[ ARC forum 2 ]
Written by Danalee at 24 Jun 2004 07:34:00: Re: When in Rome...
As an answer to: Re: When in Rome... written by David_R at 23 Jun 2004 04:41:07:
I did like the history lesson. I see why, then, when we did go to Sydney in the 70s, and I got him to go to the doc that one time, why they didn't even have him drop his drawers. We also went to a 'marriage and family counselor' once--he wouldn't go a second time; but all she did was give a pep talk on the importance of foreplay and I don't think she ever asked him once how HE viewed our sex life. It was all a sad comedy of errors. Maybe she was a Germaine Greer clone...ick.
>>It's a little more complicated than that. Circumcision was THE mark of the upper crust in the UK. THEN, a very poor observer of life, one Dr Gairdner, wrote an article called "The Fate of the Foreskin" which was published in 1947 and absurdly concluded that circumcision was dangerous because there were 16 deaths reported. That they were due to anesthetic complications in boys outside the newborn area escaped him and the peer reviewers and that allowed this to be published as a revelation and a warning to all parents to cease this barbaric and deadly procedure. The NHS in the UK promptly stopped paying for the procedure (it added to the national debt!!!) and thus the decline in the UK.
>In Australia and NZ it was a little different. Australia had a rate close to 95% but when a Staph aureus outbreak occurred in the nurseries in the public hospitals in Australia in the early 60's, both THAT and the newly installed Professors of Paediatrics who were English taught, led to a moratorium on circumcisions and after that it was a massive downward drop! NZ was influenced by this also and like other government funded health programs (Medicaid in the US does the same thing) suddenly they had an excuse not to pay for circumcsions! That has led, at least in Australia to two things: the poor couldn't afford it (even though they could but when everything else is free, why pay 20 bucks for something?) and the educated lot, with MUCH influence from the Germaine Greers et al ( an agenda here, like don't let men be improved?) had another effect and one heard it over and over again... I wan't my little boy to have a penis, moist and soft and sensitive like my clitoris!! If that doesn't make you want to throw up, I don't know what will but as a resident and registrar in obsterics, I heard this line, ad nauseam! Circs take a nosedive! Recently, the rate has increased and thank heaven's for the Queenslanders who didn't believe the feminist bs and have kept on circumcising! Clinics have opened in Sydney and Melbourne to correct the errors of the past. Of course, the whole topic polarizes the debaters and so one is insulted just as much there as in the USA and the UK, I have found, by the anticircers. Isn't it interesting that on this forum, there has not been one circumcised man going off like the uncircumcised guys who really, really vent. Why is that? I think this is a legitimate question and once answered, I am not sure that the anticircers will come off in a good light. Just my opinion.
>Hope you liked the little history lesson.