by David Balashinsky
The confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as the 114th associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States reveals several demoralizing truths about democracy in the United States of America. Chief among these is that we are not, in fact, living in a democracy. As Michael Tomasky has explained, we now have "two Supreme Court justices who deserve to be called 'minority-majority': justices who are part of a five-vote majority on the bench but who were nominated and confirmed by a president and Senate [respectively] who represent the will of a minority of the American people." This is, in part, due to the existence of the electoral college which installed Donald J. Trump as president of the United States despite his having lost the popular vote to his opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who beat Trump by several million votes. A majority of Americans who voted in 2016 chose Clinton as our next president. Thanks to the electoral college, the losing side won. That's not democracy.
It's also due to the constitutionally-established structure of congress which was created, in part, to guarantee a disproportionate amount of power to low-population states, which is why each state, irrespective of the size of its population, gets two senators. At about the time the constitution was ratified (1788), the population of the fledgling United States was about 4 million. By way of comparison, the population of Great Britain at the time was about twice that and the population of France about six times that. In 1790, the population of free white males 16 or older in Pennsylvania was 110,788 while that of Delaware was 11,783, a ratio of almost 10 to one. The total population of Virginia (the most populous state) in the 1790 census was 747,610 while the total population of Delaware (the least populous) was 59,094, a ratio of 12.7 to one. It's impossible not to conclude that what might have been palatable to the delegates to the Constitutional Convention as a compromise between large-population states and small-population states in a nation of 4 million with disparities in populations between the states of no more than twelve-fold at the most (depending upon how - and who - one counts) is a gross perversion of democracy in a nation of 325 million. (Of course, the failure of the original constitution to do away with slavery was an even greater perversion of democracy, and its accommodation by means of the Three-Fifths Compromise was intrinsic to the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives and to the number of electors in the Electoral College.)
Few political events illustrate this better than the Senate's confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. Consider this: Only the Senate - not the House of Representatives - gets to confirm or reject a nominee to the Supreme Court. That means that Wyoming, for example, with a population of about 573,000 people, gets as many votes for Kavanaugh (or any other nominee) as California, with its population of 39 million people. Here's some simple math: Thirty-nine million divided by 573 thousand equals 68. That means that each resident of Wyoming has 68 times as much clout in determining the ideological make-up of the Supreme Court as each resident of California. Not only is that disparity multiplied across the United States but the political repercussions of these disparities are magnified also, since these disparities in proportional representation (by population) in the Senate give much more power to Republican and conservative voters relative to Democrat and progressive voters. That is because low-population states (like Wyoming) tend to be Republican and conservative while high-population states, like California, tend to be Democrat and progressive. Whatever the authors of the constitution intended in the 18th century, the result in the 21st is de facto affirmative action for Republicans and conservatives. (This built-in advantage for Republicans and conservatives has been enhanced, unconscionably, still further by aggressive Republican political gerrymandering and Republican voter-suppression laws.) That's not democracy either.
Now that the Supreme Court of the United States has a solid right-wing majority (which is being called, charitably, the most conservative court in close to a century) it's almost impossible to conceive of the amount of damage that can and will be done to the nation, to the principle and practice of democracy in the United States and to its citizens, particularly to women, LGBTQ citizens, ethnic and religious minorities, workers, consumers, borrowers, students, people who need affordable health-care or will need it at some point in the future, non-Republican voters and people who breathe air and drink water. There is virtually no law or regulation that has been passed or promulgated to protect the interests, rights and well-being of the aforementioned that the masterminds behind Kavanaugh's installation on the Supreme Court will not now in all probability seek to have overturned.
Perhaps none of these rights is more important - and now more threatened - than the right of a woman to terminate her pregnancy. Despite Kavanaugh's assurances to Senator Collins that he had not "made commitments or pledges to anyone at the White House, to [the] Federalist Society, or any outside group on how he would decide cases," (and we know, from his testimony before the Senate, to what extent Kavanaugh's veracity may be relied upon), it remains an incontrovertible part of the public record that, during the presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to nominate to the Supreme Court only judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade.
It is exquisitely perverse that the man now empowered to cast the deciding vote to do just that should be a man who, in his youth, may very well have committed a sexual assault and, thus, this nomination and confirmation also reveal a great deal about the state of women's rights and victims' rights in the United States. Installing such a man - even one with only unproved allegations of sexual assault against him - on the Supreme Court constitutes an affront of monumental proportions to women and to women's bodily autonomy. Kavanaugh will now, and for the remainder of his life, have the power to make decisions about the most intimate aspects of women's sexual lives and about their bodies up to and including decisions that will determine whether they live or die.
