Male and Female Circumcision Among Jews, Christians and Muslims by Sami Aldeeb ABU-SAHLIEH Marco Polo Monographs Shangrila Publications

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MPM5: Male & Female Circumcision: (كتاب ختان الكور والإنا) Among Jews, Christians & Muslims
by Sami A. Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh
A Medical, Social, Legal, and Religious Debate Contents __________________________________________ [ii-iii] Series Foreword [iv-xi] Color Plates [3] General observations [4] Foreword by Marilyn Fayre Milos [5-7] Introduction [8-15] Part I - Definition and distribution of circumcision [16] Part II - Religious debate [16-68] 1: Circumcision among the Jews [69-97] 2: Circumcision among Christians [98-136] 3: Circumcision among Muslims [137] Part III - The medical debate [137-139] 1: Relationship between clergy and physicians [140-143] 2: Trivializations and exaggerations of circumcision [144-149] 3: Circumcision and pain [150-157] 4: Health damages of circumcision [158-171] 5: Sexual damages from circumcision	ORDER NOW This book divides myth from fact about a topic that everyone is interested in but afraid to discuss! ISBN 0-9677201-9-2 Cloth Bound Price $49.50 US ISBN 0-9677201-6-8 Paperback Price $41.00 US Single Orders Volume Orders Excerpt Below Arabic Version
[172-198] 6: Supposed health advantages of circumcision [199-204] 7: Foreskin restoration [205] Part IV - The social debate [205-210] 1: From self-mutilation to cultural mutilation [211-215] 2: Influence of the milieu on circumcision [216-218] 3: Influence of religion on circumcision [219-222] 4: Circumcision and control of sexual instinct [223-229] 5: Circumcision and marriage [230-235] 6: Circumcision in tribal and communal systems [236-244] 7: Circumcision and the instinct of domination [245-255] 8: Circumcision and economic factors [256-272] 9: Circumcision and political factors [273-282] 10: Psychological and social effects of circumcision [283-288] 11: Educational and psychological measures against circumcision [289] Part V - The legal debate [290-292] 1: Historical legal prohibition of male circumcision [293-298] 2: International condemnation of female circumcision [299-306] 3: National condemnation of female circumcision [307-316] 4: NGOs opposed to female and male circumcision [317-335] 5: Circumcision and human rights [336-354] 6: Circumcision and medical dispension [355-367] 7: Interdiction of circumcision between ideal and feasibility [368-375] 8: Circumcision and political asylum [376-377] Conclusion [378-391] Bibliography [392-400] Extensive table of contents REVIEW by Jerry K. Brayton Attorneys for the Rights of the Child (ARC) This long-awaited book كتاب ختان الكور والإنا by well-known intactivist and Swiss Institute of Comparative Law Professor Sami Aldeeb is a fitting counterpoint to Lisa Bisque's "You Call This Love?" Aldeeb's work presents readers with an awe-inspiring wealth of information on many pertinent aspects of circumcision. Even the most dedicated advocate of genital integrity is likely to find much that is new here. It is delightful to read a book, possibly the first ever published, that comprehensively treats male and female genital cutting on an equal footing, in keeping with Aldeeb's own personal enthusiasm for halting both practices. I found the author's synthesis of the various different positions regarding male and female genital cutting to be highly intriguing and thought-provoking. The section on genital mutilations and human rights (pages 316-336) is particularly strong. ... The information is a goldmine ... I highly recommend Sami Aldeeb's passionate work for the large amount of information it contains which cannot easily be found elsewhere, and for daring to make the first stab at globally addressing many aspects of genital mutilations within the covers of one book. ... I consider this to be one of the most important books ever written about genital integrity, and highly recommend that every reader seek out a copy for his or her perusal and personal library.

EXCERPTS

INTRODUCTION

A crowd of women, men and children gathered before our Muslim neighbor's house. One distributed candy while songs of women about the house, mingled with shrill screams of children. I asked my parents: "What happens there? Why do children scream inside? Is this because some children are deprived of candy?" They explained that children had been circumcised.
