This blog post is a guest contribution written by John Geisheker, the executive director and general counsel of a nonprofit physicians’ organization based in Seattle, Washington.
In a recent post for Washington Initiative for Boys and Men, I wrote about a pernicious practice in American medicine: forced foreskin retraction injuries, which are inflicted on infants, typically at well-baby visits.
In this post, I share the key points in the amicus brief (friend of the court brief) that our organization filed in a recent lawsuit in Massachusetts. For those who know nothing of the actual practice of male circumcision, these revelations should be enlightening — and astonishing.
- No state, including Washington, requires a medical license (or indeed any medical training whatsoever) to perform a circumcision.
- No federal or state law requires the use of anesthesia or analgesia when performing a circumcision, regardless of the child’s age. Meanwhile, federal law 7 USC 54 Sec. 2131 requires anesthesia for painful procedures to veterinary or lab animals. It is a felony to withhold it.
- There are no proven, recommended, or mandatory surgical protocols for circumcision at the federal or state levels. What passes for protocol is casual, informal folklore.
- No regulation requires that circumcisions be performed in sterile clinical venues.
- No regulation requires that emergency equipment be on hand during a circumcision. (For most kinds of surgeries, the doctor has a ‘crash cart’ nearby that holds instruments for resuscitations, hemorrhaging, and other emergency scenarios.)
Please join our email list for once-a-week updates on WIBM’s latest content.
Circumcisions as ‘surgical practice opportunities’
- Circumcisions are often performed by medical students and residents as ‘surgical practice opportunities,’ fulfilling a required quota. Circumcision is routinely the first surgery a medical student performs, after 15 or fewer minutes training by a more senior resident. This follows the medical tradition of ‘Watch one, do one, teach one.’ Millions of American men bear the jagged scars of some ham-fisted 24-year-old’s first ‘beta’ surgery attempt.
- Circumcisions seldom include a ‘procedural pause’, as circumcision is not considered lucrative enough to justify the delay. A procedural pause, whose intent is to prevent errors and misidentification of the patient, is mandatory for surgeries on adults.
- The traditional circumcision clamps pre-date the FDA and thus have never been FDA approved.
- Worn, mismatched, obsolete, counterfeit, or dulled circumcision clamps (all of which can and do cause hemorrhaging) are not subject to required inspection or ‘sunsetting’ in any U.S. state, including Washington.
- No tests are required to detect anatomical anomalies, bleeding disorders, or other congenital maladies at birth that might indicate circumcision is inappropriate for the patient.
- Those performing circumcisions often pay little or no attention to collateral damage to adjoining limbic, vascular, muscular, or neurological structures. The only requirement for a ‘successful’ circumcision is that the child’s internal glans is permanently externalized (sadly, to drying and insensitivity) by any means.
- Premature infants are routinely pulled out of the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) to endure circumcisions — effectively ‘micro-surgery’ on their tiny organs. This is highly unethical, but it is common and is not illegal in Washington.
- No United States or Washington state registry exists to track children injured by circumcision or to identify inept ‘operators.’ Thus, complications are undocumented and substantially undercounted, and no one knows (or is telling) the true extent.
There are many ways a doctor might botch a circumcision, each of which negatively affects the appearance and/or functionality of the penis for the owner’s lifetime. Parents seldom know what exactly the penis should look like post-circumcision, so they do not catch the surgical errors early on. By the time a man realizes he is the victim of a botched circumcision, the statute of limitations and statute of repose in Washington state have both run out. The man has no legal recourse whatsoever. I counsel these men routinely. They are invariably devastated and angry.
John V. Geisheker, JD, LL.M
Executive Director & General Counsel
Doctors Opposing Circumcision
Docdirector.geisheker@gmail.com
2040 Westlake Ave. N., Suite #420
Seattle, WA 98109
5/10/2021