by David Balashinsky
Before I say anything else, let me state for the record that I am a
cat-lover and that none of my cats ever has or ever will be declawed. I
have long believed that cat declawing is both inhumane and unethical,
which is why I supported efforts to ban this practice in my
home state of New York and support banning the practice nationwide. As a New Yorker, I am proud that my state became the first to institute a statewide ban on cat declawing. Maryland is now about to become the second state to do so.
Still, I have mixed feelings about these laws. The reason is that they create a legal protection for cats that, to this day,
is denied people like me. I am referring to human males and to the practice of removing boys' foreskins
when not medically indicated, a practice known as nontherapeutic penile circumcision or, simply, "circumcision." As much as I love cats, it is impossible for me not to view these anti-declawing laws from the vantage point
of someone who had part of his body cut off without his consent. Given that the part of me that was amputated without any rational reason or justification is just as important to me as cats' claws are to them, it is hard not to look at cats now without feeling some envy and resentment. I feel demeaned by the fact that my cats now have a greater legal right to bodily integrity than I would if I were the same age as they are.
A word about the male prepuce, or foreskin, is in order. Like cats' claws, the prepuce
has evolved and been retained through millions of years of evolution
because it serves important physiological functions. One of these is
providing protection for the glans penis in exactly the same way that
the clitoral hood, its homologous counterpart in females, provides
protection for the glans clitoris. (Anatomically, both the male
foreskin and the female clitoral hood are identified as the prepuce. Unlike boys, however, in New York, Maryland, and the rest of the United States, girls are allowed to keep theirs.) In addition, histological studies demonstrate that the male prepuce contains numerous sensory receptors. These specialized, light-touch mechanoreceptors (known as Meissner's corpuscles),
are found in particularly dense concentrations in the body where
light-touch sensation is most important, including the finger tips, the
lips and, it should come as no surprise, the prepuce. Several studies
have demonstrated that the male prepuce is, in fact, the primary sensory apparatus of the penis. All of the sensation that the prepuce enables an individual to experience is lost forever when this part of his penis is removed. Moreover, once the glans penis has been permanently deprived of its natural protective covering, the glans, itself, becomes keratinized (dried out and "toughened up"), making it even less sensitive. In short, the male prepuce is not
"excess skin." It is an integral and essential part of a person's penis.
It is a part of his body that that individual has as much a right to keep as
he has to keep any other part of his body. And it is a part of his body that he has
as much a right to keep as cats have to keep their claws.
A word about nontherapeutic penile circumcision is also in order. Non-therapeutic neonatal penile circumcision (like cat declawing) is always performed without the consent of the one subjected to it. It always
entails the painful removal of a normal, functional and highly erotogenic body
part. And, in virtually all cases, penile circumcision is imposed on a child not because there is a pathological condition that needs to be
treated or a congenital deformity that needs to be corrected but,
rather, for reasons involving custom, social conformity, convenience,
socially-influenced aesthetics about human genitals, specious medical rationalizations and medical profiteering (often at
tax-payer expense through Medicaid funding).
Both cat declawing and penile circumcision, then, have a lot in common. Both
entail the removal of a normal, functional body part. Both entail a surgical removal of healthy tissue
without any regard to the wishes of the
cat or infant human male who is subjected to it. Both practices are inhumane,
unnecessary, unjustifiable and unethical. Not surprisingly, because the campaigns to ban both
practices are based on the same philosophical and moral principles,
many of those who oppose cat declawing also oppose nontherapeutic penile circumcision.
Also
not surprisingly, just as there are parallels between the
practices themselves, there are parallels between the movements
to eradicate them. Consider the legislative history of the New York bill banning cat declawing. Passage of Senate Bill S5532B / Assembly Bill A1303B
did not happen overnight but was the culmination of a long, arduous
process that required its sponsors to persevere against the stiff headwinds of an
entrenched practice. The legislation had to overcome the opposition of the New York State Veterinary Medical Society (NYSVMS), which opposed it for perfectly rational and, it could be argued, even humane reasons.
It had to overcome the resistance of legislators who, no
doubt, initially scoffed at the notion that this is a matter worthy of
the legislature's time. It had to overcome the opposition of those who
believe that cat "owners" have a right to make such medical
decisions on behalf of their cats. And it even had to overcome the
opposition of those who profess to love cats and probably do love cats just as much as I do. It is
important to remember, in this regard, that
people who subject their cats to declawing are not evil, sadistic
monsters who want to harm their cats. These are people who love their
cats but who, for one reason or another, believe declawing to be
beneficial, appropriate and ethical. Thus, it was the combined resistance of
societal and institutional acceptance of cat declawing, including, especially, the normalization of it, that the bill's sponsors had to overcome in order to get it passed.
