Category: Circumcision

Catching up on events

I’ve been busy over the last week or so, which meant that I didn’t have enough time to give blogging enough mental energy. That’s over, so it’s time to catch up on a few interesting stories before moving to new stuff. Without further delay:

Kudos to Sen. John Sununu for challenging the unhealthy, anti-consumer partnership between content owners and the FCC known as the Broadcast Flag. (Source)

Senator John Sununu (R-NH) has just announced that his office is working on legislation that would prevent the FCC from creating specific technology mandates that have to be followed by consumer electronics manufacturers. What’s his target? The broadcast flag.

Television and movie studios have wanted a broadcast flag for years. The flag is a short analog or digital signal embedded into broadcasts that specifies what users can do with the content. It would most often be used to prevent any copying of broadcast material, but there’s an obvious problem with the plan: it requires recording devices to pay attention to the flag. Because no consumers wander the aisles at Best Buy thinking, “You know, I would definitely buy this DVD recorder, but only if it supported broadcast flag technology,” the industry has asked the federal government to step in and simply require manufacturers to respect the flag.

Exactly the right analysis. The FCC should not be restricting innovation before any potentially illegal action can even occur. The onus should be on the businesses to engineer solutions that meet their needs, not regulation. That’s dinosaur thinking and should not be reward.

Next, just ponder this photograph’s implications. It’s posted in London, so there’s no concern for the United States, except there is concern. We move closer to this mentality with every newly brushed aside civil liberty. (Source)

Next, sometimes a cheap shot is easier than analysis. From Glenn Reynolds:

A CITIZEN’S ARREST BY PAUL HACKETT: A pro-gun anti-crime Democrat — I’m surprised the party didn’t get behind him.

Just like claiming that there’s a war on crime, this requires little thinking and says more about the writer than the facts. Who honestly believes that Democrats are not “anti-crime”? Not tough enough crime, we could argue. But it’s posts like these that prove Glenn Reynolds is little more than a Republican with some libertarian leanings. That’s not surprising, but this is an unflattering proof.

Next, North Korea has a hunger problem. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of economics understands that this has as much to do with the country’s political structure as anything. Socialism doesn’t work, and can never provide for everyone’s needs. When the failure extends to famine, this moves from oppression to murder. But the North Koreans have a solution, courtesy of a German breeder (Source):

An east German pensioner who breeds rabbits the size of dogs has been asked by North Korea to help set up a big bunny farm to alleviate food shortages in the communist country. Now journalists and rabbit gourmets from around the world are thumping at his door.

It all started when Karl Szmolinsky won a prize for breeding Germany’s largest rabbit, a friendly-looking 10.5 kilogram “German Gray Giant” called Robert, in February 2006.

Images of the chubby monster went around the world and reached the reclusive communist state of North Korea, a country of 23 million which according to the United Nations Food Programme suffers widespread food shortages and where many people “struggle to feed themselves on a diet critically deficient in protein, fats and micronutrients.”

Any reasonable analysis would point out an obvious point of why this will fail to alleviate suffering.

“I’m not increasing production and I’m not taking any more orders after this. They cost a lot to feed,” he said.

The rabbits apparently feed eight. How much food will be used to feed the rabbits until they’re ready to become that one-time meal that feeds eight? How much land that could be better used to grow crops for North Koreans will be used to grow feed for these rabbits, as well as house them while they grow? This is a central-planning solution at its ugliest.

Next, religion will continue getting a free pass for unnecessary medical procedures under a socialist health system.

The NHS should provide more faith-based care for Muslims, an expert says.

Muslims are about twice as likely to report poor health and disability than the general population, says Edinburgh University’s Professor Aziz Sheikh.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, he called for male circumcision on the NHS and more details over alcohol derived drugs.

Leaving aside the obvious questions of whether or not routine/ritual circumcision of children should be allowed, it’s an unnecessary medical procedure that drains resources. As an ethically-questionable procedure, it’s also unacceptable to force taxpayers to fund such surgeries. This is why current U.S. funding under our relatively free market system is objectionable. This call from Britain just seeks to double the mistake. It’s absurd.

