[back]back to TOC




Marilyn Fayre Milos R.N. & Norman Cohen
April 3, 1999

Victory to the Children: Ending Circumcision in the Next Century


Part I
By Marilyn Fayre Milos, R.N.

The American Academy of Pediatrics announced on 1 March 1999 that it does not recommend routine infant circumcision. Without compelling medical benefits, then, routine circumcision is nothing more than a social-cultural custom.

Ethical physicians will uphold the first tenet of medical practice - “First, do no harm” - but some physicians will continue to act as “agents” of this custom - and continue to profit from it. It is essential, therefore, to understand how genital cutting began in the US, how and why it has been perpetuated here, and why the birthright of all human beings to keep their sex organs intact must be respected and protected.

The genital cutting of children is gruesome and horrifying. No one knows for sure why anyone started cutting other people’s genitals. The origins of genital cutting are rooted in culture and religion. Researchers agree that it began in Africa, where it is still performed as a puberty rite and religious ritual. Forced and coerced genital cutting is an especially violent means of control and domination - and itself marks a society as violent.

The circumcision of a newborn violates maternal instinct and impairs infant bonding. Mother is disempowered, and baby is primally wounded. Circumcision encodes the infant brain with pain associated with a part of the body meant to experience pleasure. The baby becomes both victim and potential victimizer, and the cycle of violence perpetuates itself from one generation to the next.

Physicians began circumcising male children - and adults when they could - in England in the mid-1800s, after two Frenchmen introduced their “Degenerative Theory of Disease,” which claimed that everyone is born with a finite amount of energy. Over-expenditure of that energy, they said, leads to debility and susceptibility to disease. This idea dovetailed with the strictness of behavior and the gravity of “spilling the seed” in puritanical Victorian England. Masturbation was blamed as the obvious cause of degeneration. Attempts to prevent this “self-abuse” included physical restraint, corporal punishment, and blistering the urethra with a cauterizing instrument called a bougie (“Don’t let the boogie man get you!”). Soon after England began circumcising male minors, the US followed its lead.

Near the turn of the century, the Germ Theory of Disease was introduced, and suddenly the already maligned foreskin was further demonized as harboring germs. Hygiene became the new pretext for excising foreskins. From then on, medical pretexts for circumcision corresponded to the dreaded diseases of the time: the penile cancer scare of the ’30s, the cervical cancer scare of the ’50s, and the sexually transmitted diseases that came with the sexual revolution in the ’60s. Today, of course, we know that penile cancer is a very rare disease of elderly men with poor hygiene and a history of smoking cigarettes and consuming alcohol. Cervical cancer is a sexually transmitted disease caused by a virus. Sexually transmitted diseases are spread by risky behaviors, not normal parts of the body.

By the end of World War II, most babies were born in hospitals, and the pretexts to circumcise - coupled with insurance coverage - made the intact penis a rarity among American males. In the early ’60s people began questioning and challenging the sexual mores and other aspects of earlier eras, including medicine. Many women wanted a more holistic lifestyle, recognized birth as a normal process, and chose to have their babies at home. Many of these babies were kept intact.

With the “medical reasons” for circumcision debunked and the circumcision rate declining in the ’70s, other pretexts for circumcision emerged: “He won’t look like his father,” “He’ll look different from the other boys,” “He’ll feel different in the locker room.” These arguments were never used, of course, when circumcision was adopted and circumcised babies had intact fathers and grandfathers. They were just more reasons given to perpetuate circumcision.

During the 1980s, a new pretext for circumcision was found: prevention of urinary tract infections. Even though both girls and circumcised boys get urinary tract infections (easily treated with antibiotics), perpetrators argued that without circumcision, increasing numbers of males would end up on dialysis machines from kidney failure. They ignored the fact that 85% of the males in the world are not circumcised and are not on dialysis machines.

Sexually transmitted diseases again became a pretext for circumcision during the 1990s, and perpetrators now added the most dreaded disease of all: AIDS. Perhaps no pretext for routine circumcision reveals the irrationality of the circumcision mindset more than the claim that circumcision confers protection against AIDS. The US has one of the highest male circumcision rates and one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world. Some, however, still use this argument. I recently received a letter from a health worker in Senegal trying to get help for males in the Luos tribe, who are being beaten and circumcised by force because of the faulty AIDS studies of Canadian researchers. Why are these researchers not spending their grant money on education? Safe behavior, not amputation, protects against sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV infection.