These types of opposition to New York's anti-cat-declawing bill all have parallels in the campaign to eradicate nontherapeutic penile circumcision which, like the campaign to ban cat declawing, also
faces stiff institutional and cultural headwinds. Banning nontherapeutic circumcision is
opposed by medical trade associations (whose members profit handsomely
from the procedure), such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and The
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, both of which have
issued statements that implicitly or explicitly endorse nontherapeutic
circumcision while conceding that it is not medically necessary. These position statements include one rationalization after the other that
exaggerate the purported benefits of penile circumcision while minimizing or ignoring
its incontrovertible harms. In certain crucial respects, these organizations'
position statements on nontherapeutic circumcision are strikingly similar to that of the NYSVMS on cat declawing.
Then there is the reluctance of legislators to take on this issue for
a variety of reasons, not least of which is their mistaken belief that a
ban on non-therapeutic circumcision would violate the first amendment's
guarantee of freedom of religion. Of course, numerous state
legislatures have demonstrated no such qualms about banning female genital cutting for religious reasons.
Added to this is the persistent cultural view of children as property. Many parents who support nontherapeutic penile circumcision claim that, because their children belong
to them, they (the parents) have a right to cut off part of their
children's genitals. This, too, mirrors the view of people who regard
companion animals as property, to do with whatever they choose.
Finally, the genital autonomy movement has had to contend with the
deep-seated conviction of those who endorse nontherapeutic circumcision that this is not
something that one does to a child but for a child.
Those who practice genital cutting of any type - whether of boys, girls or intersex
children - sincerely believe that the genital surgery to which they are
subjecting their child will benefit that child. At the very least,
they regard it as harmless. Even when this blithe fantasy collides with the reality that any surgery is traumatic for an infant -
especially one performed on one of the most sensitive parts of the body
(and, typically, with insufficient or even no anesthetization) - still such
parents reason with themselves that, in any event, "the benefits
outweigh the risks" ("risks" serving, in this case, as a conceptual
stand-in for "harms"). Those who opt to have their sons circumcised thus
make a moral calculation that the overall good that results outweighs
the potential and even the actual harms of the surgery itself.
Similarly, those who defend cat declawing do so on the principle that
it produces an overall good when the alternative is abandonment or
euthanasia. These cat-lovers likewise have made a moral calculation
that the overall good that results from having their cats declawed
outweighs the actual harms of declawing.
In both of these cases, however, it is not the person exercising this
surgical option who must live with the consequences of the surgery but
the cat or the human infant - and, of course, the man that that infant
will one day become, since circumcision is irreversible. Still, it must
be acknowledged that parents who impose their own penile preferences on their sons' bodies are not
evil, sadistic monsters who want to harm their sons. These are parents
who love their sons but who, for one reason or another, believe nontherapeutic circumcision to be beneficial, appropriate and ethical. This is no less true, by the way, of
parents who subject their daughters to what is known in our culture as female genital mutilation (FGM). The
parents in these cultures love their daughters just as much as we love
our sons. And when they choose genital cutting for their
daughters, they do not do so out of malice, nor do they regard it as "mutilation." They regard it as
beneficial, as something religiously mandated and as something culturally meaningful. Above all, like parents in our society, they
regard it as their right to make this decision on behalf of
their daughters.
If the similarities between cat-declawing and non-therapeutic penile circumcision were not plain enough, a statement by one of the New York bill's sponsors, Assemblymember Linda B. Rosenthal, which she made when she first introduced her legislation, underscores the point:
There's no reason to do it unless the animal has [an] infection that is never going away, or if there is a cancer or tumor-related issue in the claw. It's basically done because humans want it done, and I don't think it's our right to mutilate our animals for our own satisfaction.Exactly the same can be said of nontherapeutic penile circumcision:
There's no reason to do it unless the infant has an infection that is never going away, or if there is a cancer or tumor-related issue in the prepuce. It's basically done because humans want it done, and I don't think it's our right to mutilate our sons for our own satisfaction.
All of which leads me to wonder how, in passing these anti-cat-declawing laws, these legislators can exude such compassion, empathy and respect for the bodily integrity of cats while remaining perfectly devoid of any comparable sentiments when it comes to the bodily integrity of human males. After all, don't we deserve to have the same rights as cats?
Update: Maryland Governor Larry Hogan signed the legislation banning cat-declawing in April of 2022 making Maryland the second state to ban this inhumane practice. As of now, however, there is no pending legislation in Maryland that would provide children with penises with the same legal protection for their genitals that Maryland now provides for cats' claws.
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