050809 - To Florida State University's President and Schools of Medicine and Law

Thomas Kent Wetherell, President
Florida State University
and faculty and associates of the
FSU Medical and Law Schools


Dear President Wetherell and FSU Medical and Law Schools faculty and associates,

Copied below my email message to you here, is the abstract of an article published recently in the Journal of Medical Ethics, which ends with the following sentence:

“We conclude that it is ethically inappropriate to subject children—male or female—to the acknowledged risks of circumcision and contend that there is no compelling legal authority for the common view that male circumcision is lawful.”

A full text pdf copy of the paper may be downloaded from
http://jme.bmjjournals.com/cgi/reprint/31/8/463
or
http://tinyurl.com/cfzt8
and a copy is attached for your convenience.

I write to you today trying to prevent unnecessary pain and trauma, and unnecessary physical, emotional and mental damages and harms, and further unnecessary risks, including death, that we adults ignorantly, unthinkingly, unnecessarily, and unethically still impose on the majority of male babies and many additional male children in the United States of America.

I am also trying to save lives.

If this were anything less important than life-and-death I would not be sending this message to any of you, let alone all of you. In the name of the thousands of children whose lives we unnecessarily and recklessly endanger every day, I ask you all to read it, and, given the gravity of these realities, to respond to it appropriately, despite possibly intense external and maybe considerable internal pressure not to. (I know about both. I was arrested and jailed with my brother, Ben, in Tallahassee on 17 December 1970, simply for speaking out peacefully in public on this issue. Punishments today usually are less overt, but no less real. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

I look forward to hearing from you, and to seeing you and FSU’s medical and law schools taking action where action is obviously needed.

Silence gives consent. Please do not give your consent any longer to subjecting innocent, healthy babies and children to our daily, unnecessary, obscene child death lottery. (I can email anyone who wants it a steadily growing list of names of babies and children that I already know about, dead from circumcising.)

It is important for you to understand that this view is not unsupported. It is becoming mainstream now. Science and scientists at the highest level support it, including Francis Crick and George Wald, Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine. See http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1962/index.html
http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1967/index.html and
http://StopInfantCircumcision.org/crick-wald.htm

Today you can join Nobel laureates Crick and Wald, physicians Jonas Salk and Benjamin Spock, and thousands of others in declaring your opposition to the genital mutilation of children worldwide by endorsing the Ashley Montagu Resolution and Petition at http://MontaguNoCircPetition.org . Please do.

Please educate yourselves competently on this scientifically and ethically simple (young children can understand it; I know four-year-olds who get it) but often emotionally difficult-because-tragic subject. Then educate your students, whether they like it or not. That is what we Florida taxpayers pay you for. We work hard for our money, it’s expensive for us to keep paying your salaries, and we need to get our money’s worth out of public education.

Babies’ and children’s lives are riding on your ability and willingness to respond to this information sanely and effectively. For their sake and for yours, I wish you well with your thoughts, feelings and actions on this subject, if any. Please let me know if I can help in any way.

Finally, shooting the messenger will not solve the problem. I would appreciate it very much if you would refrain from doing so. I’ve had enough of that and don’t need any more.

CUT CLAMS, NOT BABIES!

Van Lewis
P.O.Box 323
Panacea, Florida 32346
vanlewis@post.harvard.edu

cc: Florida House of Representatives
Florida Senate
Governor Jeb Bush
Tallahassee Democrat
Bishop John Howard, Episcopal Diocese of Florida
Broad public distribution


On 10/4/05 20:54, "Van Lewis" asked:

FSU Physicians and related persons,

Does FSU’s physician and health care community have any conscience at all, or any sense of medical ethics?

Van Lewis, Administrator
Ashley Montagu Resolution
http://MontaguNoCircPetition.org
...
------------------------------------------------------------------
I provided information last April in the email indicated above to individuals in the FSU Medical School community concerning medically unnecessary, elective (by others but involuntary on the part of the person cut) genital cutting and mutilation of minors, without the mutilated minors’ informed consent (which they are legally incapable of giving). I will be happy to forward the entire email to any who may be interested in seeing it.

Having received only negative responses (and very few of those; two, if I recall correctly; one only mildly negative, one of different character) from the over 100 FSU Medical School personnel addressed in the earlier email to my sincere efforts to help (both them and through them the people they are charged with teaching and caring for), this message is sent as well to persons associated with the FSU Law School in the (foolish?) hope that FSU’s lawyers will prove themselves capable of understanding more clearly and responding more effectively and more expeditiously to the relevant issues than FSU’s doctors have so far.

