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23 Jun 2007 02:08 pm

The Rights of Children

A reader writes:

Your post "Scarred For Life" is just so painful. But when you write,

"['My body my choice'] is only for women, apparently,"

I think you're missing the point. This is not a men's issue - it's a children's issue.

The desires, aka the rights and humanity, of children are terribly violated in this culture. (And lots of others, sadly.) Circumcision is just one part of it. What we glibly call "separation anxiety," as parents pry their distraught 2-year-olds off them and leave them at day care, is the western world's equivalent of forcing women into burqas, gender apartheid, and second-class citizenship. Young children who do not want to be separated from their parents should not be forced to do it on a regular basis. They are not developmentally able to understand why this is happening to them, so their objections to it should be taken seriously. Young children unwillingly separated from their parents show obvious, massive distress. Adults trivialize this distress ("She'll be fine in half an hour") in the exact same way that men have trivialized the distress of women, slave-owners have trivialized the distress and agony of slaves, and so on.

Women, and feminists in particular, should recognize the unhappiness of children as a feminist issue. But that threatens the gains of women the same way that feminism threatened the status of men.

Women fear that giving their children what they want will lead to their own re-entrapment in the kitchen (which would indeed stink). But the alternative is to look at a defenseless being and say "What you want doesn't matter. My needs come before yours."

Circumcision is the ultimate expression of this. Nobody who saw infants as *human beings* could possibly countenance the pain they endure for an unnecessary procedure. No one would perform such a painful act on an unwilling or unable-to-consent adult just for reasons of habit or custom or religion.

I think we need another civil rights revolution in this country, predicated on the radical idea that babies and young children are people. (And to the extent that mothers might need to make big changes in their priorities to accommodate that revolution, there should be social support for them so they're not penalized in employment or social status.)

(Photo: Spencer Flatt/Getty.)

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