In reference to the allegations by Christine Blasey Ford that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party sometime around 1982, Kavanaugh's defenders have lamented the lack of a presumption of innocence to which they claim he was entitled. But, leaving aside the numerous ways in which Kavanaugh has proved himself to be wholly unfit for a seat on the Supreme Court, the fact remains that Kavanaugh was not charged with a crime and that is why the notion of a presumption of innocence is a red herring. That principle applies in criminal proceedings, as it should, because state power should be limited at least to the extent that the state must meet the burden of proof in order to obtain a conviction. If the state is purposing to deprive a citizen of life or liberty, its justification for doing so - hence its right to do so - had better reach a pretty high bar. That's the burden of proof along with the presumption of innocence that are, together, the bedrock of western jurisprudence. But those principles do not apply when someone is applying for a job, whether as a cashier or as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Even if one feels obliged, in the absence of absolute proof one way or the other, to give equal weight to Blasey's allegations and Kavenaugh's denials, the fact remains that, if Blasey were lying but the Senate believed her and, as a result, denied Kavenaugh a seat on the Supreme Court, the only injustice that would have been done would be to have wrongly denied Kavenaugh the seat. On the other hand, if Kavenaugh were lying (or merely mistakenly believed himself to be innocent of the allegations because he committed the assault in a blacked-out state of drunkenness), the Senate's believing him and granting him a seat on the Court compounds the original injustice of his alleged sexual assault of Blasey. In this case, not only would a sexual-assault victim be denied the dignity and justice of being believed but her attacker would be rewarded with a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. On balance, and faced with the prospect of not knowing with absolute certainty whom to believe and thus having to risk doing an injustice to one of the parties - Blasey or Kavanaugh - the Senate was left in the unenviable position of having to choose between two possible injustices. But given that choice, ought the Senate not to have chosen the lesser of those two possible injustices? And which is the lesser and which the greater of these two injustices? That of an innocent man wrongly denied a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court? Or that of a guilty man wrongly granted a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court? To me, the answer is obvious.
It has been argued that if Kavanaugh is, indeed, innocent, then the harm that may have been done to him transcends the harm (if one may call it that) of not getting a seat on the Court. After all, it is difficult to wipe away the stain on one's personal and professional reputation of an allegation of sexual assault. (Unless, of course, one happens to be Donald Trump, for whom committing sexual assault is something to boast about.) Obviously, a false allegation of sexual assault can take an enormous toll on one's personal and professional life. But an actual sexual assault will, even more obviously, take an even greater toll on one's personal and professional life. That is the context in which Blasey's allegations and the shameful way in which the Senate responded to them must be viewed. The manner in which Kavanaugh's defenders have sought to dismiss and delegitimize Blasey's allegations are of a piece with the manner in which victims of sexual assault have historically and routinely been silenced and their claims dismissed. It is the rape victims, themselves, who are typically, in effect, put on trial: "What were you wearing?" "What were you doing at his house without a chaperone?" "Had you been drinking?" "Did you lead him on?" "Why didn't you fight back harder?" "Why didn't you report this to the authorities when it happened?" "Why didn't you tell your parents?" The societal practice of blaming the victims of sexual assault is only one of many reasons why they are reluctant to come forward and report the crime.
Here, too, then, society must choose between two competing but grossly unequal injustices. If sexual-assault victims are made to feel that it is they who are the ones on trial, they will seldom report their assaults and they will even more rarely get justice. Conversely, if we presume in all cases that someone alleging a sexual assault is telling the truth, then it's certainly possible that some innocent persons' reputations will be wrongly tarnished (and even some innocent persons falsely convicted, as has occurred in rare cases) with false allegations. Studies, however, have demonstrated that this rarely occurs. The reality is that the number of sexual assaults that go unreported and unpunished dwarf, by orders of magnitude, the number of confirmed cases of false sexual-assault allegations. That being the case, while it is unfair to those rare victims of false sexual-assault allegations to be personally or professionally harmed by them, I believe that society has a much greater and more urgent interest in protecting actual sexual-assault victims who are much greater in number and much more egregiously harmed. (And, of course, in criminal law, the accused enjoys the presumption of innocence and convictions for sexual assault remain notoriously difficult to obtain.) After all - and let's not lose sight of the big picture here - I think we can agree that it's much, much worse to be actually raped than to be falsely accused of rape. And it's certainly much, much worse to be sexually assaulted than not to get a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Sunday, October 7, 2018
Monday, July 23, 2018
On the Matter of Asserting One's Right Not To Be Groped in the Context of Florida's "Stand Your Ground" Law
by David Balashinsky
In 2005, Florida passed a "Stand Your Ground," law. In the Florida Senate the vote received 39 yeas and 0 nays while in the House it received 94 yeas and 20 nays. It was signed into law on April 26th by then Governor Jeb Bush. Although this law deserved to be notorious before the ink had dried on the bill, and although there had been warnings about its potential to create chaos and lead to an increase in the number of homicides, its notoriety greatly increased in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin shooting in which the law figured prominently. Initially, Bill Lee, the police chief in the jurisdiction where the shooting occurred, declined to arrest Zimmerman, citing Florida's Stand Your Ground law as a reason. In addition, the jury that tried Zimmerman when he ultimately stood trial for killing Martin was given instructions that incorporated the self-defense principle as expanded under the 2005 Stand Your Ground law.
