Genital Autonomy and the World - Steven Svoboda

Recorded at the 15th international Symposium on Genital Autonomy and Children's Rights in San Francisco 4-6 May 2018

GENITAL AUTONOMY AND THE WORLD
J. STEVEN SVOBODA

Forces helping maintain genital cutting include religious references and lies—about medical benefits, babies’ inability to feel pain and no harm to males. A “hold back the floodgates” mentality may also be at play, along with message dilution fears, logistical inability to take on another struggle, submission to the reigning gender paradigm, and homophobia.

Barriers are several: profit, cultural/social predisposition, an appalling lack of knowledge regarding the foreskin’s functions, and doctors deferring to patients’ parents. Three times courts have avoided addressing circumcision’s legality by diverting the discussion into peripheral issues.

The world is changing before our eyes, with a German court decision, a French adult legal victory, and two recent UK cases. Even the United Nations is awakening. Four years ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics lost a debate to a ragtag team of activists.

Skepticism to authority has grown and old institutions just don’t, ahem, cut it any more. Changes in perceptions of gender and sex may also be helping genital autonomy.

Genital autonomy is an exceptional issue, characterized by numerous muddles, and creating discomfort. The personal is political for us too.

Attorneys for the Rights of the Child:
https://www.arclaw.org

J. Steven Svoboda, Esq. holds a Master’s Degree in Physics from the University of California at Berkeley and graduated with honors from Harvard Law School. He is Executive Director of Attorneys for the Rights of the Child, which he founded in 1997, and he has presented to the United Nations on male circumcision. In 2013, he debated Michael Brady of the American Academy of Pediatrics regarding the legality and ethics of male circumcision, unofficially winning the debate. His articles regarding children’s right to bodily autonomy have appeared in the Journal of Medical Ethics, the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, and the American Journal of Bioethics.

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