  I was five years old. I had just attended a circumcision but I did not understand what that meant, because of my young age and my membership in a Christian family that does not circumcise its children. The memory of this event has stayed with me, despite the years and physical distance that separate me from it. This event was a feast at which many delighted while others screamed!
In 1992, during a bookstore tour in Cairo, I saw a book in Arabic entitled: Male and Female Circumcision from a Muslim Point of View . On the cover were pictures of a boy and girl with a red knife between them. The title triggered my memory of the circumcision I had witnessed and intrigued me because I discovered females were also circumcised. After some hesitation, I bought the book. Instead of reading it, I hid it in my library, far removed from even my own eyes.
  Some months later, I was contacted by the Libyan North-South association to participate as lecturer in a symposium on children's rights. The symposium was organized in collaboration with the Department of Sociology at the University of Geneva. I proposed two topics: a child's right to a peaceful education or sexual mutilation of children. To my surprise, the promoters chose the latter topic, about which I new absolutely nothing (except for the event in my youth). Therefore, I needed to unearth the book bought in Cairo and get to work preparing for the conference, to take place three months later, 30-31 January 1993 . I read an impressive amount of material and met with representatives of organizations working on the topic.
  A great number of lecturers from different countries participated in the symposium. My lecture was scheduled for the end of the first day. The participants were tired and were ready to leave. When I began speaking, however, I noted a distinct energy dynamic in the audience. Some people smiled, while others appeared tense. At the end of my presentation, half the room applauded and the other half was infuriated. The Libyan president of the North-South association then remarked, with an angry air, that it seemed to him that the speaker (me) had forgotten the episode of Salman Rushdie who had been perceived as attacking the religious convictions of others. I responded by stating that I considered his remark an insult and I asked him to withdraw it. I explained that my intention was not to attack convictions of others, but to defend children. Seeing that a part of the audience sided with me, the president apologized.
  This episode opened my eyes. I was quite naive, for I thought that I was doing good in denouncing male and female circumcision. However, I had somehow forgotten that I was walking in a minefield full of religious and sexual taboos. This situation presented me with a challenge: keep silent and allow 15 million children to be mutilated annually, or attack the practice. I opted for the latter. I felt that I had to defend mutilated children, as well as protect my professional honor as a lawyer. Ironically, I discovered that members of my profession do not protect children from sexual mutilation. Because the fight against sexual mutilation does not yield anything except problems, attorneys had historically washed their hands. I later discovered that religious leaders and medical authorities have all behaved in the same way.
  Since that day in 1992, I have carried the burden of mutilated children on my back. Every day that passes, I make both new friends and new enemies.
  This book began as a booklet of research results, sent to Swiss libraries . The first text is now translated and published in various periodicals in French, English and Spanish. I sent a copy to NOCIRC, an American organization that fights against sexual mutilations in the United States. The organization's president, Marilyn Fayre Milos, is a nurse who lost her job because of her involvement in the issue. She invited me to participate in the 3rd International Symposium on Sexual Mutilation held 22-25 May 1994, at the University of Maryland (USA).
  On August 7, 1994, during the UN Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the cable news network (CNN) released a movie of circumcision of an Egyptian girl named Najla by a barber in a popular quarter of Cairo. The day before, the Egyptian president had declared that female circumcision had practically disappeared in Egypt. The movie discredited the president's declaration and triggered shockwaves among political, religious and intellectual circles in Egypt. It was followed by numerous contradictory positions. Tantawi, the Mufti of Egypt, declared that female circumcision is only a Pharaonic custom with no link to the Islam; therefore, he said physicians must be the ones to decide if female circumcision is damaging . Jad-al-Haq (d. 1996), Great Sheik of Al-Azhar, the most important Islamic center in the world, disagreed with Tantawi:
  If a region stops, of common agreement, to practice male and female circumcision, the chief of the state declares war against that region because circumcision is a part of the rituals of Islam and its specificities. This means that male and female circumcisions are obligatory .