The main features of this bill are as follows. First, as a matter of public policy, it absolves citizens of the obligation to avoid an escalation of a conflict that may result in greater harm or death. In other words, whereas, prior to the passage of this bill, a person, unless in his home (the "castle doctrine"), had a duty to flee as a first course of action rather than resorting to lethal force when he felt that his life was in danger (or merely that he was in danger of sustaining "great bodily harm"), the Stand Your Ground law did away with that requirement. Instead, it grants the state's imprimatur to a right to shoot to kill as a matter of principle. "Why should I have to flee?" a gun-wielding person might argue. "I have every right to be where I am and if, by staying put, the only way that I can sufficiently defend myself is by shooting my adversary, so be it." The Florida legislature adopted this line of thinking, encouraged (and, no doubt, pressured) by the fanatical pro-gun organization, the National Rifle Association. This organization, which has elevated guns to the level of a fetish and that exists not so much to defend the 2nd amendment as to promote the sale of guns, must have recognized the potential bonanza in gun sales to which such legislation must inevitably lead. After all, if every person whom one accidentally jostles at the supermarket or inadvertently cuts off on the highway is carrying a gun and an argument ensues, that person need only claim that he feared for his life in order to be legally entitled to pull out his gun and shoot to kill. Given the threat posed by virtually anyone to everyone else, it would certainly behoove everyone else to carry a gun also, so as not to be caught unprepared when what once would have ended in angry words now ends with a bullet. And this personal arms race is, of course, precisely what the NRA wants: a gun in every purse and trouser pocket in America. Predictably, the law has, according to at least one study, led to a threefold increase in the number of homicides by shooting in Florida since it was enacted.
As a matter of law, and as a result of an amendment to the law which was signed by Governor Rick Scott in 2017, when a shooting occurs in which a claim of self-defense is asserted, the law now places the burden of proof on the state (when it contemplates prosecuting the shooter) rather than on the shooter himself in defense of his claim that the shooting was justified. That is, under the principle established by this law, a person who shoots and kills another human being must now be presumed to have acted in a legitimate exercise of the right of self-defense provided that he makes that claim. No longer obligated to deescalate the confrontation, much less to avoid it altogether, he merely has to assert his claim that he felt that his life was endangered or that he was in danger of sustaining great bodily harm. This is what Zimmerman did after shooting Trayvon Martin and this is why Florida did not initially prosecute Zimmerman for killing Martin. This is despite that fact that there were numerous non-lethal means at his disposal - and numerous opportunities to avail himself of them - with which Zimmerman could easily have dealt with any threat (whether real or imagined) that he thought Martin posed either to Zimmerman himself or to anyone else in the community. (Ultimately, Zimmerman did not rely upon a Stand-Your-Ground defense although, as noted above, the law did figure in the instructions that were given to the jury trying the case.)
It is impossible for anyone who does not relish the thought of our society's descent into a wild-west, lawless sort of free-for-all, to regard this law as anything other than a fig-leaf for legalized vigilantism and legalized manslaughter - even legalized murder. Want someone dead? All you need do in the state of Florida is start an argument with him (and be sure to bring your concealed gun) and, when the argument gets heated enough, pull out your gun and shoot. When the authorities arrive, you need only claim - not untruthfully, either - that you feared for your life. After all, isn't it safe to assume that that person was, like you, carrying a gun? And, in any case, that person seemed, really, really angry and menacing. It was him or you.
