Shadow Minister <
I also believe genital mutilation is wrong. However, male Circumcision is not considered mutilation by any other than a handful of ill informed activists."

Really? Why then have most Doctors nowadays refused to do unnecessary circumcisions anymore?

I have watched and held down many baby boys years ago when it was fashionable to have baby boy's natural penis parts sliced off, and trust me, they sure looked like they felt every last cut.

Most of the time it seemed they were only being done because daddy wanted them to 'look like me'!
Trouble is, nowadays they would be very much in the minority lining up at the urinals minus their natural foreskin...

SOL,

Obviously years ago, no anaesthetic cream was used. It can be painful but doesn't have to be. Do you consider vaccinations an unnecessary infliction of pain.

Is removal of the appendix a mutilation?

The conditions vaccination strongly protects against are highly contagious and deadly to children - we forget, precisely because vaccination has made them so rare. The things circumcision debatably offers slight reductions of are nothing like that.

Two minutes? Shadow Minister, your practitioner was going dangerously fast.

1. Male and female genital cutting are much more comparable, especially ethically, than male genital cutting and vaccination. The intention exists inside the perpetrator's head (and the road to Hell is paved with good intentions) but "medical" circumcision was introduced for very similar anti-sexual reasons to FGC.

2. It is simply not true that circumcising later is worse than doing it earlier. On the contrary, any tiny mistake on a baby's penis is magnified when he grows up. A baby can afford to lose only 35ml of blood (two tablespoonsful) before he is in danger. An adult can monitor his own bleeding, infection and pain control. But above all, an adult can give his own informed consent. The main reason it is done to babies is that they can't fight back.

3. The individual's human right to bodily autonomy (which is where we came in) trump the insignificant and often bogus "benefits" and the real risk of harm, from disfigurement to sexual damage, all the way to death.

4. http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem

HI, (Bodily autonomy is unaffected by circumcision. Perhaps you meant integrity)

if you had bothered to read my original post, you would see that the comparison with vaccinations is far closer than to female circumcision.

With vaccination, there are risks of reaction including fever and even death. The medical societies have evaluated this and based on the evidence reasoned that the benefits far outweigh the risks.

The evaluation has also been done on male circumcision, and the American medical body has decided that the benefits outweigh the risks.

Given that sexual function and sensitivity are completely unaffected by the procedure, (compared to female circumcision, which is the purpose) The proven health benefits outweight the miniscule risks that a proper procedure poses.

If you support vaccinations, your opposition to cicumcision is ethically challenged.

There is an historic connection to male circumcision.
In the couple of thousand BC years the middle east people somehow
knew that circumcised men had wives who had less cancers.
So it was advocated.

They also knew that those who ate pork had more illnesses and deaths
due to eating the pork.
So a ban was advocated.

About 1000BC the Chinese learnt how to raise pigs so there we no problems.
This information reached the west but by then it had become a
religious ban and still is.

So that is the connection, and it shows that ancient information is
often correct and can be accepted or avoided.

Dear Bazz,

"Occam's razor" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor) states that "other things being equal, a simpler explanation is better than a more complex one".

Why assert some ancient middle-easterners had sophisticated knowledge of cancer where a much clearer motive is known?

The Jews wanted to isolate themselves and prevent mixing with the gentiles. Having a clear, inescapable bodily identification-mark is one way, another is to have strict dietary rules which prevents a Jew from eating with gentiles. Not being able to eat together reduces the risk of intermarriage.