Copies are also provided to Florida’s legislators (the funders of these two public educational institutions), JEB!, the local newspaper, Episcopal Bishop John Howard, my priest, mission board, some local physicians, and others.

What IS a penis, anyway?

For those of you who may not already know it, in the earlier 1990s, barely ten years ago, a highly complex, highly evolved, highly vascularized, highly innervated human sense organ, new then to science and containing, among other things, tens of thousands of highly specialized nerve endings, was discovered within the mucosal skin encircling the inner male foreskin. Named the “ridged band” by its scientific discoverers (I’m sure they weren’t the first to know anything about it, just the first known to have looked for and found it scientifically), it is a highly structured human sense organ - like an eye, an ear, a tongue – its complex and exquisite structure enabling it to perform it’s complex and important human survival functions. It contains the highest density of nerve endings yet discovered in the human penis. These nerve endings and the nerve plexus they connect to and serve are “hard-wired” via the spinal cord to a vital center in the human male brain the location of which, I read the other day, has only just recently been discovered.

I call the ridged band the male’s “sexual eye” in honor of my magnificent college biology professor, Nobel laureate George Wald, and his intelligent 1975-1997 efforts to end medically unnecessary, non-therapeutic, “elective” circumcising of children of both sexes. (See http://StopInfantCircumcision.org/crick-wald.htm ) George won the Nobel prize in 1967 for his discovery of Vitamin A in the retina of the visual eye and how it works with light to form the molecular/energetic basis of vision. See http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1967/index.html

George didn’t get to – he died in 1997 – but you can still read the original articles reporting and confirming the important scientific discovery of the male sexual eye in the British Journal of Urology of 1996 and 1999 at:
http://www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/taylor/
http://www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/cold-taylor/
A discussion by one of the authors is available at http://research.cirp.org

This complex, normal, necessary human sense organ is the exact target of male circumcision, first adopted as medicine in England and the US beginning in the mid-1800s. The pre-germ-theory genital-mutilation-initiating doctors of the day (quacks, by our standards) said (and wrote, fortunately) that by circumcising children (and, not much later, babies) they were trying to stop them from masturbating. Males AND females, by the way. They said they thought masturbation caused insanity. (Circumcising is far more likely to achieve that undesirable result, through iatrogenic post-traumatic genital cutting-and-mutilation stress disorder.)

Over the decades since this inauspicious beginning, the US medical profession has claimed in writing that masturbation causes and/or circumcising prevents and/or cures club foot, diarrhea, curvature of the spine, bed-wetting and over 200 other diseases, not one of which has ever been proved to be caused by masturbation or prevented or cured by circumcising. (Circumcising them doesn’t stop children from masturbating, either – if anything it tends to increase masturbation, not decrease it [Laumann http://www.cirp.org/library/general/laumann/] – but it does stop them from masturbating normally.)

These nineteenth-century quacks said they hoped they could stop children from masturbating by causing them as much genital pain as possible (thus anesthesia was discouraged until 1999), and by destroying for life as much sexual pleasure as possible, with amputation of healthy sexual body parts in childhood and infancy. Only later, after the turn of the century with the maturation of a second, less forthright generation of medical mutilators, were the reverse medical myths/lies invented that “babies can’t feel circumcision” (scientific investigations indicate that they probably feel it more acutely than adults do), and that “circumcising doesn’t harm, and probably helps adult male sexuality and pleasure”.

These poor, clueless men apparently were convinced that they could improve on God/evolution’s complex design/result for the human sex organs and organism as a whole with simple, blundering, genitally mutilative, finally inexplicable amputations.

Astonishing. And in my view, pitiful.

This is literally why circumcising was adopted in medicine in Anglophone countries. I still find it hard to believe. Can you tell? I didn’t make it up, though. I couldn’t have. I read the medical history. Have you? Truth here is definitely stranger than any fiction I could have imagined.

Ever since then medical circumcising has been a vicious circle, a criminally insane cure in search of an even more vicious disease. It has never found one (although circumcised and circumcising evangelists are now trying to force AIDS to play that role as they have with so many other diseases in the past), but the uncontroverted modern scientific neuroanatomy of the foreskin proves that circumcising is highly efficient at accomplishing exactly what it’s original medical proponents said they intended to do with it; sexually blind and sexually debilitate children and the adults they may become, if they survive this mad “criminal assault”. (Margaret Somerville, Founder and Director, Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, McGill University: http://intact.ca/canary.htm )

Circumcising healthy babies and children today is clearly criminal activity.