Because the system isn’t bureaucratic and dysfunctional enough already, Democrats want to allow unionization by TSA employees. That won’t end well.

“I disagree” is mature; the delete key isn’t.

Last week I entered a short exchange with a pregnant woman about circumcision. I thought it might go well enough, although I’m well aware that when people get it in their head that genital cutting is reasonable, there is little anyone can do to restore sanity. The need to dig in and not confront truth seems quite powerful.

One particular phrase jumped out at me in her entry:

…oh, the terror that awaits him. I hope I don’t have to take Alec in to get his circ done…

If it’s a terror, and you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. Maybe there was some connection to reality in there. So I commented, asking why she would go through with it if she knows it’s a terror and clearly doesn’t want to do it. Simple enough, I thought. Her response?

That was a little more like a “kidding around” type of thing. I don’t think it’s a horror. If it was a serious problem, they wouldn’t circumcise babies. 🙂

It gets worse from there, which you can’t validate for yourself because she deleted the first two comments and my response. It was long, but I addressed each of her wishful thoughts with facts. Clearly she didn’t like being challenged, so she deleted the “debate”, presumably to believe it never happened. Like I said, the need to dig in and not confront truth seems quite powerful.

I won’t bore you with the details of my second comment for I’d have to excerpt everything in her comment for it to make sense. But I opened with this:

If it was a serious problem, they wouldn’t circumcise babies.

That’s not true. Just because something is easy does not mean it’s right or in the boy’s best interest. Doctors regularly removed tonsils, but now it’s clear that tonsils fight infection. It’s not a routine procedure now. Doctors wait until disease that can’t be treated with less invasive measures. Explore history and you’ll find examples of medical practices that are now known to be wrong. Our medicine is the most advanced in human history, but that doesn’t mean we know everything and won’t know more in the future. We will rediscover the foreskin’s value. Other developed countries have abandoned infant circumcision to no ill effect.

That should be enough, but another example came to my attention yesterday, via Ken Jennings. Consider:

Everyone who has even thought about exercising has heard the warnings about lactic acid. It builds up in your muscles. It is what makes your muscles burn. Its buildup is what makes your muscles tire and give out.

Coaches and personal trainers tell athletes and exercisers that they have to learn to work out at just below their “lactic threshold,” that point of diminishing returns when lactic acid starts to accumulate. Some athletes even have blood tests to find their personal lactic thresholds.

But that, it turns out, is all wrong. Lactic acid is actually a fuel, not a caustic waste product. Muscles make it deliberately, producing it from glucose, and they burn it to obtain energy. The reason trained athletes can perform so hard and so long is because their intense training causes their muscles to adapt so they more readily and efficiently absorb lactic acid.

How many more examples do we need from history? When we look back in the future at the madness that is forced circumcision, how will we view it? We’ve shown too much willingness to dig in despite facts for me to believe we’ll be harsh on ourselves. But history will not be kind.

Science changes, but even beyond the basic evidence-based facts, however flawed the methodology that generated them, common sense must prevail. That’s where the general idea “first, do no harm” originates. It’s one thing to believe the opposite about lactic acid. With infant circumcision a doctor willfully removes healthy tissue from a child for potential benefit, if the parents even care about the potential benefits. Too often the justification is purely social. Read many of the comments at Suburban Turmoil if you question how nonsensical some parents get when deciding to have someone cut their children sons. I will never understand why parents value the possible opinion of another, future person over the normal, intact penis of their son.

Of interest, from the article on lactic acid, I doubt I’d phrase my indictment this nicely, but the basic idea is applicable to circumcision.

“It’s one of the classic mistakes in the history of science,” Dr. [George A.] Brooks said.

That’s just a theory with limited permanent impact. What would we call medically unnecessary genital surgery on non-consenting individuals? Parental choice? Classic, indeed. And insane.

The scalpel will not teach responsibility.

This editorial is a mess, so it’ll be easiest to just jump in:

In inner Sydney it has been estimated that between 10 and 18 per cent of the homosexual population are HIV/AIDS-affected, similar to the UN’s figures for parts of Africa.

In NSW and Victoria, the rate of diagnosis of infectious syphilis doubled between 2001 and 2005, “almost entirely through increased numbers of cases among homosexual men”.

