Reddit reviews Plain Facts for Old and Young

I've been working on a paper for my Bioethics class on it for some time now (which is why i'm home on a Saturday night). also, I do some work as an activist raising awareness. I consider it a human rights violation in and of itself, and you're right, my opposition is not motivated by opposition to religion. My views on both circ and religion came about independently of the other.

However, the more research I've done on it, the more I have come to oppose religion as a result, because I've come to see the reasons religion exists, how it propagates itself, it's history, and in the case of involuntary circumcision, how religion can lead people to do incredibly awful things to others to further a religious goal, inject harmful memes into a culture that last long after the religious justification is gone, due to the way religion makes use of the failings of the human mind.

In the case of circumcision, this happened in the nineteenth century. science was growing as a major social motivator. some religious people decided to co-opt it, use the authority that physicians and science were given to "prove" biblical ideas true. and one way they did this in the victorian era, an era when the pleasure of both sexes was considered officially obscene and immoral, was to come up with theories and what passed as evidence that sexual pleasure and fulfillment was harmful and try to stop or limit it wherever they could. and this includes male pleasure as well; masturbation was vilified and hated, nocturnal erections and emissions were considered sinful and deadly, and in fact masturbation was considered by many "doctors" of the time to be the cause of virtually ALL disease, from tuberculosis to paralysis to bed wetting. Joh Harvey Kellogg lead the charge against it. His book, Plain Facts For old and Young, laid out all sorts of "proof" that sexual pleasure was the cause of nearly every illness, in males and females. he and his colleagues invented all sorts of junk science and devices he said would prevent and "cure" the disorder of "self abuse" and the most famous of these is circumcision, introduced into anglophone countries by these pseudo scientists to stop masturbation and limit sexual activity. it didn't of course, but they were undeterred by facts at the time. and they also used clitorectomy and burning of the female genitals, but this never caught on at the same rate. however, clitorectomy was paid for by Blue Cross, Blue Shield in America until the 70s, as Patricia Robinett pointed out in Her book about discovering that she'd been subjected to it in Kansas in the 50s.

But male circumcision did catch on and grow common in England, Canada, Australia and the US. It mostly died out in England by the 50s, then in Australia and Canada around the 70s and 80s, where it's now very rare. but in the US, it soared with popularity, mostly because it simply became seen as the norm, with fathers wanting their sons to be the same, and new excuses being invented every era with either bad or misleading evidence from a minority of researchers all the time, mostly based on misleading reporting of statistics since the 50s.

Despite abundant evidence that it does harm, and no evidence of justifiable benefit from forcing it on children, it survives for the social conformity reasons, and cultural bias, especially since many don't want to talk about it. American Organizations, like the AAP and AMA, all repeatedly say that there's not evidence to recommend it, yet they think it's ok to do if the parents want it for social or family reasons, a position that they take with literally no other elective surgery on children. and part of that is, they kind of know they're screwed, since it will eventually be recognized as battery, since it's nonconsensual, nontherapeutic, and irreversible amputation of a healthy, functional anatomically correct body part.