Harmful Fiction, Useful Facts

It's amazing how motivated people can become, emotionally attached to a singular issue, one that sometimes puzzles people, finding it difficult to distinguish reality from febrile imagination. Ideas rejection valid procedures,  that become for them a cause celebre and to which they are happy and determined to passionately campaign against.

There are, admittedly, times and causes for which people should become involved. And then there are issues whose details in their intimate details send people into paroxysms of inchoate rage.

It's understandable that people become furious when speaking of the quality-of-life-destroying effect of female genital mutilation. A barbaric custom that sometimes goes so far as to destroy lives. According to the World Health Organization there is this to say about female genital mutilation:

"(female genital mutilation also) violates a person's rights to health, security and physical integrity, the right to be free from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and the right to life when the procedure results in death."

And within present society there are people who will not speak the word 'circumcision', feeling that to do so is to give it an unwarranted measure of legitimacy as a medical procedure. Rather they spit out terms like male genital cutting, and genital mutilation, comparing its effects to infibulation for girls.

When in fact, circumcision, far from representing an 'amputation' a 'cruel and despicable form of abuse', 'damaging penises' and 'violating human rights', is nothing of the kind. Study after study has demonstrated that circumcision for males is a health attribute. It is an effective preventive measure against global disease, lowering the risk of HIV acquisition in heterosexual men by 60% to 70%.

The World Health Organization considers circumcision a key tool in the fight against HIV. Circumcision protects men against a variety of sexually transmitted diseases. It reduces chances of contracting herpes and syphilis. Quite apart from the fact that a circumcised penis is far easier to keep clean. A circumcised penis prevents HPV transmission, reducing risk of penile cancer. And it protects women from their partners passing on health risks to them.

Circumcised men are far less likely to contract genital warts or to develop urinary tract infections. Health care costs zoom into the stratosphere with the growing phenomenon of parents rejecting the procedure for their newborn sons, a procedure that was once more common than not in North America. Misinformation of a most alarming kind proliferates on the Internet where detractors insist that circumcision has a high rate of complications rendering it invalid.

Internet sites, however, that reflect calm analysis through a generation of scientific enquiry validate the usefulness for circumcision in hygiene, and in disease prevention with its use within the male community.