Alarmingly, the NSW Government has failed to take the smallest step toward preventing the spread of AIDS and syphilis, though still parading its support for the homosexual community’s annual orgy of self-celebration, the mardi gras.

You know where this is going, right? I’ll get to that in a moment, but it’s impossible not to also highlight the implication of “the homosexual community’s annual orgy of self-celebration” as an important facet in this essay. It will return. But let’s get back to what is the painfully inevitable nonsense masquerading as a strategy:

The step that NSW Health Minister John Hatzistergos won’t take is the adoption of circumcision as a routine surgical procedure.

His health department describes the removal of the foreskin as “social circumcision” and not to be performed in the state’s hospitals unless a clear clinical need is established.

Last month, the World Health Organisation (WHO) established such a clear clinical need. It stopped two large clinical trials it was conducting in Kenya and Uganda because it felt the results were so overwhelmingly positive for the circumcised group it could not ethically proceed without offering those in the uncircumcised control group the chance to get snipped.

The writer of this essay, Piers Akerman, made the illogical leap from it being unethical to not offer circumcision to the still-intact adults in the study to demanding that the New South Wales Health Minister adopt circumcision as a routine surgical procedureÂą for infants. The WHO’s conclusion included the two key words Mr. Akerman is now ignoring, as well as buried-but-appropriate warnings that circumcision is not a magic bullet. As such, there is not a “clear clinical need” for sexually-inactive infants.

Continuing:

The NSW Government is in politically correct self-denial, as is Sydney’s homosexual community.

While spokesmen such as The Sydney Morning Herald’s cultural commissar David Marr and High Court judge Michael Kirby make gay marriage their gay issue of choice, their cohorts are dying because governments see no mileage in doing more than promoting so-called safe sex.

This at a time when a group within the homosexual community has been identified as promoting high-risk sex and actively pursuing infection or passing it on in a macabre practice known as “bug chasing”.

Mr. Akerman is woefully misinformed if he believes that circumcision will prevent HIV infections among those who are “bug chasing”. Circumcision is not immunity from infection. It will still be possible to become infected without trying too hard. But it’s easier to lambast gays as a group for the irresponsibility of a few than to focus on irresponsible behavior by individuals, gay and straight. The consequences should fall on those who are irresponsible, not infants.

Despite what came before the conclusion, it takes a strained thought process to propose this:

Reckless indifference to safe sexual practices by members of the homosexual community is responsible for most of the transmission of HIV/AIDS in Australia.

State governments need to get off their politically correct hobby horses and prescribe the operation to all male infants to give them a better chance to avoid this plague.

This is ridiculous, as should be clear by the two statements I’ve emphasized. Some gays will behave irresponsibly. This warrants circumcising all male infants, the majority of whom will not be gay? Unless we can identify which infants will be irresponsible when they become sexually active, routine infant circumcision is not the answer. Even then it wouldn’t be acceptable, but until that discussion is warranted, routine infant circumcision as an HIV preventative is little more than a universal punishment for potential future irresponsibility that only placates Mr. Akerman’s apparent animosity towards gays.

Update: For a refreshing look at common sense overtaking the bigotry and stupidity, read the comments at Mr. Akerman’s blog entry for his published essay. They started out badly, but recovered well.

Âą We’re discussing socialized medicine here, with the procedure paid by the taxpayers through the government. Parents in Australia can still circumcise their male children for any reason on their own dime.

Six days

I predicted this, but I’m amazed at the speed and audacity with which the United Nations discarded the words adult and voluntary.

“These (African) countries should now prepare how to introduce circumcision on a large scale,” UNAIDS chief Dr. Peter Piot told Reuters. “The science is clear.”

Baby boys should be targeted first but then attention should switch to adolescent boys and adult men, said Piot, who is in New Delhi to meet Indian officials on how they plan to tackle the world’s largest HIV/AIDS caseload.

The HIV crisis is raging in Africa among sexually-active adults, and UNAIDS wants to focus initial resources on circumcising baby boys. Baby boys can’t fight back, and if you circumcise them young, they’re much more likely to grow up and circumcise their own children. It’s indoctrination to perpetuate an otherwise unthinkable practice. That’s how it occurred in the United States in the early 20th century. It’s how it will occur in Africa in the 21st century.

