I oppose genital cutting of infants in the absence of medical need because it is a cultural practice that violates the universal human rights to autonomy and bodily integrity. These are reasons enough to oppose this barbaric and disgusting custom.

But these are relatively abstract ethical values. They make you think but they don’t engage the emotions. A parent can easily disregard a seemingly remote value such as “autonomy” when a team of nurses and doctors pressures them to believe that circumcision is “just something you do” to a baby boy.

Recently I came across yet another to reason to oppose it, a reason that gets at the heart of what’s human and that struck me as piercingly sad: cutting the genitals of an infant violates two of the five innate fears that all humans share.

Five basic fears

An article puts the science in clear terms: all humans have a fear of extinction (ceasing to exist), mutilation, loss of autonomy, separation, and ego-death.

Infant genital cutting violates and triggers two of these fears: mutilation and loss of autonomy.

“Mutilation—the fear of losing any part of our precious bodily structure; the thought of having our body’s boundaries invaded, or of losing the integrity of any organ, body part, or natural function.

Loss of Autonomy—the fear of being immobilized, paralyzed, restricted, enveloped, overwhelmed, entrapped, imprisoned, smothered, or otherwise controlled by circumstances beyond our control.”

Search online for the Circumstraint Board (pictured) and tell me if an infant strapped into this device would feel a loss of autonomy on some unconscious level. And of course, this device is designed for routine mutilation.

What led me to google innate fears

I was watching the excellent, compassionate and wise Thaïs Gibson in an effort to understand patterns in my past. She mentioned matter-of-factly that there is only a small number of biological fears.

I wanted to understand my attachment style in relationships. Based on my past I think I lean moderately toward dismissive avoidant. Interestingly, a person with this attachment style values autonomy and independence and sometimes zealously defends that independence, to the point of cutting off relationships that might threaten it, in reality or in the imagination. She also said that people with a dismissive avoidant attachment style can be living in a fight-or-flight mode throughout much of their lives.

I looked back and pictured myself strapped down to a board like the Circumstraint, tiny, helpless, and then having part of my penis cut off needlessly, and then requiring weeks of healing, and then developing scar tissue that would last for a lifetime. I had in fact just emerged from days in an incubator thanks to my mom’s gestational diabetes and was a weak and vulnerable life form that was not ready for further cutting, bleeding and pain.

This early experience would contribute to the sense that you cannot rely on others. It would trigger the fear of a loss of autonomy and of mutilation. This in turn would lead to a dismissive avoidant attachment style, where you fight to defend autonomy. And then to a strident defense of autonomy as a biomedical ethical principle.

But it all goes back to the small infant fearing mutilation and loss of control over what is done to one’s body, like any human would.

More reasons to oppose genital cutting of infant boys

· It is not your body to cut

· Infants regularly die from this

· Many procedures are botched (google “botched circumcision” and prepare to be shocked by penile amputations, extremely tight cuts, and doctors who hide and deny their streak of crimes)

· The rate of infant circumcision is declining everywhere and so circumcised boys will soon be in the minority in the US and globally

· The custom was popularized in the US as a way to destroy sexual pleasure because masturbation was considered evil

· It reduces sexual sensation

· Anyone is legally allowed to circumcise an infant boy in the US regardless of medical training, which indicates its cultural nature as opposed to medical

· Circumcised men experience more sexual dysfunction than intact men

· The shocking practice of oral suction circumcision by Jewish witch doctors is tolerated in New York City and New Jersey and has led to infant deaths from fulminant herpes virus infections

· Just take a look at the Circumstraint and picture your baby boy strapped into it for an unneeded genital cutting ritual