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→2016 WWDOGA speech
I speak to you as a pediatrician, as representative of the professional association of pediatricians in Germany which has their head office here in Cologne and represents almost all residential pediatricians and a very big part of the pediatricians that work in hospitals.
All German pediatric associations disapprove of [[circumcision]] of young boys when there is no urgent medical indication, when there are no important medical reasons for this surgery. The vast majority of pediatricians in Germany have a different opinion than the majority of the members of the German Bundestag. Parents should not be allowed to decide whether or not their boys get [[circumcised]] without indispensable medical reasons.
Circumcision is a physical injury of the child's body that can not be undone. It's not just a little scar that remains like after a surgery, after circumcision the boy lacks something. There's a lack of protection, a lack of sensitivity at his [[penis]]. But not only is the body being harmed, the soul of the child is harmed as well.
The most intimate, the most sensitive area is subjected to [[pain]] that last lasts for days. The adults dictate that, they hold him down, they make him will-less, he has to endure it, he does not understand it, and it still hurts so much for so long.
We pediatricians are convinced that [[human rights]] are at the very top of our value system. Children's rights are [[human rights]]. A child's right to an unharmed body counts more than the parental right to consent. The child's right to self-determination counts more means more to us then religious command. No one accepts corporal punishment just because some people read from the bible that beating is necessary for a child's upbringing.
We pediatricians want that boys in our society boys are to be granted the same level of protection that as girls are. We thoroughly oppose considerations from so-called medical ethicists in America to allow a - what they call it - small female circumcision, and that this small circumcision was a protection for the girls from a later, big circumcision. Those are totally unproven claims, those are abstruse considerations that have been published in big ethical journals in the American medial medical world now in 2016.
Big or small, boy or girl, who wants to beat will beat, who wants to circumcise will circumcise. That is no ethical situation, that is no ethical stance, that is no medical stance - we can not allow that.
Yet we doctors may as well not ignore that a huge number of boys in Germany are [[circumcised]] without any religious and without any medical reason. The are being circumcised because doctors a badly trained. In their studies and advanced vocational training medical students and doctors learn things about the foreskin that date back all the way to the first half of the last century. They learn that the [[foreskin ]] was dispensable, that it it could be cut off, and many still believe that with school age, a boy must be able to retract his [[foreskin]] with ease, or otherwise we doctors would have to intervene. A few years ago we proved that each year 30,000 boys are circumcised in Germany without religious motivation and also without any medical indication. Almost 30,000 victims, boys, of mutilation by doctors. Mutilation due to nescience, mutilation due to neglect, and a mutilation with which individual people make good profits.
If we pediatricians take children's right seriously, if we take our medical mission seriously, than we have a huge responsibility in terms of circumcision, and we still have a lot to do. We need to ensure that our colleagues stop to needlessly hurt hurting thousands of boys each year. We need to educate them better, we need to inform them about the risks and side-effects and the nonsense of their actions.
And sometimes we need to fall into their arms and take away their knifes.