Iceland is right to ban circumcision. Boys need protecting from it Any debate which touches on religion or gender quickly gets dragged into the culture war. So when the news broke […]

Any debate which touches on religion or gender quickly gets dragged into the culture war.

So when the news broke on Sunday that Iceland was considering banning male circumcision, you could already sense the identity-politics battlelines forming.

Islamophobes would love to weaponise the issue, as they do Halal food, to exploit crude religious divisions and present Islam as fundamentally barbarbaric.

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Men’s rights activists, whose strange combination of aggression and theatrical vulnerability leads them to claim every offence against women as somehow akin to one against men, could use it to pretend that male and female circumcision were comparable, which they most manifestly are not.

On the other side, Jewish and Muslim groups are genuinely outraged by the idea this tradition could ever be banned.

Skirting the issue

It’s likely that if it were, they would just travel abroad to have it done.

And the procedure itself seems basically harmless. Men rarely complain about it. It doesn’t prevent or hinder sexual pleasure, as female genital mutilation does. It may even have some health benefits, by making it harder to transmit sexually transmitted diseases.

The truth is, male circumcision is not as harmless as it first appears

For reasons like this, liberals have managed to avoid almost any mention of the subject for years. But this isn’t because the debate is won. It’s because they don’t want to talk about it.

The reality of male circumcision is this: it entails the mutilation of a child’s genitals before they are old enough to give consent.

Religious identity

It is an irreversible expression of religious identity, through surgery, inflicted on the body before the child can make up their own mind about their spirituality. There’s no way around these facts. There are demonstrably and uncontroversially true.

European courts have gradually started to face down the outrage from religious groups and challenge the practice.

A 2012 German court ruling found the practice “permanently and irreparably changed” a child’s body and took away his right to “make his own decision on his religious affiliation”.

A high court judge in 2016 insisted that a decision be left until two brothers were old enough to make “individual choices”.

Damaging side effects

The truth is, male circumcision is not as harmless as it first appears.

There’s a paucity of research on the topic, but a 1999 study in the British Association of Urological Surgeons journal criticised the existing medical literature for its silence on the “pleasure and dynamics of movement, sensation and lubrication” the foreskin provides “during masturbation, foreplay and intercourse”.

It went on: “Assumptions that men circumcised in childhood are satisfied with or suffer no adverse effects from circumcision have no scientific foundation”. In other words: it’s not that it’s true, it’s just that we don’t talk about it.

Circumcised men are themselves often uncomfortable with the subject.

Speaking out

“It’s a very difficult thing for a man to complain about,” Richard Duncker, an anti-circumcision campaigner, says.

“First of all it’s to do with his genitals. Then he must question his parents. Then he must question his culture and religious community. And lastly, he’ll often experience ridicule if he does complain.”

If it any other invasive surgical procedure on baby without a good medical reason, we’d be horrified

A Danish study from 2011 in the International Journal of Epidemiology found circumcised men were more likely to report frequent orgasm difficulties.

Other surveys – often conducted by anti-circumcision groups – have seen circumcised men complain about prominent scarring, insufficient penile skin for a comfortable erection, pain, bleeding and a variety of psychological ailments, including feelings of mutilation, low self-esteem, violation and parental betrayal.

Decision making

The British Medical Association‘s rules on the practice state that “all children who are capable of expressing a view should be involved in decisions about whether they should be circumcised”.

But this is absurd.

If it is morally essential that a child capable of ‘expressing a view’ is asked whether they want the procedure, then it is surely morally indefensible for the procedure to take place before they are capable.

But far from waiting until a child can give consent, the Jewish faith demands that circumcision be carried out on the eighth day of a child’s life and the Muslim faith that it be carried out on the seventh.

Religious freedom

Interfering with this is considered an intolerable infringement on religious freedom. But what about the religious freedom of the child to make up their own mind about their spiritual identity?

When someone can give consent, the state should get out their way and allow them to express their religious identity however they wish.

When they cannot, the state has a duty to protect them, even from their own family.

If someone was committing any other invasive surgical procedure on baby without a good medical reason, we’d be horrified.

But because this procedure comes draped in religious tradition, we treat it as if it were somehow tolerable. It is not.

With any luck, Iceland will be the first of many European countries to outlaw it.