All About the Profit: the AAP's "Circumcision Task Force" report

The AAP's recently released "technical report on male circumcision" makes it clear what the AAP, pediatrics and the for-profit medical industry is really about: money.

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Posted: 10/04/2012 on the Huffington Post by Georgeanne Chapin of Intact America


The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) describes itself as "dedicated to the health and well-being of infants, children, adolescents and young adults." Unfortunately, its new Circumcision Task Force report, published last month in the journal Pediatrics, reveals instead a trade association agenda that desperately seeks to justify and secure reimbursement for a medically-unnecessary surgery that harms children and violates their basic human rights. The self-interest and selective blindness of the AAP report is especially remarkable given the growing condemnation of child circumcision by physician groups and even courts in European and Commonwealth countries, which view the surgery as an outmoded American ritual that serves no therapeutic purpose and causes both short- and long-term harm.

In actuality, the AAP report stops short of recommending circumcision, even as it claims the surgery's benefits outweigh the risks. Yet it states repeatedly that those risks are unknown and devotes not a word to the function and purpose of the foreskin, a normal and integral part of the penis and one that approximately 70 percent of all men worldwide have retained. The United States is virtually alone among developed countries in surgically altering the bodies of baby boys as a routine medical procedure. Rates of male circumcision in European countries are around 10 percent.

Not only does the Task Force report blatantly ignore the ethical obligation of physicians to respect their patients' autonomy and do no harm, it repeatedly calls for doctors to be paid by private insurance or Medicaid for removing healthy, functioning tissue from an infant baby boy who cannot consent to this permanent alteration to his body.

Specifically, the report says:

"Although health benefits are not great enough to recommend routine circumcision for all male newborns, the benefits of circumcision are sufficient to justify access to this procedure for families choosing it and to warrant third-party payment for circumcision of male newborns."

The Task Force says that it's the parents' responsibility to decide whether their particular newborn might benefit from being circumcised, though no guidance is given on how parents should make this decision.

In fact, 18 states do not cover circumcisions under Medicaid, and many insurance plans do not cover what the American Medical Association has referred to as a "non-therapeutic" procedure. The newborn circumcision rate is falling steadily in the United States, with current estimates placing it at about 50 percent -- as compared with around 80 percent only a few decades ago.

The decline is attributable to a number of factors, among these, immigration from countries where intact boys and men are considered normal and healthy and a growing awareness among parents that the surgery is unnecessary and -- indeed -- painful, risky, and harmful. These parents are as loathe to circumcise their infant sons as they would be to assent to the genital cutting of their daughters, a practice popular in parts of Africa and the Muslim world but outlawed in most Western countries, including the United States.

... All of this -- together with the insistence that parents bear the burden (and therefore the liability) of deciding whether or not to have their sons circumcised -- makes it clear to me that the American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force report is all about justifying past practice, perpetuating it into the future, disclaiming responsibility for any adverse consequences, and ensuring a revenue stream for doctors.

read the rest at https://www.huffingtonpost.com/georg...b_1919711.html