This contradictory debate between highest Egyptian religious authorities parallels another contradiction, no less shocking for me. While a UN conference condemned female circumcision, it was silent on routine male circumcision. No NGO spoke out against male circumcision. CNN avoided making a parallel between female circumcision and male circumcision, even though about 3,300 children a day undergo routine male circumcision in the U.S. alone.
This silence intrigued me. Why is female circumcision condemned, but not male circumcision? Is this not discrimination against boys? I later discovered that one reason for silence was fear of being labeled an anti-Semite for attacking male circumcision; part of Jewish religious conviction.
  On 9-11 August 1996, I organized, with NOCIRC, the 4th International Symposium on Sexual Mutilations at the University of Lausanne. We also decided to publish papers presented at this symposium, even though papers from the three previous symposia were not published . On 5-7 August 1998, I participated in the 5th International Symposium held at the University of Oxford. Papers from this symposium have also been published . The 6th Symposium took place in Sydney in December 2000. The symposia have increasingly intensified, uniting more and more participants from five continents: nurses, physicians, psychologists, attorneys and activists, all united in one ideal: to abolish male and female sexual mutilation.
In front of this group of pioneers, there are numerous NGOs that, under the auspices of the United Nations and Western governments, fight to abolish only female circumcision. The name of this practice has even been changed to female genital mutilation to distinguish it from male circumcision. This name change signifies a refusal to address the issue of male circumcision, without providing any valid reasons for making a distinction between the two practices. Both procedures mutilate healthy sexual organs, without medical justification and without the victim's consent. Both practices also violate the right to physical integrity, as well as other human rights.
  This book is dedicated to the debate on male and female circumcision. It is based mainly on the author's book in Arabic, published in Lebanon , also composed of five parts. The first part defines male and female circumcision and explains what groups participate in these practices. The remaining four parts detail the religious, medical, social and legal debates surrounding the issues. Order of these parts is dictated by a chronological sequence of the debate. For the religious believer, religious principles constitute his or her main legal standard of reference. Whatever physicians, sociologists, or lawyers may say against male and female circumcision, the religious believer feels he must follow religious dogma and close his ears to any other argument.
  Second is the medical debate, in which both sides try to justify respective positions medically. Religious believers also use medical debates to confirm religious convictions: "God was wise while ordering us to circumcise our children. Medicine confirms His wisdom". Opponents answer that medical resources are manipulated and falsified by unscrupulous physicians and fundamentalist researchers to justify holy books. Opponents also propose remedying damages suffered by victims, notably through non-surgical restoration of mutilated organs.
  Anthropologists, ethnologists, sociologists and psychiatrists have gone beyond the religious and medical debate to examine the deep reasons driving human beings to mutilate themselves and their children. They have formed an extensive range of reasons spanning psychiatric illness to political or economic reasons to explain these practices. One activist actually counted 260 reasons . In addition, different specialists have tried to examine the influence of male and female circumcision on human behavior, to propose social means to put an end to these two practices.
  Lawyers have been last to intervene, concluding that male and female circumcisions are not a medical necessity. Since genital tissue is healthy, there is no need to operate on the approximately 13 million boys and 2 million girls who undergo circumcision each year. Indeed, a great majority of men and women in the world are intact and have no problems. Lawyers conclude that circumcision is a violation of physical integrity and that bodily integrity must be appreciated in light of legal principles, notably respect for human rights. But attorneys are confronted with various factors that preclude them from applying these principles. They are limited to condemning female circumcision while keeping silent about male circumcision, especially for political reasons. They are also restrained by the difficulty of abolishing an ancient practice extensively followed by society and sustained by health professionals for profit. They finally hesitate to open a door to requests for asylum that would provoke qualification of these two practices as contrary to human rights. They are thus torn between  ideal of respecting human rights, and the reality of multiple factors that perpetuate a violation of this right. They realize that law alone is can not abolish this violation; it must be accompanied by other social measures.