There will always be “researchers” with personal agendas trying to market their biased opinions. Adults, at least, have a choice and a chance to protect themselves. Millions of children in the world, including most male children in the US, don’t.

Circumcision has never been a health issue. Circumcision is a human rights issue. What can we do to bring this torture and mutilation of children to an end?

We can educate. This is a difficult task because we are trying to legitimize the normal penis in a sexually repressed, foreskin-phobic society. It is more difficult still because our message is one many people don’t want to hear. What man wants to hear - or have anyone else hear - that he was tortured and mutilated and that the protective and most erogenous part of his penis was cut off when he was too young to protect himself? What mother wants to hear that her precious baby suffered needlessly? What doctor wants to admit he has blood on his hands? The truth about circumcision is not easy to hear. Yet, as Gandhi said, “If we are to have real peace, we must begin with the children.” Our message is urgent and of supreme importance!

In response to doctors who refuse to stop circumcising, there is now an international group of lawyers, Attorneys for the Rights of the Child (ARC), who are suing doctors and hospitals on behalf of children. As ARC founder J. Steven Svoboda said, “The medical profession, which has perpetuated this tragic disfigurement of baby boys’ genitals, will be challenged by an organization of legal professionals they cannot afford to ignore.”

Female genital mutilation has been outlawed in the United States. That law is unconstitutional because of its gender bias. It must be extended to protect males as well. Although some argue that female and male genital mutilation are not the same, who is harmed or suffers more is not the issue. Any cut into the healthy normal tissue of a child or nonconsenting adult violates that person’s human rights, regardless of gender or the severity of the wound.

We are the generation that has begun to recognize, acknowledge, and document the harm circumcision does and to proclaim circumcision without consent of the circumcised to be what it really is: an intolerable violation of human rights - an awareness growing worldwide. We are the generation that is bringing this harmful, misguided custom to an end. We are the generation that is making America whole again.

Part II
By Norman Cohen

I’d like to share a little bit of what I’ve learned about circumcision. I’d like to educate people about it, show why it’s important to Atheists as well, and explain why I believe that circumcision is truly on its way out. I was an Atheist at seventeen. I was raised in a conservative Jewish home - my father is a rabbi - so I got religion pretty much shoved down my throat. I sat in the library when I was seventeen, I was thinking about god, and I realized that god does not exist. However, it was another ten years before I realized anything had been done to my penis - something that had harmed me. This was a real shocker. It took me ten years to find out about circumcision. I had a scar on my penis, and I didn’t know what it was or why.

I was told that circumcision was a good thing, that the Jews had invented it - which is not true. That it prevents cervical cancer, which is not true. And that this was a gift that the Jews had given Americans - because after all, now everybody has been circumcised. All of that is baloney. Circumcision was not invented by the Jews, it was invented by the Egyptians about six thousand years ago. A number of different groups all over the world practice circumcision and it is a barbaric tradition that has been going on for six thousand years. The practice of circumcision, although it was rooted in religion and as we will see in sexuality, it did not stay there. It mutated into what it is today in North America, where it is a custom that has somehow transcended religion and even those that give up religion. They never seem to question circumcision.

So there’s some powerful forces at work here that I think we all need to look at. When I got involved in this movement, I said “Well, I don’t have much time and I don’t think there’s much I can do, but I’ll spend one hour a week talking to parents about circumcision and then we’ll see where it goes.” It became important to me, because as I learned more and talked more, I realized that circumcision gave a lot of symbolic meaning to and understanding of my own childhood. I began to see that so many things were done to me “for my own good,” and that was repeated over and over again: “it was done for your own good.” I realize now it was not done for my good. Circumcision is rooted in the power and control that we now call religion. It transcends religion. It is patriarchal; the male elders of the tribe impose their will on the helpless babies and boys as part of a ritual, and a variety of reasons are given as to why these boys need to be circumcised. But in the end it is the patriarchal power structure inflicting its will upon these helpless boys.

You have to understand that before you can control a person’s mind, say through religion, you have to control his or her sexuality. You must control sexuality, because it is one of the most independent and powerful of all human experiences. You must control sexuality if you’re going to control minds. We see this in all of the fascist regimes of this century; they have a long history of oppressing sexuality, of persecuting homosexuals. What happens with circumcision is that once a boy suffers this barbaric act, it continues into the next generation. The victim then becomes the perpetrator, and he says things like, “well if it was good enough for me…” or “this is what was done to me,” or “this has been done for thousands of years, so this must be OK.” Religious origins become sort of hidden in this personal mythology and belief about the body.

Religion has literally mutilated the individual, literally sculpting his body into what that religion thinks his body should look like. It virtually crushes his spirit. Marilyn tells about a little baby struggling on the circumcision board struggling to be free - which was impossible - and having to endure this incredible pain. (Up until recently, no anesthesia was given for infant circumcision.) So what is going through that boy’s mind when this is happening? What kind of loss of trust is this boy suffering? How can he ever really trust that his care givers are going to take good care of him? These are things that men as adults do not want to face - that they were harmed when they were most helpless. This is a learned helplessness that contributes to a variety of things such as a powerful belief in god and religion, drug abuse, and other post-traumatic stress illnesses. You see, we need to keep god not only out of the public schools and off of the lawn at city hall: we need to keep him away from baby boys’ penises.

Circumcision is rooted in religion. Don’t be fooled by modern medical mythology, because that’s not where it began. We have to understand that - and that the separation of church and state is not enough in this case to protect baby boys. This ritual has superseded religion with a new priesthood - the medical priesthood. We’re beginning the 21st century now with anesthetized mutilations in our nation’s hospitals at the cultural whims of parents. The parents can just say “Do it Doctor,” and the doctor will do it. He will remove what in an adult man will be fifteen square inches of flesh - this is done by a doctor, at the whim of the parents. On the other hand, as Marilyn pointed out, in 1996 female genital mutilation was declared a felony in this country. The slightest cut of girls’ genitals is against the law. My hope and expectations are that sometime soon a young Jewish angry man will stand up in a court room and confront his mohel and he will say, “You harmed me; you violated my civil rights.” This is what it is going to take. Right now we’re still in sort of an academic stage, where we’re discussing human-rights implications and the damage that’s done to a boy’s penis. But until we can turn this into an interpersonal and intergenerational conflict where the young can confront those that have perpetrated this crime, we’re not going to end it. We’re in the process though of creating the understanding and the type of society that can win such a lawsuit, because we have to help people understand first, that babies are human beings, that they have rights, that they are not property of their parents, they’re not religious objects. Parents are simply trustees. They’ve been given this child to care and nurture until adulthood. We need to welcome them in peace.

Why is all this important for Atheists? Why should you care about circumcision and ending circumcision? Because a child becomes a victim of his parents religious delusions, whether that’s circumcision or going to church every week or belief in god. In some ways they are victimized by their parents’ beliefs - in circumcision quite literally physically victimized. As a victim they are compelled to repeat it. So this victimization-perpetration cycle continues from generation to generation. It has a powerful psychological draw that’s very difficult to break. A man so fears what has been done to him as a child that he ends up repeating it on his own son. Unless he’s able to confront what was done to him, unless he is able to recognize the physical harm that was done through the circumcision, he will end up doing it on his son. And this tragically is the case all too often. In fact, in Jewish tradition, the Jewish father, by attending his son’s circumcision, is asking to give confirmation and acceptance of what was done to him those many years ago. So, it’s a generational cycle that we have to break. The suffering of children raised in religious homes - where out of fear they’re taught to betray themselves, doubt their self-worth, and are forced to give up their human rights as people - is a concern to Atheists.

I believe that if you change childhood you can change the future. Religion in the past has played both the role of victimizer of children and a rescuer. Children are raised in dysfunctional religious homes and then grow up to be dysfunctional adults who cling to religion. If we can break this cycle, we will do a great deal of good to promote Atheism.

