A UK midwife has been charged with manslaughter after a baby bled to death following a circumcision.

According to online reports from The Oldham Chronicle Grace Adeleye (66) was charged on Friday with the manslaughter of Goodluck Caubergs by gross negligence. The court heard the incident happened in Oldham on April 17 2010.

In the UK it is still legal to subject baby boys to the type of genital surgery that we would consider barbaric if it was performed on baby girls in the developing world. To get a better understanding of the relative severity of the different types of unnecessary genital surgery performed on girls and boys see this 5 minute YouTube clip.

Subjecting a girl living in Britain to unnecessary genital surgery – either at home or abroad – is illegal. Yet performing unnecessary genital surgery on boys is classed as a ‘consensual assault’ – just like tattooing but with one subtle difference. While it is illegal to tattoo a boy either with or without his consent, parents do not need their son’s consent to have his foreskin painfully and unnecessarily removed without anaesthetic by non-medical practitioners.

As well as the many physical complications, subjecting infants and boys to unnecessary genital surgery has been found to cause post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anger, low self-esteem and problems with intimacy. Furthermore, circumcised men are believed to be 60% more likely to develop alexithymia, which is the inability to feel or understand emotions.

And yet in the UK we are still subjecting an estimated 100 boys a day to non-consensual, medically unnecessary circumcision – with two-thirds of these procedures being carried out for non-religious reasons.

Click here to read a report that found 40% of circumcisions performed on boys at an Islamic school in Oxford led to medical problems with 1 in 5 being treated in hospital as a result.

This has led to some doctors calling for the NHS to perform medically unnecessary male circumcisions rather than making it illegal for anyone to carry out unnecessary genital surgery on boys – as is the case for girls.

At present we cannot say how boys in the UK die as a result of being subjected to medically unnecessary male circumcision sa the connection to circumcision is not always recorded – as this article by campaigner Laura McDonald explains.

You can see previous posts on this issue here: