re: #13 APox

What if the parent wanted it done because of the health benefits— while knowing the health risks from it? Does that make it more likely for you to support it over doing it for religious reasons?

As for doing it at later ages; the person making that decision is not going to be doing so in an independent environment, so the actual results of that would be rather moot.

To engage, briefly, with the female genital mutilation argument— while stressing that they are in no way similar— if girls in that environment were given the ‘choice’ of “Do you want to have this adulthood ceremony done to you and become an adult, or would you rather be a weird outcast?” almost all of them would say to go ahead and do it. The women who have had it done are often the ones who are most supportive of it. You’re acting as though the decision would be done by some objective person in an objective environment.

We allow parents to do any number of things to kids that are far more harmful to their health, like letting them eat unhealthy foods, letting them not exercise, or making them exercise in strenuous and damaging ways. We let them carry backpacks that cause skeletal damage, and we often inflict teeth-straightening on them that is painful, expensive, and permanent even though often the effect is cosmetic, and not meaningful.

Circumcision is singled out because it relates to sex and religion. It is not about an objective measure of harm to the child, at all, or about the choice of the individual.