Why is medicine so incompetent and so slow at correcting its own obvious, deadly errors?

Why do most doctors depend on lawyers (and mere clam farmers like me, for God’s sake?) to correct their insanities?

And where are all the lawyers, anyway?

You’d think with the inconceivable amounts of money to be made out of this massive national tragedy lawyers would be already as thick on this issue as molasses in January at the pre-global-warming North Pole – the USA is the only country in the world where the medical profession mutilates the genitals of the majority of the male babies, and this despite the fact that no national or international medical body in the world recommends circumcising healthy people, let alone children, and most of them are recommending more and more strongly as time goes on that circumcising not be done – but US lawyers are nearly as scarce as US doctors when (for males, anyway) it comes to defending the firmly established human and legal rights to bodily integrity, including genital integrity, from 3,300 gross violations of them every day in the USA, one totally unnecessary lifetime sexual mutilation every 26 seconds. (I know a few, doctors AND lawyers, who actually do defend children from this evil. God bless them all.)

How did it ever come to this?

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
- Albert Einstein

Going sane on the subject appears to be nearly impossible for genitally mutilated populations, for families within such societies, and for individuals; male, female and otherwise, doctors, lawyers or Indian chiefs.

Why can’t FSU’s law and medical schools lead the nation on this life-and-death issue? What is holding you back? Is it your father’s circumcision? Your own? Is it your spouse’s? Your son’s?

Whatever it is, it’s not worth taking one additional child’s life to protect. It’s not even worth risking one child’s life, let alone over a million of them every year.

No adult has any right to subject healthy, normal children to the totally unnecessary death lottery that circumcising them is. Deciding to continue circumcising children is deciding to kill some of them. Essentially for nothing. It’s crazy. If it’s not crazy there’s no such thing.

Is there even ONE FSU employee who would kill a child for nothing?

If so, I want to meet that person. Who is it? Stand up in public now and be counted.

I offer to debate anyone on this subject, in public, anytime, anywhere.

And preferably before we kill another child with our cowardly and despicable silence on this issue.

Debate me in public anyone?

Responsible, vigorous action that leaves me out of the picture entirely? (Fine with me! I don’t need to spend my time this way if people with more voice and more respectable authority will take over the thankless job. My clams need me.)

Or just more cowardly silence? More business as usual? More vile, child-killing insanity?

IS ANYONE actually ALIVE out there?

I’m listening for your reply, hoping to find some life, somewhere in outer space, which this obviously is.

CUT CLAMS, NOT BABIES!

Van Lewis
vanlewis@post.harvard.edu
http://CastrateCircumcising.blogspot.com

--------------

http://tinyurl.com/cfzt8

LAW, ETHICS, AND MEDICINE
A covenant with the status quo? Male circumcision and the new BMA guidance to doctors
M Fox and M Thomson
School of Law, Keele University, Staffordshire, UK

Correspondence to:
Michael Thomson
School of Law, Keele University, Staffordshire ST5 5BG, UK; m.o.thomson@keele.ac.uk

ABSTRACT
This article offers a critique of the recently revised BMA guidance on routine neonatal male circumcision and seeks to challenge the assumptions underpinning the guidance which construe this procedure as a matter of parental choice. Our aim is to problematise continued professional willingness to tolerate the non-therapeutic, non-consensual excision of healthy tissue, arguing that in this context both professional guidance and law are uncharacteristically tolerant of risks inflicted on young children, given the absence of clear medical benefits. By interrogating historical medical explanations for this practice, which continue to surface in contemporary justifications of non-consensual male circumcision, we demonstrate how circumcision has long existed as a procedure in need of a justification. We conclude that it is ethically inappropriate to subject children—male or female—to the acknowledged risks of circumcision and contend that there is no compelling legal authority for the common view that male circumcision is lawful.

------------------------

On August 9, 2005, sixty years to the day after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki by the US government, Doctors Opposing Circumcision at http://DoctorsOpposingCircumcision.org has responded to the paper indicated above and attached, with a letter to the Journal of Medical Ethics at http://jme.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/31/8/463#345
or
http://tinyurl.com/ayu27

Circumcision Bioethics: A Proposal for Reform
9 August 2005

George Hill,
Executive Secretary
Doctors Opposing Circumcision, Suite 42, 2442 NW Market Street, Seattle, Washington 98107-4137, USA,
John V. Geishker, JD, LL.M
Send letter to journal:
Re: Circumcision Bioethics: A Proposal for Reform
Email George Hill, et al.