Alice Miller is a Swiss psychiatrist who has written a number of books on what we do to children “for their own good.” In fact, that’s a title of one of her own books. And she has studied the history of childhood in Europe and understands that it was the childhood practices of Europe that led to the Holocaust: the belief that you could not question your parents, that your parents were always right. That what ever they did to you, it was for your own good. Every beating that you received was for your own good. This cycle could lead to the adult Nazis marching the Jews and others into concentration camps and gassing them without feeling.

We now, today, are finally learning though to treat children as independent human beings and thinkers. Children are finally going to be able to question authority and be able to truly confront themselves as independent and separate from their parents, and be able to lead lives where they can make choices that are different from their parents.

I believe that if you change childhood, you will get more Atheists. If you want a child to grow up believing in god, you just have to spank him all the time, teach him that he is nothing, that he has no value, let him cry himself to sleep at night, in his own room, and teach him that others know better for him than he knows for himself. You’ll have a child grow up believing in god. This is damaging to the child, because it damages his capacity to think critically. He learned that he is helpless to change his destiny, and that he cannot challenge the status quo. On the other hand, if you rear children with nurturing and acceptance and you let them express their own power as individuals - maybe this belief can prosper.

It’s helpful to think of circumcision as a social disease or social virus. A disease is a destructive process on an organ that has a specific cause and specific symptoms; and circumcision certainly fits that definition. It attacks the penis, it removes one third of the skin system of the penis, it desensitizes the glans of the penis, removes thousands of nerve endings, and interferes with the natural mechanics of sexual intercourse.

We have to look now in different places where these irrational beliefs such as circumcision can still be cleverly hidden. And this is because, like a disease, this virus has mutated and it has gone from being a religious belief to a so-called medical belief. And we need to look in areas such as medicine and sexuality to find where it’s really hiding. This is what I call the unholy alliance which started as a religious belief in the last century and became a medical belief. The medical doctors - religious doctors - looked at their Bible and looked at the Jewish populations and they said “Circumcision must be a good thing; it’s in my Bible , there must be a valid reason for it.” They were under a lot of pressure to come up with a rational reason to continue this process. The Jews of a hundred and fifty years ago wanted to eliminate circumcision in the reformed movement, and there was a great deal of debate about this. It was the Jewish doctors that came forward and said, “No don’t eliminate it, because there are hygiene benefits to circumcising and, after all, our women are not getting cervical cancer, and after all our women are not getting syphilis; so it must be the circumcision.” Well, all of this was based on flawed studies and a lot of fudged data.

This is an unholy alliance that continues today. Doctors are very comfortable with the role of playing god. They are very comfortable in mixing their personal beliefs about good and evil with their medical prescriptions. Doctors cannot control us unless we are ill. Therefore, doctors define illnesses for us. If they want the foreskin to be removed, they’ll find a reason to remove it. This needs to be challenged with a great deal of skepticism. The promotion of circumcision as a medical procedure in this country actually protects the religious communities that practice circumcision, both the Jews and the Moslems. By keeping circumcision as a potential medical benefit, the Jews do not have to feel challenged. And it legitimizes and protects the religious ritual which continues. I might add that there are a number of Jewish doctors today that are the biggest proponents of circumcision for so-called medical reasons. So it escapes the legal and scientific scrutiny by being protected by the medical community.

We saw this with the recent announcement of the American Academy of Pediatrics that said that it is legitimate for parents to consider religious and ethnic reasons for circumcising. Thomas Szasz, the famous psychiatrist, asks, “Well, why is male genital mutilation legal?” It is legal because it imitates preventative medicine. Why does it imitate preventative medicine? Because otherwise it would have to be illegal. So for conscious reasons doctors continue to promote this practice, and they mix their religious beliefs with their medicine. In addition, the epidemiologists - the people that study the spread of disease - also mix their religion with their medicine. They design flawed studies that say “going to church once a week makes you healthier.” They design studies that show that prayer helps you heal. All of this is nonsense. What they do is, they skew the data. They pick the groups that will give them the most favorable results, and they design very poor studies that are well publicized and that are not challenged by the media.

