Circumcision -Penn & Teller Showtime

[Dr Rock]

Originally posted by KinkGuy@Apr 15 2005, 10:24 PM
What they don’t know is that one out of every 500 circumcisions results in a serious complication. [Schmitt] About 4 out of 100 are either considered unsatisfactory or result in some sort of complication.

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wow, that high? so either a large proportion of doctors are distressingly incompetent, or the procedure is rather more brutal than we're usually led to believe. sick.

and don't get me started on islamic adolescent circumcision. that's even worse than neonatal circumcision, because at least a newborn baby is unlikely to remember the event. gaaahhhh. x(

 

[robertomuro]

Originally posted by Dr Rock+Apr 16 2005, 12:53 AM--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Dr Rock &#064; Apr 16 2005, 12:53 AM)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--QuoteBegin-KinkGuy@Apr 15 2005, 10:24 PM
What they don’t know is that one out of every 500 circumcisions results in a serious complication. [Schmitt] About 4 out of 100 are either considered unsatisfactory or result in some sort of complication.

[post=300914]Quoted post[/post]​

wow, that high? so either a large proportion of doctors are distressingly incompetent, or the procedure is rather more brutal than we&#39;re usually led to believe. sick.

and don&#39;t get me started on islamic adolescent circumcision. that&#39;s even worse than neonatal circumcision, because at least a newborn baby is unlikely to remember the event. gaaahhhh. x(

[post=300920]Quoted post[/post]​

[/b][/quote]

Think that&#39;s bad? Here the black males belonging to the Xhosa tribe are circumcised around the ages of 17-19 before they can become a man. It is performed by one of the elders without anaesthetic or any sterile equipment. A knife (not always that sharp) is used freehand to do it. After which the foreskin is eaten by the initiate (to apparently prevent it in being used in spells against him). He then goes out into the bush with a makeshift bandage over it and he can only come back to civlisation when it is healed (can take up to 2 weeks). Hundreds die from these circumcisions every year, hundreds more have SEVERE complications. Millions of &#036; are spent every year on specific clinics and monitoring professionals specifically for circumcisions. If a person refuses to be circumcised they are quite often abducted and forcibly circumcised. If they are circumcised in medical institution they are sometimes abducted and a traditional circumcision is done/attempted on them again.

If in you don&#39;t believe any of this you could always go to one of our mainstream news sites (eg: www.news24.com) and just search for the keyword circumcision. These are newspapers which are traditionally for the practice.

There are two major points on this though:
1) EVERY person has a right to make decisions about his own body unless he is incapable and the INTERVENTION is required to prevent death or harm to him/her. This is violated in neonatal circumcisions.
2) EVERY medical organisation (even in the USA) has stated that they do NOT support neonatal circumcisions. The benefits DO NOT outweigh the risks involved. Add up every supposed risk from the seriously flawed circumcision research done and you will still not approach the risk of circumcision complications.

Side note: Could someone please explain that increased AIDS risk study due to not being circumcised to me? The white population here (mostly uncircumcised) has a less than 2% HIV infection rate. The black population (60%+ are circumcised) have a 40% HIV infection rate. Europe is almost completely intact as is their HIV rate. But my real point is this, what does a lowered risk mean? Even if it is 20% less or whatever, does that mean you have to sleep around one more time with someone for example before you get infected? Stick to one partner or wear a condom etc.. and this will not even be a concern&#33; Continue to have sex with an infected person and no matter what this already proven to be flawed survery says and you will (unless you are immune) get infected. Let this practice go along with female circumcision, blood letting and electro-shock therapy.

Respect your children enough to let them decide..

 

[Dr Rock]

Originally posted by robertomuro@Apr 15 2005, 11:24 PM
Think that&#39;s bad? Here the black males belonging to the Xhosa tribe are circumcised around the ages of 17-19 before they can become a man. It is performed by one of the elders without anaesthetic or any sterile equipment.

yeah, there&#39;s a wide and sickening array of variations on the circumcision rite among tribes in africa. the sabei not only practise ritual circumcision but also slit the scrotum and cut out one testicle, for example. yes, seriously. then there are the tribes that decorticate the entire penis from the base - can you imagine that, in an equatorial climate?? uke: just a few of several thousand reasons why africa is one big fucking headache for the civilized world (and in comparison to 80% of african nations, even I can use that term without irony). there&#39;s a joke among black folks here that africa is such a disaster because all the smart africans long ago emigrated to europe and the US. something is sure as hell very badly wrong with the continent.

