In her ruling this week, the family court judge Mrs Justice Roberts was quite clear that the two boys at the centre of her hearing could be circumcised when the time was right. She was also quite clear that the time was not yet right.
“I am simply deferring that decision to the point where each of the boys themselves will make their individual choices, once they have the maturity and insight to appreciate the consequences and longer term effects of the decisions which they reach.”
The father of the two boys, aged six and four, had applied for a court order to compel their mother to have the boys circumcised in accordance with his Muslim faith. The mother, from whom he is separated, successfully persuaded the court to allow the boys to mature to an age where they could make their own decision about their religious and bodily preferences.
While the ruling in this case is specific to the individual circumstances, the case is not unique. Last year in Florida, a similar court case ruled the other way, obliging Heather Hironimus, a mother, to surrender care of her four-year-old boy to his father to arrange his circumcision. She initially refused, disappearing into hiding in a domestic violence refuge for three months before being located and then jailed for nine days until finally, sobbing loudly and still shackled in handcuffs, she signed the release papers. It is reported that the boy was circumcised last November.
Across the world, attitudes towards routine or ritual infant circumcision are changing. In the US, where circumcision rates were once close to 90%, the latest surveys show that only slightly more than half of newborn boys are now cut. That is expected to become a clear minority within a generation. Even among Jewish and Muslim communities, there is a small but growing movement to abandon the tradition. Meanwhile the type of interfaith and cross-cultural relationships that sparked the case this week are an inevitable feature of an increasingly migratory global society.
As these trends gather pace, it is inevitable that there will be more and more cases like the one in Exeter. That judge’s ruling is correct and welcome; where there is a dispute between parents the deciding factor has to be that, while one outcome is easily reversible at a later stage, the other (barring complex plastic surgery) is not.
Inevitably, however, the judge’s remarks have already invited discussion of the deeper principles involved. What right do or should parents have to impose permanent bodily alteration or, as many would call it, mutilation, on their own children? What rights do or should cultural communities have to preserve their own religious rites and customs? To participants on either side of the circumcision debate, the answers to those questions seem self-evident and unarguable. They are also entirely incompatible.
It is the role of a secular democratic state to intervene in such clashes of competing rights. Yet over the years UK governments have almost entirely neglected their duty of care on this question. No formal attempts have been made to quantify the extent of medical complaints arising from circumcisions. We know that hundreds of babies and children are admitted to British hospitals every year with infections, uncontrolled bleeding or other complications. Shockingly, despite horrific evidence of serious injuries and even deaths arising from botched circumcisions conducted by unqualified practitioners in non-clinical conditions, there remains no legal regulation of circumcision in this country. Anyone can set up shop as a circumcision practitioner in Britain today.
Personally, I would like to see an end to all non-medical infant circumcision, but I recognise that any attempt at a legal ban is entirely the wrong approach. Rightly or wrongly, it would be perceived as an attempt to force assimilation on Jewish and Muslim communities, and would require them to leave the country in order to observe their religion. It would also encourage the very same backstreet, blackmarket practices that pose by far the greatest medical risks.
At the same time, an informed and unapologetic public health debate is long overdue and necessary. If parents wish to have their children circumcised then that has to be facilitated, but no parent should make that choice without understanding that even medical circumcisions carry risks of permanent mutilation, terrifying injuries and even fatalities. The NHS has a formal position that routine circumcision brings no identifiable medical benefits that could justify the quantifiable risks. We need to go further, however, in challenging and exploding prevailing myths about circumcision, such as the idea that it is painless for babies, that it is no more invasive than an ear-piercing, or that it has proven health and hygiene benefits. All these ideas have now been resoundingly and repeatedly disproven by medical science.
Circumcision has been practised for thousands of years, and it will not be ended by an act of parliament, however well-intentioned. But it might well be reduced and eventually even eliminated by growing consideration of the rights of the child, by education, by information and, ultimately, by nothing more than the will of parents.