The United Nations is a despicable organization in the circumcision debate. It lacks any legitimate notion of human rights or gender equality. Baby boys are human beings with inherent rights, not tools for ideological social experimentation.

Science isn’t the primary facet of this debate.

One point of follow-up on the Scottish article I discussed this morning. Further along in the article, this:

“The presumption against male circumcision in Scotland should be lifted,” said Dr Tim Hargreave, a urologist at Edinburgh University and a senior adviser to the WHO.

“There needs to be a policy shift in light of this evidence. Parents who seek circumcision for non-religious reasons should have ready access on the NHS.”
…

“There is an enormous anti-circumcision lobby that has very real concerns. But you have to separate the science and the evidence from the emotional baggage,” he said.

Isn’t it convenient how easily Dr. Hargreave lumps “real concerns” into emotional baggage, since the science is so convincing? That would be truthful if it were true. Dr. Hargreave’s position, like most who support infant circumcision, falls into the realm of truthiness.

Yes, I’m angry about being circumcised, a fact I admit. That does not change my argument. My “emotional baggage” appears in the tone and lack of patience I sometimes take surrounding the issue of infant circumcision, but there are facts and logic behind what I say. I do not deny the science, instead explaining why it isn’t enough to overcome the ethical concerns and the reality that less invasive procedures exist to resolve medical issues if they arise.

Orac, at Respectful Insolence, has an interesting take on the battle against vaccines that I think can be applied equally to the circumcision debate. I have no idea if Orac would agree with me, but his words speak truth to what I’m trying to say. Consider:

Supporters of pseudoscience … always have the advantage in such events, because the pseudoscientist can throw canards, dubious data, and distortions with abandon and force the skeptic or scientist on the defensive batting the canards aside, so much so that it is very difficult and sometimes impossible for a skeptic to get his message across.

Obviously the pro-infant circumcision lobby would classify me as the pseudoscientist in the circumcision debate, but that doesn’t fit. Skeptic versus non-skeptic is the key. Skepticism to Dr. Hargreave, and presumably most pro-infant circumcision folks, is “emotional baggage”. Circumcision is the panacea for all that ails society. Males should accept that the men and women who came before them and made their decision for them were wise and only acting with the best of intentions. The skeptic sees that this is modern medicine’s version of snake oil. Some people will improve by accident, but most are getting nothing measurable out of it. Does that mean everyone should drink up because it might work? Of course not. But that truth is “emotional baggage,” stifling the debate away from where it should be.

To their credit, the NHS stated that the recent results are not sufficient for it to reconsider its current policy that circumcision is unnecessary and should not be funded.

Thanks to Kip for the Science Blogs link.

I can quote a press release, too.

This press release has gotten some mileage recently, which surprises me because it’s from February. It’s obviously “relevant” now, as you’ll see, but I wonder how people can throw something like this around while missing points so obvious.

A statistical review of the past medical files of more than 300 couples in Uganda, in which the female partner was HIV negative and the male was HIV positive, provides solid documentation of the protective effects of male circumcision in reducing the risk of infection among women. Male circumcision also reduced rates of trichomonas and bacterial vaginosis in female partners. The study is believed to be the first to demonstrate the benefits to female partners of male circumcision.
…

Thomas C. Quinn, M.D., professor of infectious diseases at Hopkins and a senior investigator at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, will present an overview of this trial, plus two others presently under way, as part of a plenary discussion at CROI on circumcision and HIV. But, he says, “We will have to wait for the ongoing two trials before drawing conclusive recommendations about circumcision for all men, and whether or not the benefits apply to transmission from females to males only, or to females from men as well. However, early indications are dramatic and, if proven, one case of HIV disease could be prevented through circumcising anywhere from 15 to 60 males.”

Continue reading “I can quote a press release, too.”

Who needs brains when we have other people’s money?

One sentence, three flaws:

Scottish parents who wish to have their male infants circumcised should have the procedure paid for by the NHS to prevent the transmission of AIDS, a World Health Organisation (WHO) expert said yesterday.