Side note: Could someone please explain that increased AIDS risk study due to not being circumcised to me? The white population here (mostly uncircumcised) has a less than 2% HIV infection rate. The black population (60%+ are circumcised) have a 40% HIV infection rate. Europe is almost completely intact as is their HIV rate.

... and strangely enough, the area with the highest rate of HIV infection (scotland) is also the area with the highest rate of infant circumcision.

I don&#39;t honestly think that being cut or uncut has much to do with one&#39;s likelihood of contracting HIV - as a virus, infection relies more on circumstantial factors - but apparent "coincidences" like these do make me wonder what exactly IS going on.

 

[jonb]

Originally posted by bigsam@Apr 14 2005, 08:55 PM
As far as I&#39;m concerned from a medical standpoint its still up for debate, and as far as I know, the cervical cancer study is actually quite recent, as it was determined that uncircumcised penises have a much higher incidence of carrying or maintaining living HPV which causes cervical cancer in women.

What is this "living HPV"? You ARE aware that viruses aren&#39;t alive, right?

There is also recent evidence that the chances of contracting HIV are much higher for an uncircumcised man through heterosexual intercourse.

Oh, yes, because the foreskin has either more or fewer of a cell which is only found in the pancreas; the studies haven&#39;t decided which it is. *snicker*

Some doctors say one thing, some say another.

You do realize homeopaths say the same thing. But it&#39;s still just magic water.

Both camps have suporters within the medical community, and as such its difficult if not impossible to determine who is in fact right, or whether or not there is in fact a "right".

Please, no postmodern nonsense.

 

[jonb]

Also, Dr Rock, the U.S. has a higher seroprevalence rate than most Western countries. You can actually find a few Third World countries with low rates of circumcision (such as Mexico) where the seroprevalence rate is lower.

 

[DadsAreUs]

someone correct me if I&#39;m wrong but I have read that traditional Jewish circumcision did not originally involve removal of the entire foreskin but merely a trimming of the skin to expose the head. One piece of evidence of this is from an account of Jewish gladiators in Rome. Apparently in Rome pulling back the foreskin to expose the head was a gesture akin to flipping someone the bird and so Jewish gladiators had to wear a special piece of jewelry to stretch their shortened foreskins over the gland. Anyway, it wasn&#39;t until many centuries later that Jewish circumcision entailed removal of the entire thing.

 

[bigsam]

Dr. Rock...I respect both your points on the topic. However there are lots and lots of things that babies (as people) don&#39;t choose to do or have done to them as infants that ends up happening. You have no ability to make those choices, and some of them are significant. Piercing of the ears of infants is a common one, and while infinitley less common than circumcision so is removal of extraneous limbs or growths (tails, fingers or toes, superfluous genetalia) all of which it falls upon the parents to make a decision of what they think is best for their child.

As for the religious wacko&#39;s comments that have cropped up. I&#39;m jewish, my father is jewish, my children will be jewish. Our tradition for thousands of years indeed our covenant with g-d is that of circumcision. Does that make me a religious wacko? Its not even as if this practice is a loose interpretation of the written texts. The tradition has been handed down directly since pre torah times. Does my wanting to continue that tradition make me a religious wacko?

I would hope that people in a place called support group would be more open minded than that.

 

[Knight]

I think the main argument is with the non-Jewish Americans and other people who are only removing a part of their child because everyone else is doing it. It&#39;s silly really and does a lot more harm than good.

 

[KinkGuy]

This certainly explains a lot.

Since the 1980s, private hospitals have been involved in the business of supplying discarded foreskins to private bio-research laboratories and pharmaceutical companies who require human flesh as raw research material. They also supply foreskins to transnational corporations such as Advanced Tissue Sciences of San Diego, California, [1] Organogenesis, [2] and BioSurface Technology, [3] who have recently emerged to reap new corporate profits from the sale of marketable products made from harvested human foreskins. In 1996 alone, Advanced Tissue Sciences could boast of a healthy &#036;663.9 million market capitalization performance.[4]

Not only is the actual surgical mutilation a revenue stream so are the skins themselves.

