Picture it:
You're brand new to this world.
You're taken away from everyone and everywhere you know.
You're being controlled by strangers with latex gloves and straight faces.
You're laid upon a hard, cold board.
Your legs are strapped down.
Your arms are strapped down, too.
Your blanket is off, your diaper removed - you're cold, alone, immobile, uncomfortable, and scared.
Your genitals are grabbed by one of the strangers who puts a cold, wet substance on the area, rubbing so much that you get an involuntary erection.
(Additional step that may - MAY - be taken in only 4% of cases: a needle may be jabbed straight into the base of your penis, doing little to numb the area and much to cause extra pain with the actual jab and injection. Perhaps a cream is rubbed onto the area instead, doing even less than the needle would. As stated, this is only in FOUR percent of cases, meaning 96% of the time, this step is not taken at all, not that it really matters anyway.)
The foreskin of your penis is ripped from your glans. This must happen, because your foreskin is as firmly attached to your glans as your fingernails are to your fingers.
You've long since been screaming in terror and unbearable pain OR you've gone into a state of shock, not making a peep at all. Regardless of reaction, you're being ignored.
All of a sudden, you feel a white hot, searing pain as the stranger cuts your delicate, nerve-dense foreskin one-third of the way down your penis.
You're still either screaming or in shock. You're still ignored or perhaps you're given a finger in your mouth that you're supposed to suck on or a pacifier covered in sugar water, neither of which do anything to ease your mental, emotional, and physical suffering.
Your sliced foreskin is now spread apart by tightly held clamps as a plastic hood is shoved under it and over your exposed glans. That hood is then tied over your throbbing, bleeding, traumatized penis with a string that will later help the organ to necrotize and fall off.
You're not done yet.
What is deemed as "excess" skin by those strangers ignoring your cries or complete shock is again cut off of your now mutilated penis.
A little dollop of petroleum jelly on your wound, your diaper back on so that you can urinate and defecate on said open wound, a quick clean up, and another swaddling and you're back to your parents.
You hear the stranger tell them what a "good boy" you were, that you "hardly cried at all" or "slept right through it," and that's it's completely normal for you to sleep 12 hours or more now, regardless of how often you were breastfeeding and sleeping before.
You have no voice. You have no way of telling them the truth. You tried earlier, but nobody listened to you.
Congratulations. You've just been circumcised.
OR...
You're brand new to this world.
You get to stay at the breast and in the arms of your warm mother.
That's all. You just get to be there...forever...secure, calm, respected, and cared for.
Which sounds better to YOU?
*The procedure described was the Plastibell circumcision, considered by pro-cutters to be the cream of the crop of circumcision methods and the lie is often told to parents that this method involves no cutting. Wrong. It's not. It's all bad. It's all wrong. There is also the Gomco and Mogen methods, pictured below.
Do you see? Do you see now why I and so many like me are fighting actively and with all our might to end this atrocity? Do you see?
If you still need more evidence as to why routine infant circumcision is, in fact, a gross violation of all we value in the free world, please visit Intact America. Tell them a friend sent you.
Sunday, March 30, 2014
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Thankyou so much for being an advocate and a voice for these baby boys. Because of you and other vocal mamas our new baby boy avoided this procedure! I am so thankful. Interestingly, our baby has a posterior tongue tie and an upper lip tie. There is a huge movement within La Leche League and providers to educate mamas about this and to clip these ties or laser them even if there isn't a problem with breastfeeding. (And to give them arnica for the pain. Wah? I took arnica after childbirth and it didn't make a dent in the pain.) Anyway, we struggled at first with this decision and decided to leave his mouth alone. We didn't circumcise him for a reason and this also felt like mutilation to me without baby boy's consent. Thankfully we saw a great lactation consultant who didn't believe in cutting his frenulum because the baby is strapped down, etc. Just like a circumsion...
ReplyDeleteAs long as the ties don't interfere with his ability to breastfeed, I think that's awesome. For me, ties that completely impede breastfeeding should be rectified. The breastfeeding is priority. As circumcision has no benefits and great risks both long and short-term, it has no place in our world.
DeleteI missed this one when it was posted. Very powerful, thank you so much. So powerful that even though I regularly share intactivism messages on FB, I'm struggling over whether to share this or not. It's so real and so NOT removed from the emotion and pain, I fear what it will do to relationships with family if I do. A very different advocacy approach from an academic discussion of the functions of the foreskin that are lost to circumcision. And unlike anything I've come across. So I'm gonna do it. Sharing...because if it saves a baby from having to go through this, it's beyond worth angering an adult.
ReplyDelete~ Annie
<3 Proud of you.
Delete