First, allow me to repeat the obvious counter-argument to this. Male infants are not sexually active and parents have more ability to teach their children safe sex practices and responsibility than ability to predict their child’s personal behavior 15 or more years into the future. So, unless their sons intend to have unprotected sex with HIV-positive women, something parents can’t know, circumcising male infants to protect them from HIV is unconscionable folly.

Second, the World Health Organization is strongly pro-male infant circumcision and strongly anti-female infant circumcision. I understand the reasoning depends on centuries of what’s socially acceptable, but I’ve already pointed out the hypocrisy in applying different rules to boys and girls when they apply equally. Specifically, human rights are subject to more than just a clean operating room and good intentions. The World Health Organization should read through its own literature with a keener eye.

Third, for those in the United States longing for socialized healthcare, this is the sort of quandary you’ll be in. Fanatics will seek to allow parents to chop off parts of their sons on the national dime. That’s absurd enough, since there is no medical need for the surgery, but it should be clear that national resources are not unlimited. Every penny unnecessarily removing a foreskin is a penny not spent curing disease. I suspect socialists don’t think this way. There’s always another rich person who can be forced to pay her fair share, right? That’s unjust, but also false. People will die now so that little boys might not die six or seven decades from now of diseases with causes not specific to their foreskins. It’s stupidity.

Free market economics, not surgery

I’ve held off posting this because I try to pace myself on the circumcision posts. But today is the perfect day to comment. For a rational take on the problem of HIV/AIDS in Africa, consider Emily Oster’s recent article from Esquire:

When I began studying the HIV epidemic in Africa a few years ago, there were few other economists working on the topic and almost none on the specific issues that interested me. It’s not that the questions I wanted to answer weren’t being asked. They were. But they were being asked by anthropologists, sociologists, and public-health officials.

That’s an important distinction. These disciplines believe that cultural differences—differences in how entire groups of people think and act—account for broader social and regional trends. AIDS became a disaster in Africa, the thinking goes, because Africans didn’t know how to deal with it.

Economists like me don’t trust that argument. We assume everyone is fundamentally alike; we believe circumstances, not culture, drive people’s decisions, including decisions about sex and disease.

I’ve studied the epidemic from that perspective. I’m one of the few people who have done so. And I’ve learned that a lot of what we’ve been told about it is wrong. Below are three things the world needs to know about AIDS in Africa.

I can’t recommend the article enough, as Ms. Oster explains the HIV crisis in Africa in terms at least as plausible as any prevailing theory. It just might be possible that believing the future will be worth living encourages people to make better choices. If that’s correct, circumcision won’t make the difference in Africa that its proponents hope. Again, we must ask ourselves whether solving the problem is more important than addressing it with a preferred solution. Accurate assumptions are vital.

Sticking with today’s theme

If the topic wasn’t so serious and offensive, I’d be laughing at this ridiculous assertion:

In order to support countries or institutions that decide to scale up male circumcision services, WHO, the UNAIDS Secretariat and their partners are developing:

  • technical guidance on ethical, rights-based, clinical and programmatic approaches to male circumcision;

Neither the WHO nor UNAIDS recognizes any ethical or rights-based argument against male circumcision. It would take a gullible person to believe either organization will suddenly find truth from this announcement by the NIH.

Key Word Omission Watch – Blogs

Continuing with the series, here’s a look at what bloggers are saying. I will excerpt some relevant passages, since blogs allow for commentary instead of the “reporting” offered by news media.

First, from Queerty:

The studies have yet to delve into the dark world of anal sex. Reseachers [sic] from John Hopkins University are currently looking into a relationship between the controversial female circumcision and viral exposure.

Want to guess how well that study will go over if the data supports a preventative effect for female circumcision? If the effect is the same and no one supports changing the Female Genital Mutilation Act to let parents circumcise their daughters, everyone now promoting circumcision of male infants as an HIV preventative is at best a hypocrite. Of course, they’re already hypocrites if they believe male circumcision should be legal and female circumcision should be illegal. HIV makes no difference.

Continue reading “Key Word Omission Watch – Blogs”