An Infant's Rights

Part 1

In speaking with Maribel Navarro on the topic of fetus’ rights, she pointed out some very interesting issues. The following is the result of our conversation, coalesced and honed into a more precise discourse.

Many people are anti-abortion. Such people believe that the fetus is a living thing, and should have protection under our laws. This child-to-be, this future person, should have its liberties and life protected. These are compelling arguments. The protection of sentient life is a noble endeavor, indeed. I am not here to argue against this position. This is not an essay on the merits or demerits of abortion. What this essay is about will be revealed shortly.

Let’s take a look at some anti-abortion precepts.

1. An unborn child is a person, despite still being in the womb.

2. As a person, an unborn child has rights.

3. An unborn child, as a person, should have their life and body protected against harm.

4. A parent does not have the right to harm their child, even if that child is unborn.

If you read numbers 1-4 above and agreed with them wholeheartedly, I have a question for you: Are you a supporter of child circumcision*? If so, how can you reconcile those two beliefs? How can you believe that a child, even an unborn one, has an amount of autonomy and protection under the law and yet support a practice where parents may permanently alter their child’s genitals without the child’s consent?

*Note: I am referring to any circumcision practice in this essay, whether male or female, sanctioned or banned. Any permanent altering of an individual’s genitals falls into this description.

Hypothetically speaking, if I had a child, do I have the right to surgically and permanently remove their eyebrows shortly after birth? They don’t really need them, and they won’t suffer any serious medical issues if they don’t’ have eyebrows. I think my child’s ears are too wide, so I’d like to give the child a permanent alteration to its ears after birth, shaping them how I want them.

If, at the age of 5, my parents held me down and shaved off all the hair on my body while I screamed and cried, they’d be locked away. If my parents forced me, at the age of 3, to have reconstructive surgery performed on my nose because they didn’t like it’s shape, it would be criminal.

To be frank, I don’t wish to tackle the issues of circumcision at this time. I simply wish to point out an amount of hypocrisy and contradiction I have encountered in my investigations. How can someone say “God wants me to protect the life of unborn children” and then turn around and also claim that “God wants me to mutilate all male children at birth”. Does not compute!

Part 2

I wrote Part 1 about one week ago. Since that time, I have done some further reflection on the subject of circumcision. I have read some articles and heard some discourse claiming that the practice of circumcision is sacred, and to outlaw its practice would be an attack on religion (specifically, the Abrahamic religions, namely Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). This claim is inappropriate. When discussing public policy, in a nation where it is most specifically laid out that the government shall not endorse any one faith, it is not relevant that a particular religion holds a specific practice sacred. I will elaborate on this further.

In the eyes of the government, all faiths must be considered equally false. This is not to say that they are false, but that the government must take a completely neutral approach to them all, otherwise favoritism and bias emerge. It is not possible to assume that all faiths are true, so we must assume that they are all false, at least as it comes to public policy. In this manner, equality can be maintained – no one faith is considered any better than another, and the issues of religious doctrine becomes irrelevant. Again, this is not to say that the faiths are false, just that we must assume so as far as governmental issues are concerned. People have the right to believe said beliefs, that is for certain, but public policy cannot revolve around the myriad and incongruent beliefs of the faithful. It doesn’t matter that Fundamentalist Mormons believe that polygamy is sacred, we have deemed the practice itself unlawful.

The practice of circumcision, as we practice it today in the United States, has its roots in the Old Testament. It signifies a covenant made between Abraham and his god. Why the God of Abraham dislikes foreskin so much is beyond me, but that is a topic for another day. My point here being that this practice is religious first and medical second. There are some medical benefits to circumcision, and some medical drawbacks. It is important to note that this is an elective surgery, in that it is in no manner life saving or life improving, at least not in any significant way. If we divorce ourselves from the belief that mutilating infants’ genitals pleases an ancient Semitic sky deity, then maybe we can see what this practice really is: barbarism.

Side Rant: The God of Abraham demands we do a lot of things. A brief flip through my copy of the King James Bible also informs me that we should: Hunt witches, stone apostates to death, beat and kill our children, make blood sacrifices, and murder homosexuals. The mutilation of infant genitalia seems to fit right in among those directives.