”, when in actual fact it is a tube – a dynamic living sheath of highly enervated functional erogenous tissue with multiple anatomical and physiological functions.

There is no mention that neither the parents nor the baby consent to this use of the foreskin, nor do they benefit financially from it. In fact the parents are usually not even aware of it. She does mention that one foreskin can be used for decades (!) to produce face creams, but doesn’t expound on how one foreskin can go such a long way and so this does not justify routine infant circumcision.

There is no mention of the fact that there are other forms of skin grafts that don’t require foreskins, or that the only medicos using foreskins for this purpose are American because circumcision is part of the culture.

And most importantly of all, there is no mention of ANY of the Functions of the Foreskin. There is no mention of Any of the positive benefits a foreskin gives to its socalled owner. How it relates to the rest of the penis and how it affects sexual experience. The foreskin would be put to much better use attached to its owner than being used by corporations who do not ask for consent, do not re-imburse the owner, and do not even make people aware of what they are doing.

And then in the last paragraph she mentions her stupid husband who didn’t even realise the foreskins he works with everyday come from human babies. Indeed it seems that like attracts like. And if people as daft as her husband are working with foreskins to create products then it doesn’t bid well for the products or the reasons for making them.

Parents, let your male children keep their whole genitalia, just as you give your daughters the opportunity of. Don’t buy into silly commercial media hype, and speak out against this destructive practice.

More infibulation bandwagon!

Male and female circumcision are identical. The most commonly performed type of female circumcision that the Muslims perform is removing the clitoral hood which is identical to the male foreskin. They do not do it to “mutilate” them or to “reduce their sensitivity” or “cotnrol” them. That’s all feministic bullshit that women have been touting as part of their “bodily rights” campaign. Hey sexist women: bodily rights apply to everyone, and the United States has a law that says all laws have to be created equally. Your little female cuttting law is unconstitutional, and it’s just a matter of time until they ban circumcisions for everyone, or allow girls to get their little clip. And for all the bullshit about HIV and urinary tract infections? Women get more urinary tract infections than men do…by 10 to 20 times, and they also did numerous studies in Tanzania that said female circumcision reduces HIV by up to 65%, so if there was any procedure that would have a health, and cost benefit to our society, it’s female circumcision.