The arrest of Rabbi Jonathan Abraham in Dublin on July 30th on suspicion of performing an illegal circumcision is, per Jewish organisations, the first instance of a Jewish person being arrested for performing a circumcision in Europe since the end of the second world war. Mr. Abraham is facing, should he be convicted on the charge, a maximum fine of €130,000 and up to five years in Jail.
My fellow conservative columnist, David Quinn, published a poll on his social media account over the last few days, asking his followers whether they favoured a criminal ban on the circumcision of baby boys in Ireland for religious reasons. The results were stark:
Should Ireland ban circumcision of baby boys for religious reasons? (Question asked in light of the arrest here of a rabbi in connection with circumcision).
— David Quinn (@DavQuinn) August 25, 2024
At this juncture, it might be noted that circumcision of boys, aside from being a practice going back millennia, is globally recognised as the norm in many countries. In the United States, for example, fully 80% of males have been circumcised – the vast majority for non-religious and non-health related reasons. In the UK, circumcision rates run to one in five men. In South Korea, 75% of men are circumcised. 58% of Australian men, similarly, have had the foreskin removed. In countries where the majority religion is Jewish or Muslim, rates are much higher: 99% in Morocco, 91.7% in Israel.
It should also be noted that male circumcision, unlike its female counterpart, does not impact sexual function or the ability to orgasm. It is mostly carried out in the United States and Australia for perceived hygiene reasons, and to some extent for perceived cosmetic reasons.
The arguments against circumcision under David Quinn’s poll are overwhelming, and almost entirely uniform. One commenter perhaps summarised it most pithily: “The question is so simple it answers itself: should we permanently injure and impair a child for no medical reason and without their consent?”
The answer to that question is not straightforward, for if we were to apply it uniformly then surely we should also ban ear-piercing in children, since that procedure also amounts to a permanent injury to the body (which will try to heal itself) for no medical reason. One might argue that children can consent to ear-piercing, but that would be to take a unique view of consent since many people would also argue that children cannot consent independently to just about any other medical or surgical procedure.
The other thing to note here is that David specified that the ban he was talking about would not be a generic prohibition on circumcision – simply on elective circumcisions specifically for religious reasons. Some children (and indeed adult males) undergo circumcision to treat conditions like phimosis, in which the foreskin of the penis cannot be withdrawn naturally. These, presumably, would not be covered by David’s hypothetical ban. The ban would also, per David’s wording, exclude American-style cosmetic or hygienic circumcisions, which are not carried out because of some religious imperative.
Yet surely, if one opposes circumcision on religious grounds, one must also oppose it on cultural, cosmetic, or hygienic grounds? If for no other reason than that the parents of children would simply evade the ban by claiming that their religious circumcisions of their son were actually carried out on grounds of hygiene or penile aesthetic. Besides, one can hardly argue that “permanent injury and mutilation” is okay if irreligious parents believe that the procedure leaves their son with a cleaner and more hygienic penis, but entirely wrong if that same cleaner penis is a religious imperative.
As to the issue of mutilation and injury, this gets into a whole area of laws and customs around harm that start to get very messy, very quickly. For liberals, it becomes almost impossible, for example, to defend any kind of gender reassignment treatment if we have already established that circumcision – a much less transformative procedure – is impermissible. For conservatives, there are obvious questions about religious practices in general: If a child cannot consent to circumcision, then how can a child consent to baptism? How can a child consent to corrective surgery on a cleft palate, or to being blindfolded over a good eye to correct a lazy one, impacting their sight in the short term?
There is, clearly, a difference of degree between male circumcision and other “mutilations”: Were a religion to mandate the removal of a hand, or an eye, for example, after birth, then we might say that that act was criminal because it permanent impairs somebody’s ability to fully function in society, regardless of the grounds. Clearly, male circumcision does not meet that threshold.
We know, because we live in a world where 80% of American men are circumcised, that the procedure does no lasting harm to the human body’s ability to function. We also know that it is a core religious practice for at least two of the world’s great and oldest religions.
On that last point, there is a serious conversation to be had: We are told that Ireland is not an antisemitic nation, but at the same time there appears to be a considerable appetite for banning one of the oldest and most well-known Jewish religious traditions from being carried out in our country. We have just become the first European state in the guts of a century to seek to prosecute that act, criminally. For a country often obsessed with “how the world sees us”, this arrest and this debate is unlikely to endear us to a large part of the global population.
Since I may as well offer a personal view, I do not find circumcision to be a particularly tasteful or necessary practice, nor do I believe that any God would create the human body and then mandate the permanent removal of part of it. But I am not a religious person. The threshold for regulating religious practices should be if those practices are actively and meaningfully harmful to either an individual, or to society at large. There is zero evidence that male circumcision meets that threshold.