It's time someone said it, loud and clear: that infant circumcision -- including so-called "religious" infant circumcision -- is an atrocity and a fraud; that it's a brutal, perverse, outrageous violation of a helpless human being's right to his own body; that it's child sexual abuse in its most vicious, most destructive, most cunningly disguised form; that it literally censors a child's life -- kills part of the child -- even if he never realizes it, because it severs him from a uniquely specialized, uniquely sensitive means of perceiving, experiencing, sharing and enjoying his existence; that the reasons given to justify it are myths and lies; that it's the ugliest, saddest, most sickening scandal in the history of medicine and an infamy to societies that tolerate it and to institutions that sanctify it; and that anyone involved even remotely with cutting, tearing, crushing or burning off the foreskins of babies -- or anyone else by force, coercion or deceit -- is as guilty of causing human suffering as the monsters of Auschwitz and in the name of humanity should be exposed, confronted, stopped, brought to trial, and imprisoned.

Regardless of anyone's "reason" for circumcising a baby, the fact remains that infant circumcision is foreskin amputation by force -- the deliberate, irreversible destruction of a normal, natural, functional part of someone else's body -- living, protective, erogenous tissue that is rightfully his and that he instinctively wants to keep intact -- at a time in his life when he can't understand what is being done to him -- or why -- and can't speak for or protect himself.

Infant circumcision is, in other words, human vivisection -- legalized, institutionalized, sanctified human vivisection.

Reason and attempts at persuasion will not deter those who, driven by the compulsion to destroy what they secretly envy but can never have, and desperate to make their own tortured partial penises seem normal -- and for who knows what other god-awful reasons -- persist so relentlessly in defending, promoting, misrepresenting and performing this crippling, disfiguring mutilation.

The birthright of males -- all males -- to keep all of the penis they are born with must therefore be secured by law.

John A. Erickson
Biloxi, Mississippi
March 1998