In his famous book for Caliph Harun Al-Rashid, the great judge Abu-Yusuf (d. 798) wrote:

A man told the Caliph Umar Ibn-al-Khattab: "Fear Allah, oh Umar!" and repeated these words several times. "Keep silent, said someone, you repeated several times the same thing to the believers' Prince". But Umar intervening: "Don't disturb this man! It is bad not to speak to us in this way, and it is bad if we don't accept this way of speaking".
I hope readers in the 21st century, whatever their religion or nationality, will have Caliph Umar's (d. 644) open mind. I ask them to share with me their reflections and constructive remarks.
I also offer to make all documentation I have gathered, in several languages during seven years of research, available to researchers, if their research is not one-sided. That is, the materials must be used to address both female and male circumcision.
Before closing, I wish to express deep gratitude to those who reviewed or corrected this text and/or provided feedback. I especially name my brother Father Raed A. Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh, Seham Abd-al-Salam, Patrizia Conforti, Jackie Manasterli, Patricia Robinett, John P. Warren, Frederick Hodges, Richard Louis Matteoli, Brad McCormick, Peter Ball and Steve Wilder. I thank Marilyn Fayre Milos, director of NOCIRC for the foreword to this book, and my publisher Prof. Sheldon Lee Gosline who warmly accepted this book, read it thoroughly and provided valuable remarks. I remain solely responsible for mistakes and opinions expressed herein.
Dr. Sami A. Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh, 
Ochettaz 17, 1025 St-Sulpice, Switzerland, 
email: Sami.Aldeeb@isdc-dfjp.unil.ch

CHAPTER X
PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL EFFECTS OF CIRCUMCISION

Imagine that you are resting or sleeping comfortably among those you love. Suddenly some strange people enter the room and proceed to pick you up to carry you away. You protest and struggle, but they are stronger than you are. They take you to another room where they remove your clothes and strap you down on your back on a table. You try to free yourself, but the only part of your body that you can move is your head. Then a man enters, and after seeing that you are secure, he picks up a knife and starts to cut off a piece of skin from your genitals. The procedure lasts for about fifteen minutes. At that time, you discover that those you love are accomplices of your aggressors. What will be then your reaction? The question now is whether there is a difference between your reaction as adult and the reaction of a child who is mutilated in this way?
  We saw above the effects of circumcision on sexual intercourse and on marriage. We will treat in this chapter the effects of the trauma of the circumcision on the child, on his rapport with his parents and with the society. We enter here the domain of psychology, a domain constructed on complex concepts difficult to understand by non-specialists, but that nevertheless we cannot disregard. We take into consideration here the principle that it is better to know a thing than to ignore it.

1) Circumcision trauma and the child
A) Denial of circumcision trauma
In an interview with Rosemary Romberg, the rabbi and mohel F. S. Gartner denies that male circumcision has traumatic effects on the child. He says:
  There is no proof that such things really affect the future of the babies. They forget it, just like the bleeding stops. I don¡¯t believe it. You are entitled to your opinion and so am I. Psychiatrists ... what would they have to do if they wouldn't bother with such things? They would be just standing idly around. You also give the baby a little slap when it is born, but I don't think that causes any trauma .
  Ombolo, an African author, writes in the same sense:
Neither physiologically, nor socially, nor psychologically, has circumcision ever had any unfavorable consequences [...]. The only problem to consider would be the great physical pain in the operation and its risks of psychological traumatism. But to say the truth, this idea is rather a view of the mind. This pain is not lived by individuals like an injustice or like a test arbitrarily or gratuitously imposed. All males of the society pass by there and it is the only way that leads to a full social existence; in what it has as requiring courage and strength, the circumcision is rather a way of pedagogy of the pain .