To the Editor:
We at Doctors Opposing Circumcision (DOC) are gratified by the publication of this paper by Fox and Thompson.1 They confirm the position previously taken by the Norwegian Council for Medical Ethics that male non-therapeutic circumcision violates important principles of medical ethics.2 Their findings also are consistent with Articles 1, 2, and 20 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Bioethics.3
DOC concurs with their criticism of the British Medical Association (BMA) statement. As previously reported, we think it is deficient in that it fails to recognize 1) the probable unlawfulness of the circumcision of male children, 2) the lack of medical value, 3) the complications, risks, and other disadvantages, 4) the functional value of the prepuce, 5) the inherent violations of human rights, and 6) the clearly unethical nature of child circumcision.4
Lawfulness
We also believe that non-therapeutic circumcision of children is already unlawful, because the mutilative nature of circumcision makes it a violation of existing child protection laws. For example, a man from Clark County, Washington, USA currently is in gaol for three years for child assault because he attempted to perform a religiously motivated non-therapeutic circumcision on his son.5 Without medical justification, may a parent do by proxy consent what he cannot legally do himself?
We think that, in England and Wales, the circumcision of children is a misdemeanour under the Children and Young Persons Act (1933). The continued performance of non-therapeutic circumcision on children in Britain and elsewhere depends on the failure of public prosecutors to enforce existing law.
Where do we go from here?
Doctors have a clear duty to decline all inefficacious or unethical operations on minors. DOC has prepared a guidance on conscientious objection to the performance of non-therapeutic circumcision on children that provides justification and authority for refusing to perform a non-therapeutic circumcision on a child.6 We recommend that all doctors who may be asked to perform a non-therapeutic circumcision of a child download a copy from our website so they may be acquainted with their ethical rights and duties.
Certainly, the Medical Ethics Committee of the BMA has more work to do. A revision to the 2003 statement already is needed because of its original inadequacies.
The General Medical Council needs to grasp this nettle firmly. It is time to cast out its temporizing 1997 policy. A new guidance for doctors that is consistent with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and Articles 1,2, and 20 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Bioethics (1997) is needed.
In a case involving caning, the European Court of Human Rights ruled:

Children and other vulnerable individuals, in particular, are entitled to State protection, in the form of effective deterrence, against such serious breaches of personal integrity.7
We believe that this should apply at least as forcefully to cases of bodily mutilation as to cases of caning. Action by Parliament may be necessary to provide effective deterrence.

Medical societies world-wide have an ethical duty to inform their members of the unethical status of non-therapeutic circumcision of children. Medical Licencing Boards have a duty to issue regulations regarding the non-therapeutic circumcision of children to ensure that medical practice in their jurisdiction complies with the highest standards of medical ethics.
These actions will usher in a new era in which doctors respect the legal right of children to genital integrity.
George Hill, Bioethicist
Executive Secretary

John V. Geisheker, J.D, LL.M.
General Counsel
Doctors Opposing Circumcision
Suite 42
2442 NW Market Street
Seattle, Washington 98107-4137
USA
Web: http://www.doctorsopposingcircumcision.org
References
1. Fox M, Thomson M. A covenant with the status quo? Male circumcision and the new BMA guidance to doctors. J Med Ethics 2005;31(8):463-9. [Full Text]
2. Gulbrandsen P. Rituell omskjæring av gutter. [Ritual circumcision of boys.] Tidsskr Nor Lægeforen [Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association] 2001;121(25):2994. [Full Text] (In Norwegian)
3. Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine: Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine. Adopted at Oviedo, 4 April 1997. [Full Text]
4. Hill G. BMA circumcision guidance has significant omissions. BMJ; Rapid Response: 14 April 2003. [Full Text]
5. Stephanie Rice. Circumcision Attempt—Father sentenced to three years. The Columbian, Vancouver, Washington, Thursday, December 16, 2004.
6. Denniston GC, Geisheker JV, Hill G. Conscientious Objection to the Performance of Non-Therapeutic Circumcision of Children. Seattle: Doctors Opposing Circumcision, 2005. [Full Text] (PDF)
7. A. v United Kingdom. [1998] 2 FLR 959. (In the European Court of Human Rights)