Circumcision Law

What California debates today, Britain discusses tomorrow, although that tomorrow can be many years later. It was more than 20 years ago that I travelled to Hollywood with a group of mostly French journalists, who were astounded to find that they were prevented from smoking in the movie company offices we visited. Smoking was finally banned from all public places in California in 1995; and by 2007 Britain and France had enacted similar legislation, a development which my companions on that trip would have found inconceivable.

So we should pay close attention to the latest legislative coup on the US West Coast: for the November local elections in San Francisco, there will be a proposition to ban the circumcision of males under 18. Last month the Male Genital Mutilation Bill group achieved the necessary number of signatures to force a plebiscite on their objective.

The Wall Street Journal, observing this impending clash between religious groups and those pleading the rights of infants to evade an operation sanctioned by holy text, has described this as the Circumcision Wars (a twist on America’s so-called “Culture Wars” between religious and secular political forces).

Last Wednesday, Glenn Beck, the most inflammatory conservative broadcaster in America, launched a tirade on Fox News against the proposition, arguing that male circumcision was a token of the covenant that God made with the Jews and therefore that the attempt to ban the practice was antiSemitic. Beck’s fulmination was not just based on a close reading of Genesis 17; the author of the referendum text, Matthew Hess, has circulated a comic strip starring a blond superhero called Foreskin Man. This Aryanlooking figure does battle with a sinister, bearded figure, Monster Mohel (a mohel is the man qualified to perform Jewish ritual circumcision): “Nothing excites Monster Mohel more than cutting into the infantile penile flesh of an eight-day-old boy.” When asked about this astounding caption, Hess insisted that “we’re not trying to be anti-Semitic. We’re trying to be pro-human rights”.

Ostensibly, that is indeed the purpose of the anti-snip movement — an assertion of the right of an infant boy not to lose a part of his body just because his parents want to identify him as part of their religious tribe (whether Jew or, much more numerously, Muslim). They echo the words of Christopher Hitchens’s atheist polemic, God Is Not Great: “As to immoral practice, it is hard to imagine anything more grotesque than the mutilation of an infant’s genitalia.”

Put like that, it does seem barbaric: and we don’t normally sanction medically pointless surgical procedures without the consent of the subject. There is, though, a substantial medical literature suggesting statistically measurable benefits in infant male circumcision, which is one reason why for many years the hygiene-obsessed Americans have tended to put their infant sons through the procedure, using regular doctors rather than mohels. According to an article in Pediatrics magazine, entitled “The highly protective effect of newborn circumcision against invasive penile cancer”, uncircumcised men are 22 times more likely to fall victim to this gruesome condition than those who have been snipped; the authors also reveal that the country with the lowest rate of penile cancer is Israel.

When I pointed this out to an ardent anti-circumcision campaigner, he shot back that this condition was in any case extremely rare. Nevertheless, I am glad that my parents, while doubtless ignorant of what a future edition of Pediatrics magazine would reveal, ensured that their son would be at the lower-risk end of that grisly spectrum. There is, admittedly, a strong element of fashion in such medical procedures. Circumcision had become almost de rigueur among the post-war English middle classes, especially after it had somehow become known that Dr Jacob Snowman, one of a hereditary line of mohels (and co-author, with his son Leonard, of Surgery of Ritual Circumcision) had been summoned to Buckingham Palace to remove the foreskin of the newborn Prince Charles.

History will probably never relate if that is among the causes of such resentment as the heir to the throne feels towards his parents. Yet any psychiatrist would wish to establish if those (almost entirely male) campaigners to ban male circumcision are engaging in a displaced rage against their own parents, for reasons which in fact have nothing to do with the removal of their prepuce.

This would be bitterly contested by such organisations as Norm-UK, our local chapter of the National Organisation of Restoring Men, whose patrons include the actor Alan Cumming and the art critic Brian Sewell. Its website compares the psychological effects of infant male circumcision to those of “rape, torture and sexual abuse” and how, just as “the children of alcoholics may marry drinkers . . . foreskin amputees sometimes become compulsive circumcisers”. Yes, chaps, we’re amputees, though as the parent only of girls, I can exempt myself from any charge of compulsive circumcising.

In fact, both the American and British campaigners draw absolutely no moral or medical distinction between the clitoridectomies practised among certain African tribes, and male circumcision as performed in the most aseptic conditions in the hospitals of New York, Boston and London. They regard their own suffering as equivalent to that endured by adolescent girls held down to undergo the entire excision of their clitoris; and the removal of their foreskin as a loss of amenity to be compared directly to what has been inflicted on women specifically to remove their ability to experience any sexual pleasure.

In strict logic, these self-dramatising campaigners have a point: a most intimate piece of their anatomy was removed without consulting them. Body modification may be all the rage, but we tolerate the most grotesque examples only because they are self-inflicted by adult men and women in full possession of their mental faculties (despite appearances to the contrary).

Leaving aside the well-attested medical benefits of infant male circumcision, and therefore that parents may be acting out of a concern for their child’s health rather than merely tribal identification, the campaigners pressing for a vote in San Francisco have exposed a real social issue. What are the rights of parents set against those of their newborn? It is similar to the fierce argument over whether parents should be prevented by law from smacking their children.

At some point, the smacking of a child can become abuse. Yet the anti-male circumcision campaigners are like those who draw no distinction between sadistic beatings and the smack given to a child who has rushed into a road without bothering to look. It is where the modern culture of rights, admirable in principle, entirely parts company with common sense.

More particularly, those men claiming that as “foreskin amputees” they are on a level with those who have been subjected to rape or child abuse are wannabe victims, politicised hypochondriacs. As a psychiatrist friend of mine expressed it, they are wallowing in “righteous indignation, the most pleasurable of emotions, and the one which never lets you down”.

They should definitely be allowed to continue to wallow in their righteous indignation, not least because it has much comic potential; but I hope the voters of San Francisco don’t confuse them with the real victims of child abuse. That would not be funny, especially if it catches on here

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