Is the Circumcision of Children a Fraud - Peter W. Adler, J.D., M.A.
Presented at the Genital Autonomy Symposium July 24, 2014 Boulder, Colorado
ABSTRACT
It is good for health to have all living tissue and functional parts of one’s body attached, inc…
Is the Circumcision of Children a Fraud - Peter W. Adler, J.D., M.A.
Presented at the Genital Autonomy Symposium July 24, 2014 Boulder, Colorado
ABSTRACT
It is good for health to have all living tissue and functional parts of one’s body attached, including the foreskin of the penis, which is erogenous and facilitates comfortable sexual intercourse. It is risky, sometimes fatal, and always bad for the health of a child to be subjected to unnecessary surgery, including non-therapeutic circumcision or male genital cutting (MGC), the irreversible removal of the foreskin; and boys do not want to be circumcised. Regardless, unnecessary surgery on children including MGC is unlawful in the United States.
1) It violates boys’ right to bodily integrity and self-determination and is a battery: a tort; a crime; and child abuse.
2) It breaches the physician’s fiduciary duty to boys and men and is constructive fraud, where courts presume or impute fraud even if it is absent to prevent unfairness.
3) It is Medicaid fraud as physicians are not allowed to bill that program for unnecessary surgery.
4) MGC is also a complex 150-year-old multibillion-dollar intentional fraud.
Physicians in the U.S. who circumcise and their trade association, The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), have built the circumcision industry by targeting boys who are unable to defend themselves, then interposing and deceiving the boys’ trusting parents. Medical professionals use high pressure sales tactics to sell MGC to parents in the hospital shortly after the mother has given birth. They and the AAP fraudulently portray MGC as the simple, painless, harmless snip of a useless piece of skin, and prey upon parents’ fears of adult diseases, most recently HIV, which men can more easily, safely, and effectively prevent without loss of the foreskin, and which are legally irrelevant because boys are not at risk of adult diseases. The AAP also makes the fraudulent legal claims that parents have the r..