Jenny Goodman, a Jewish British psychiatrist opposed to male circumcision, does not speak of traumatism of the circumcision for an educational reason. She writes:
  I don't talk much about the psychological trauma, the unconscious scars that undoubtedly remain in the adult man. This is because the concept of unconscious memory still does not have wide currency in Britain outside of particular intellectual circles. Unlike on the East and West Coasts of the USA, the culture of psychotherapy has not yet permeated the culture at large, as one is open to ridicule, and to demands for scientific proof; which are as inappropriate in the realm of the psyche (soul) as mathematical equations are in the understanding of poetry. However, I find that the ethical argument is easily strong enough to stand alone; the infliction of pain and damage on a helpless child is absolutely wrong even if there were no memory, no residue, no consequences.
  To know if circumcision has trauma effect on the child, it is necessary to determine if the child has memory of what happens to him in general. One distinguishes in this respect between conscious memory and unconscious memory. One notices that  unconscious memory has been discovered at monkeys, rats, birds, snails and butterflies.
One field, which has been studied extensively, is the trauma provoked by complications that take place at the time of the birth. The following effects of these complications on the life of adults have been observed:

Birth experience	Adult tendencies
forceps delivery	dependency, headaches
delayed birth	impatience, feeling trapped
cesarean birth	undefined boundaries, learning difficulties
premature birth	resisting change, clinging
suffocation	asthma
major trauma	suicide, death anxiety 

B) Male circumcision trauma
If nowadays it is admitted that the experience of birth has effects on adult life, we cannot deny that circumcision, which often takes place shortly after the birth, also can have effects.
  Already in 1945, Dr. David Levy had warned against the trauma caused by surgical operations on children, including circumcision. He discovered that the younger the child, the keener was its response to pain and that, for them, the operative experience is more acute in every phase and is a raw and brutal experience. He records a case involving the circumcision of a boy of six years and seven months. The patient struggled with his father and the anesthetist before they overpowered him. After the operation, the boy's previous temper developed into destructive rages. He played numerous killing games, developed claustrophobia, destructive behavior and occasional suicidal impulses. In still another case, a boy had been brought to him at the age of three years and seven months. He suffered from temper tantrums, fears, restless behavior and night terrors. These symptoms began immediately after the boy had been circumcised at the age of one year. Joseph Lewis, in 1949, confirms the psychological effects of circumcision on children. He writes:
  Does anyone think for a moment that a newborn babe, suddenly being pounced upon by a man with a knife, his flesh cut and torn in the tenderest part of his body, suffers no psychological reaction to this shocking brutality? [...] The shock of circumcision is the cause of some of these "delayed action mines" which so adversely affect the child's nervous system and hamper its normal development .
Dr. Guerard Zwang writes:
  A certain number of mutilated children will develop a real phobia for pain. They cannot tolerate the least amount of pain, such as that experienced during medical examinations and vaccination, without suffering panic attacks or hysteria .
  Testimonies prove that circumcision leaves traces in the subconscious. Men under hypnosis report details of the circumcision that they had undergone after their birth, and the pain that they endured. They express their anger then, their will to take vengeance and to destroy those who participated in their mutilation. Psychologist John Breeding recounts his personal therapy session during which he reexperienced his circumcision:
  The emotional experience ... was horrible. I felt overwhelming fear, sweating and shaking for long periods. Intense rage also came up at times. I wanted to protect myself, but I couldn¡¯t ... I felt ... terribly sad, engulfed in grief, despair and helplessness. I released emotionally for well over an hour and was finally spent, sad.
  Two reports have studied circumcision as practiced without anesthesia on children in Turkey. In the first report, testing subjects between four and seven years old shortly before and after the ritual yielded this result: "Circumcision is perceived by the child as an aggressive attack upon his body, which damaged, mutilated and, in some cases, totally destroyed him". According to this study, circumcision resulted in increased aggressiveness and weakened the ego, causing withdrawal and reduced functioning and adaptation.
