Doctors Should Not Perform Non-Therapeutic Circumcision of Children

Under the ancient English common law that prevails in English-speaking nations, everyone, including infants and children, has a right to his or her bodily integrity.

Similarly, under contemporary international human rights law, everyone, including infants and children, has a right to his or her security of the person and to freedom from degrading treatment.

We have previously shown in Argument 2 that any circumcision excises and amputates functionally important tissue from the human body, which results in degraded physiological functions.

The circumcision of male children, therefore, violates the legal and human rights of the child, who is too young to consent to such a violation. The child, therefore, must live with the result of his irreversible injury for his whole life.

Under contemporary rules of ethics, doctors must respect the rights of their child-patients. They have a duty to their child patients to render only the care that the child-patient needs and not what someone else wants. Child-patients do not need non-therapeutic circumcision so doctors have a duty to not provide it.

Circumcision also violates the four cardinal principles of medical ethics – beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, and autonomy. For this additional reason, doctors have a duty to not carry out non-therapeutic circumcision on infants and children.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is working to bring medical practice into harmony with international human rights law. UNESCO says:

In applying and advancing scientific knowledge, medical practice and associated technologies, human vulnerability should be taken into account. Individuals and groups of special vulnerability should be protected and the personal integrity of such individuals respected.

The circumcision of children is an unethical practice for all of the reasons discussed above and for other reasons not mentioned here. Doctors, therefore, should refuse to perform non-therapeutic circumcisions on children.