How about circumcision of babies and very young children without any medical indication whatsoever (read: for religious reasons) ?
How can removing a body part like the foreskin be moral if there is no scientific reason for starting the procedure in the first place ? — no infections, no redness, no swelling, no pain, no irritation, no peeing problems, no predictable problems in the foreseeable future.
My girlfriend (who is a urologist) does them all the time, and the reason is much more sinister than you would dare to think. First of all: she does not like doing them — not for one bit.
But the sad truth is that if you systematically refuse religious circumcisions, they will be done in a illegal circuit, under unhygienic circumstances by charlatans with the bleakest possible medical aftermath. So yes, she does them all the time.
We can only be so lucky that “female circumcision” (AKA female genital cutting) is illegal in most modern countries, although it still is:
Practiced in at least 28 countries stretching across the center of Africa north of the equator; it is not found in southern Africa or in the Arabic-speaking nations of North Africa, with the exception of Egypt.
In the end, it’s very sad that medical practitioners (but also people in a more general, non-medical context) have to perform procedures whom they find unnecessary and immoral, because the alternative is simply so much worse —
It’s the story of our lives in a nutshell.
SOURCES: the footnoted site. For the medical image: Dissection of the male genitalia, lower abdomen and thighs, with the arteries and blood vessels indicated in red. Colored lithograph by J. Roux, 1822. Wellcome Collection. (© Public domain)
Footnotes
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