  In the second study, children were observed to be "terribly frightened" during the procedure, and "each child looked at his penis immediately after the circumcision as if to make sure that all was not cut off". One eight-year-old boy fell 'unconscious' during the cutting and subsequently developed a stuttering problem. A few weeks after the circumcision, parents being interviewed reported that their child exhibited increased aggressive behavior and experienced nightmares. In the same report, adults were interviewed and recalled castration anxiety and other serious fears connected with their childhood circumcision; particularly if they had been deceived or forced by parents to undergo the procedure, they felt it was a substitute for castration.
  Michel Erlich, a Jewish psychiatrist, notes that tonsillectomy performed in childhood leaves some psychological effects on the child. Strangely, when he speaks of circumcision, he says that it "doesn't include in its neonatal version, traumatic feeling comparable to the previous operations".
  Bettelheim considers that circumcision on newborns has more negative psychological effects than when it is done on a more mature person. In this last case, the child
knows much more and better about life, about his parents and their intentions. Hence it should appear far less threatening and the men who impose it less formidable. Among some tribes it is also clearly recognized that unless the boy understands the positive purposes of circumcision he is too young for the ceremony. One is tempted to add: because it might lead to castration anxiety rather than sexual freedom.
  Bettelheim compares circumcision to aesthetic operation that may be potentially as painful as circumcision, but the girl may make little of the physical pain in view of the pleasure she hopes will result .
  One of the effects of circumcision is to avoid thinking or speaking about it. Men who contact an anti-circumcision organization even avoid using the word circumcision on the envelope or in their phone calls. An opponent that had put on his car a sticker "Stop infant circumcision" noticed that no cars in his lane beyond the gap would approach his car from the rear. A few shifted to another lane. Some circumcised persons become hysterical when they are given articles and books on circumcision to look at. Others avoid looking at knives or scissors that recall for them their circumcision .
  Some estimate that circumcision has neurological effects. To preserve a semblance of attachment to the mother, a child who has suffered trauma alters reality and believes that the trauma never happened. In altering reality, the child is also altered. Based on neurological research, painful experience and trauma in childhood can result in long-term physiological changes in the central nervous system and neurochemical changes. Two brain-imaging studies of adults with histories of child sexual abuse reported reduced size of the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with memory, and in a test of verbal short-term memory, adults who had been abused had lower scores. James Prescott, a developmental neuropsychologist and former administrator for the National Institutes of Health, maintains that circumcision affects brain development .

C) Female circumcision trauma
The writings of Muslim opponents to female circumcision indicate its disastrous psychological effects . But these writings are silent on the psychological effects of male circumcision. Proponents of female circumcision reproach them for this inconsistency, mentioning Joseph Lewis, whose book is available in abridged Arabic translation .
Female circumcision is often performed between 5 and 15 years, at an age where the girl can understand the operation. This age, as per Bettelheim, could be an advantage in relation to a younger age, especially in a society that considers female circumcision a means of social integration that enables the girl to avoid mockeries from her colleagues. Much depends therefore on the manner in which the society conceives circumcision.
Lantier says with regard to the Somalian society that practices Pharaonic circumcision:
  Not only in the fanatic surroundings, the thus treated women never endure a psychosis; they are even unaware of any anguish and consider themselves happy. On the other hand, the women who are less attached to the ancient Somali customs, and who see themselves as morally obligated to undergo the traditional fate, easily fall prey to depression and sink in apathy and sadness.
He adds:
  In magico-sexual societies in which tradition and faith are still strong, the more stern are the constraint and the sexual repression, the less important are the individual anguishes, neuroses and psychoses. Again it is necessary that the group is without self-doubts, and that those who are part of it do not see themselves as submitting to or undergoing a constraint and repression, but rather they respect the principles, they want a rigorous application and they desire all the consequences.