 

[D_Stavelay Strappon]

Originally posted by madame_zora@Apr 14 2005, 01:20 AM
Well, of course there&#39;s nothing wrong with being circumsized, but it would be better as an elective surgery as an adult. I&#39;d like to see how many healthy boys who grew up having a foreskin would choose that&#33;

ps., we already have this exact same thread going in Meet & Greet.

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Not me, madame_zora.. even tho I hated being uncut when a kid. Dad and two older bros are cut.

 

[bigsam]

Its entirely possible that I&#39;ve taken more offense to this than other people due to my religious background and the understanding that we were being lumped into the "religious wacko" category. If in fact the arguement hinges around non jews and doing it for souly cosmetic purposes...well then I really don&#39;t care. I can see both sides of it.

 

[Dr Rock]

Originally posted by bigsam@Apr 16 2005, 03:41 AM
Piercing of the ears of infants is a common one

also unacceptable for the same reason. parents do not have the right to make decisions like that for their children.

and while infinitley less common than circumcision so is removal of extraneous limbs or growths (tails, fingers or toes, superfluous genetalia)

ah, but a lot of that stuff can present serious health complications as a child develops. superfluous genitalia in particular tend to be dysfunctional and will often REQUIRE surgical alteration in order for the kid to develop properly, or at least as near properly as possible.

on the other hand, polydactlyous fingers or toes have no potential health risk and I don&#39;t see any good reason for removing them without consent, either. it is sometimes necessary to surgically separate fingers or toes which have grown together, but again that&#39;s a matter of physical function.

As for the religious wacko&#39;s comments that have cropped up. I&#39;m jewish, my father is jewish, my children will be jewish. Our tradition for thousands of years indeed our covenant with g-d is that of circumcision. Does that make me a religious wacko? Its not even as if this practice is a loose interpretation of the written texts. The tradition has been handed down directly since pre torah times. Does my wanting to continue that tradition make me a religious wacko?

uh... chopping bits of your kids&#39; bodies off because "god says so"?? HELL YES. I don&#39;t care if you&#39;re a jew, a muslim, an alien cult magus or whatever, that is just beyond retarded. religion is not a valid excuse for anything, least of all something like circumcision. the day "god" graduates from med school and takes his hippocratic oath, I&#39;ll start taking his research into consideration. until then, I think I&#39;ll deal with the real world instead.

 

[The_One]

Originally posted by bigsam@Apr 16 2005, 03:41 AM
However there are lots and lots of things that babies (as people) don&#39;t choose to do or have done to them as infants that ends up happening. You have no ability to make those choices, and some of them are significant. Piercing of the ears of infants is a common one, and while infinitley less common than circumcision so is removal of extraneous limbs or growths (tails, fingers or toes, superfluous genetalia) all of which it falls upon the parents to make a decision of what they think is best for their child.

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The fact of the matter is: Tails, extra figers and toes, make life harder to live. A small bit of skin that protects the glands of a penis, does not.

I believe that any religion that requires mutilation is simply wrong, and anyone who willingly partakes in it, is also wrong. Tradition or not, it causes trauma to a child, any type of pain does, more so when they are just barely out of the womb.

 

[willie]

Due to various pressure groups, it wasn&#39;t the done thing to get my son circumcised when he was a baby. Plus with all the bad press it gets, he might have reacted badly, when he grew up.

Unfortunately for him, he did develop what is obviously a genetic problem, of a painfully tight foreskin and had a circumcision at 16.
Which didn&#39;t impress him.
He wanted to know why it wasn&#39;t done, when it would have caused a lot less trauma and embarrassment.

Yes, it was explained that other treatments are available, but he just wanted the simple approach.

Personally, I think it&#39;s a good look and zero maintenance.

 

[Dr Rock]

Originally posted by The_One+Apr 16 2005, 08:05 AM--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(The_One &#064; Apr 16 2005, 08:05 AM)</div><div class='quotemain'>I believe that any religion that requires mutilation is simply wrong, and anyone who willingly partakes in it, is also wrong.

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[/b]

I have two close friends who are jewish males; neither is circumcized (okay one of them is an atheist, but his parents were jewish, which is the relevant thing in this instance). there were three jewish kids in my year at school, and only one of them was circumcized, and he was from an orthodox family. I don&#39;t know any muslim guys personally, but I would guess that (like the jews) many of those born in the UK and europe are not circumcized either.

anyway, the point is that not all jews regard circumcision as a relevant aspect of their faith, so it is not really fair to criticize their religion on the basis of a long-outdated practise still maintained by many of its adherents (a lot of christians still get married, for example...) personally I have no time for religion period, but I don&#39;t think judaism is any worse than islam or christianity or whatever.

