Somali anti-FGC campaigner spreads her net
Intact America Launches Campaign to Change the Way the Nation Thinks About Male Circumcision | Intact America
A Somali campaigner against Female Genital Cutting (FGC) wants the US to abandon Male Genital Cutting as well.
Filmmaker and activist Soraya Miré has joined with Intact America, a lobby group formed earlier this year, to launch a nationwide campaign to change the way America thinks about male circumcision. They argue the surgery is painful and medically unnecessary, removing healthy genital tissue from non-consenting baby boys, violating medical ethics and human rights.
"The same universal human right to an intact body that I have fought for on behalf of women and girls must apply to boys as well," Miré said, "especially those who are too young to make an informed decision about the integrity of their bodies.
"We need to ask ourselves: How can it be wrong to surgically alter the genitals of a baby girl without her consent but okay to surgically alter the genitals of a baby boy?"
The campaign hopes to influence a review by the Centers for Disease Control of studies of adult African male circumcision in the context of the HIV epidemic in Africa, with the goal of developing a recommendation to be released here in the United States.
"Studies of adult men in Africa cannot be used to justify subjecting non-consenting American baby boys to irreversible surgery that will remove healthy tissue from their genitals for the rest of their lives," Intact America's executive director Georganne Chapin says. "Let young men make decisions about their own bodies, when they reach an age to make that decision for themselves."
Before parents allow that, she says, they should ask themselves if they would allow it to be done to their daughters.
Everyone needs to cease the personal attacks in this thread. Next one gets an infraction and a thread ban. No exceptions.