In the magico-sexual societies where the population has lost the faith in its traditions and doubts the holy character of its customs, immense moral disarray prevails; such a people loses the joy of life and is in despair.
Lightfoot-Klein makes observations concerning Sudan that are consistent with those of Lantier:
  Very early in life, [the girl] learns about circumcision, which she comes to realize will be the rite of passage that will make her ready to marry [...]. Her infibulated virginity will cause her to have high value in the eyes of her future husband, and will be a source of pride to her. It will bring honor to her family, to her husband, and to herself [...]. Yet there are feminists in Sudan who condemn the practice as "sexual mutilation", and view it as a cruel means of female suppression by men.
And elsewhere, she writes:
  Girls tend to look forward to their circumcision with a mixture of dread and eagerness. It is not uncommon for them to manifest severe anxiety and a generalized phobic reaction as the time approaches. They become afraid of being touched, of knives, of social gatherings, of going to sleep. This is occasioned by the fact that by the time their turn comes, they have experienced at a distance, if not actually seen the circumcision of other girls, have heard the frantic screams, quite possibly have seen the blood of their predecessors. Still, the day of circumcision is considered to be the most important day of a girl's life.
2) Circumcision and relations with parents
Both people and animal need tenderness as much as food, tenderness that starts with the mother, creating an attachment between herself and her child. This bond influences the child's physical and psychological health and reverberates on his behaviors during all his life.
Circumcision influences the relation between mother and child beginning in pregnancy, especially if the mother is in conflict with the father on this topic. Goldman reports that a midwife was attending a very difficult home birth. The baby would not descend. The midwife understood that this couple had not resolved their decision whether to circumcise their baby or not. The Jewish father wanted the boy circumcised. The mother, also Jewish, wanted to protect her baby. So the midwife whispered to the husband: "Tell her you changed your mind. We won't circumcise the baby". He did. The birth was spontaneous. He is an intact son .
  Circumcision disrupts the relation between the child and his mother. When the operation takes place in the hospital after the birth, the child is taken from his mother and transferred in another room to be mutilated before being returned back to her. The stress and the suffering may contribute to the failure of an infant to breast-feed. Sometimes the child refuses his mother. The child's extended crying may exceed the tolerance level of the mother and cause her response tendency to change from empathetic to defensively egotistic. She may become more interested in relieving her own distress from hearing the crying than in relieving the distress of her infant. All this creates a tension between the mother and the child. The child feels that his mother has betrayed him and that she is responsible of what was done to him. He loses trust in his mother. In extreme cases, the child's ensuing lack of proper responsiveness has been associated with parental problems such as child abuse and developmental problems in the child. When a young boy is circumcised, he adopts an aggressive attitude to his mother.
  Several mothers testified their feelings concerning the circumcision of their children. Some consider their son's circumcision as the worst day of their life. A woman declared that she still hears her son's screams 22 years after his circumcision and will go to her grave hearing that horrible wail and feeling somewhat responsible. Some Jewish women pray that their child be a girl so they do not have to circumcise. Others felt so traumatized that they chose to have no more children, although deeply wanting them.
  To heal relations between adult children and their parents, opponents to circumcision suggest that parents start a dialogue and express themselves. But this attitude requests courage on behalf of the parents who, by so doing, recognize they have committed a mistake. In the same way it requests courage on behalf of the children because it means that they are reached in their virility. We would have liked to give testimonies here, but the space does not permit it and we do not want to give to the reader the impression that we try to convince him by sentimentalism. Interested readers can refer to the quoted works in the footnote.
  We find the same problems with female circumcision. One of its disastrous effects is deterioration of the relation between the girl and her parents. The girl has the feeling that these last betrayed her. Dr. Adil Sadiq, an Egyptian professor of psychiatry, reports the case of a woman repudiated by her husband because she didn't enjoy with him. She then directed her aggressiveness against her father considering him responsible of the failure of her marital life for having insisted on her circumcision during her childhood.

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