This vague fear of something happening in the future allowed me to subject my precious newborns to something that was worse. I had no idea what circumcision was. The U.S. activist was buoyed yesterday by comments by one of Canada's leading medical ethicists. Margaret Somerville, founding director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, said in an interview with the Citizen this week that non- medical infant male circumcision is technically criminal assault and that Canadian doctors should not be doing it. I think Canadians would go ballistic about that, and that's a less dangerous thing to do than a male circumcision.
Circumcision involves forcibly retracting the foreskin and cutting away the inner and outer layers.
Despite the availability of inexpensive pain killers, from injections to creams that help deaden the pain, the majority of circumcisions today are performed without any anesthetic. Her life changed the day she witnessed a circumcision on a newborn baby as a nursing student in the early 1980s. The infant was strapped to a molded plastic board, his hips elevated and arms tied down with velcro. The baby was struggling against the restraints. Then the doctor started to cut into the baby's penis and the baby let out a scream I had never heard a human being make.