<!--QuoteBegin-willie@Apr 16 2005, 08:40 AM
He wanted to know why it wasn&#39;t done, when it would have caused a lot less trauma and embarrassment.[/quote]
dumb question. obviously it wasn&#39;t done earlier because nobody could have predicted that he&#39;d have that problem. that&#39;s kind of the point behind stuff like doctors and medical science, so that when we have problems with our bodies we can get them checked out. I&#39;m sure there are still places you can live where you can have shamans read the details of your future life in the composition of their feces, but most of us have discovered that doctors are generally better overall.

Yes, it was explained that other treatments are available, but he just wanted the simple approach.

I like your style&#33; next time I get strep throat, I think I&#39;ll just rip the whole thing out and replace it with a length of garden hose, then it&#39;ll never happen again&#33;

Personally, I think it&#39;s a good look and zero maintenance.

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yeah, so you said, although you may be interested to know that the "maintenance" involved - basic body hygiene - is actually identical whether you&#39;re circumcized or not. I mean, I imagine it&#39;d become an issue if you bathed less than once a month or so, but if that&#39;s the case then smegma is probably the least of your worries.

 

[robertomuro]

I must agree with the others here on the point that I don&#39;t believe any religion takes preference over the rights of the person. Bodily integrity being one of them. Many people require female circumcision but that has been made illegal in many countries very recently (only 1997 in USA).

The interesting thing about Jewish circumcision however is that in countries like Russia almost no Jews are circumcised. The traditional circumcision done by Abraham was just a removal of a small part of foreskin at the tip. The posed problems for the Rabbis as the Jews kept it rolled forward to blend in with the gentiles as only for this reason was more foreskin eventually removed. Nothing here to even do with Jewish religion. Even Moses failed to circumcise his son and no circumcision was practiced for the 40 years in the wilderness. There is lots of info on the web on this topic. If you are unable to find it let me know and I will post some links.

BTW: There is a ceremony known as bris shalom which does not include circumcision which many Jews are turning to.

 

[jonb]

Yeah, I mean, Lakota have all kinds of religious self-harm, from Sundance to funeral rites, but never on the genitalia, and never forced.

 

[bigsam]

Clearly I&#39;m not going to change anyone&#39;s minds (nor am I trying to) and no one is going to change my mind. However it seems rather small minded to simply call someone else&#39;s belief WRONG because it is based on a belief in a higher power. No one can prove the non existence of g-d any more than I can prove it.

Its just bothersome that a practice that I&#39;ve never heard of a complication from (done in a jewish ceremony by a moyel) which has been carried out for thousands of years is labled as WRONG because someone else doesn&#39;t believe in g-d. I DO believe in g-d...but I don&#39;t go telling atheists they&#39;re going to go to hell or anything.

I wouldn&#39;t have expected that kind of reaction from a support group.

 

[KinkGuy]

Originally posted by bigsam@Apr 16 2005, 03:03 PM
and no one is going to change my mind. 

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I am adamantly opposed to routine infant circumcision, BUT 110% support you in your religious beliefs and your RIGHT to hold them&#33;

We are not going to change each others position...and that&#39;s OK.

 

[robertomuro]

Originally posted by bigsam@Apr 16 2005, 11:03 PM
Clearly I&#39;m not going to change anyone&#39;s minds (nor am I trying to) and no one is going to change my mind. However it seems rather small minded to simply call someone else&#39;s belief WRONG because it is based on a belief in a higher power. No one can prove the non existence of g-d any more than I can prove it.

Its just bothersome that a practice that I&#39;ve never heard of a complication from (done in a jewish ceremony by a moyel) which has been carried out for thousands of years is labled as WRONG because someone else doesn&#39;t believe in g-d. I DO believe in g-d...but I don&#39;t go telling atheists they&#39;re going to go to hell or anything.

I wouldn&#39;t have expected that kind of reaction from a support group.

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I do not believe anyone has a problem with religion or Judaism in terms of belief. Judaism like many other religions supposedly places morales and ethics above doctrine which does not seem to be the case here. If you want complications, here is a death and infections reported a few weeks ago in the USA in the Jewish Weekly itself http://www.cirp.org/news/jewishweek02-10-05/