Droit et Cultures (Oct 2020)
Actualité du débat sur la circoncision aux États-Unis
Abstract
Although non-therapeutic circumcision, the surgical removal of the foreskin of the penis (NTC), has always been the exception and not the norm, there is a debate as to whether it is good or bad for health or somewhere in between, and whether parents have the right to elect it. It is good for health to have all of one’s body parts intact including the foreskin, which men value, while NTC is bad for health. It is painful and risky surgery and increasing numbers of men resent it having been forced on them when they could not object. The burden thus falls to physicians in the U.S., who stand virtually alone in performing NTC, to justify it on medical grounds. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has long advanced in the alternative the legal argument that parents have the right to right to elect circumcision based on their own religious, cultural, and personal preferences. However, as boys and men have the right to bodily integrity and self-determination; physicians are ethically and legally proscribed from operating on healthy children; and parents do not have the right to intrude into their son’s body and expose him to risks and harm him for reasons unrelated to medicine