We as Atheists need to reclaim the moral high ground from the deists. We have the high moral values when it comes to raising our children. The priest, the rabbi, the doctor does not speak with moral authority when it comes to raising children. We need to expose religion as the enemy of children - the device that has created a great deal of fear in children, of shame, of guilt about their bodies. And, in the case of circumcision, actual physical harm.

I’ve been asked many times by people whom I’ve tried to educate about circumcision, “Well, what do you say to religious parents? What do you say to Jewish parents who want to circumcise?” The classic response I give is “Your religion ends where a child’s flesh begins.”

Freedom of religion for the child? This is the most wide-spread physical abuse faced by children in this country for religious reasons! In the courts, in such religious-abuse cases, generally children are protected. It’s getting the society to understand that in fact this is harmful - that is where our challenge lies. As Atheists we can weaken religion’s grip on our sexuality. Religion claims our bodies and our sexuality, not just our minds. It has given us a great deal of shame about our bodies and it takes a great deal of effort in this culture to throw off that shame, whether you were raised in a strict religious family or not.

Circumcision started in sexuality. It’s important to understand the power that was needed to control the sexuality of the boys in the tribe. It had to come from the elders; they wanted to crush the individual by crushing his sexuality. That is what happened in the process of circumcision. We need to break the unholy alliance that exists today between the medical community and the religious community by rejecting the shame and guilt surrounding our bodies and our sexuality that has been passed on to us by countless older generations.

Finally, I want to address another issue quickly. That is anti-Semitism. Constantly this is raised when I talk to Jews about circumcision. They say, “well you must be anti-Semitic.” So does Dr. Laura Schlesinger; that’s what she says on her radio show. But what we’re talking about are moral and medical decisions - that’s not an anti-Semitic plot. So I say save the anti-Semite labeling for the anti-Semites. This is about caring for children; this is about the harm that children and men are suffering as a result of their circumcision (and I might add the mothers and the wives that love these people as well). Many fundamentalist Christians are actually circumcised, for religious reasons, in this country because Jesus was circumcised. So the Jews in this country are circumcised; in addition there are 800 million Moslems around the world who are circumcised. So this is not an anti-Semitic plot.

Furthermore, I don’t care if a Jewish man as an adult invites all his closest friends and relatives over to his house, strips naked, lies on the kitchen table, drinks a little Manischewitz wine, and has his foreskin cut off.

I believe that circumcision is truly on the way out. We’re an important link in this chain of change - converting the guilt, the shame, and patriarchal power into something that’s better for children. We can end six thousand years of ritual abuse in the next century. Circumcision is in direct conflict with our modern understanding of the rights of children. We’re working now in a newborn nursery to educate parents. We’re working to educate them about the damage that was done to their penises, and the lack of sensitivity that results. Soon we will also be in the courts protecting the rights of children. Circumcision is going to fall - from divine to disgrace. The so-called sacred is now being exposed as the profane. This conflict between the ancient and modern is no less significant than Galileo’s conflict with the Catholic Church or the conflict over prayer in public schools. It took a hundred years in this country for circumcision to go from 10% to 85%. So in the next hundred years I believe it will go back to 0%. We are on a train of history; there is no stopping this train. Once you understand what is to be done, there is no stopping. Circumcision will end in the next hundred years and give victory to the children.





Marilyn Fayre Milos
This speech was presented at the 25th National Convention of American Atheists, in Piscataway, New Jersey. Ms. Milos is co-founder and director of NOCIRC (the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers). She has organized and coordinated five international symposia on sexual mutilation to bring together international experts to present a multidisciplinary body of research on this human-rights issue. She is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Childbearing: Critical Perspectives (Oryx Press, 1993), Human Sexuality, An Encyclopedia (Garland Publishing, 1994), and is the author of numerous other articles and pamphlets.

Norman Cohen
Mr. Cohen has been the Director of NOCIRC of Michigan since its founding in 1994. He appeared on the 1996 award-winning documentary on circumcision, “Whose Body, Whose Rights?” He has a unique perspective on circumcision, having grown up in a conservative Jewish household as the son of a rabbi. Now an Atheist, when he is not operating his own computer-consulting business, he spends his time as an anti-circumcision activist educating a new generation for the well-being of children.