Florida is by no means the only state now with a Stand Your Ground law, although it was the first (there are currently thirty-three). There have been numerous incidents since these laws' passage that have illustrated how altercations that could easily have been deescalated or, at the worst, might have ended in fisticuffs with minor injuries, instead ended in someone's death. (But, of course, isn't that the whole point of the law: to make it easier to kill someone?) The perversity and injustice of these laws was demonstrated just last week - again, in Florida; this time in Clearwater - when, on Thursday, July 19th, Markeis McGlockton was shot and killed by Michael Drejka in a convenience-store parking lot. Drejka, who has a history of aggressive and threatening behavior, had instigated an argument with McGlockton's girlfriend, Britany Jacobs, who was waiting in her car with her and McGlockton's five-year-old son, because she had parked the car in a handicapped-parking-only spot. Hearing the commotion, McGlockton ran out of the store and pushed Drejka down onto the ground. In a video of the incident, McGlockton can be seen clearly retreating after Drejka pulls his gun, whereupon Drejka then fires, hitting McGlockton with the bullet that would kill him a short time later. Citing Florida's Stand Your Ground law, the the local sheriff, Bob Gaultieri, declined to arrest or charge Drejka for the shooting death of McGlockton. (The one hope for justice for this man, who rushed to the defense of his girlfriend and, for doing so, was shot and killed in front of her and their five-year-old son, is that, as of this writing, Gaultieri's office is referring the matter to the state attorney's office for possible prosecution. But, of course, the burden of proof is on the state attorney to demonstrate why Drejka should not enjoy the presumption that he was perfectly justified in shooting McGlockton.)
It has been pointed out that the Stand Your Ground laws and their predictable and inevitable consequences have disproportionately affected (surprise, surprise) black shooting victims. But these laws have now intersected in the most ominous way with another sort of right of self-defense that surely must be viewed within the context of the MeToo movement; namely, the right of (usually but not necessarily) a woman to mount a physical response to a sexual assault. Consider this scenario: A rapist, following the rape and emboldened by a Stand Your Ground law, goes on to shoot his victim in order to prevent her reporting his crime and testifying against him. He need only claim that, after an act of consensual sex (hence the presence of his DNA upon or within her body; and, of course, we have only his word for it since the victim has been permanently silenced), the deceased became enraged and began to act in a menacing way. She screamed at him and then charged him. He feared for his life and so pulled out his gun and shot her. But it was self defense: he feared for his life and was justified, therefore, in shooting her.
The plausibility of this scenario is now illustrated by a video that has "gone viral" of an incident in a restaurant in Savannah, Georgia in which a patron is clearly seen groping one of the waiters (or "waitresses") there. (As it happens, Georgia, too, has enacted a Stand Your Ground law.) Irate, the waiter, Emelia Holden, grabs the assailant from behind and throws him to the ground, exactly as Mr. McGlockton threw Mr. Drejka to the ground in that Florida parking lot last week. What if this episode had occurred not in a busy restaurant but in a secluded spot with no witnesses? Or, for that matter, in front of plenty of witnesses. After all, there were several witness to Drejka's killing of McGlockton. And what if the groper in the video, who has been identified as Ryan Cherwinski, had had a gun in his possession? Holden, who is (rightly, I think) being hailed as a hero to women for standing up for herself, clearly got the better of Cherwinski. Whether empowered by her sense of outrage or simply because of her superior agility, or perhaps merely aided by the element of surprise (because Holden grabbed Cherwinski from behind, he never saw what ensued coming), Holden clearly had Cherwinski at a disadvantage. Under exactly these circumstances - with Holden looming over him shouting while Cherwinski sits crumpled on the floor with his back against the wall - but with the sole exception of Cherwinski's carrying a loaded gun - what would have prevented Cherwinski from pulling out his gun, shooting Holden to death, and then asserting the perfectly reasonable claim that he was merely acting in self defense? Reasonable, that is, within the perverse internal logic and shoot-first ethos enshrined within the Stand Your Ground law. The burden of proof, it is to be remembered, would not be on Cherwinski to justify his actions but, rather, on the state to prove that his shooting Holden was not justified. How high or low that bar is - the burden of proof that the state must meet in order to charge the shooter with a crime - is, as as Galutieri himself has observed, an entirely subjective matter.
Holden is being hailed as a hero for standing up for herself. The video is being shown to girls for their edification and has inspired and emboldened women to defend themselves more forcefully in similar situations. But what if it had turned out otherwise? What if, instead of celebrating Holden's act of defiance and self-assertion, we were now mourning her as a martyr to the cause of women's empowerment sacrificed on the NRA's alter to guns?
That is a question that the Florida legislature and every legislature in a state with or merely considering a Stand Your Ground law, as well as every American citizen, ought to consider.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Update: The state attorney has now charged Drejka with manslaughter. Bear in mind, however, these important facts: First, manslaughter is defined as the unlawful killing of a human being but without malice aforethought. Manslaughter is regarded as less egregious a crime than murder and one who commits manslaughter is regarded as less culpable than one who commits murder. Second: Drejka allegedly has a history of provoking confrontations at that same location and elsewhere and he came armed and ready. That history - which, if established, represents a pattern of behavior - and the fact that Drejka initiated the confrontation after having prepared himself for it by arming himself with a loaded gun would seem together to constitute (they do to me, at any rate), on their face, premeditation.
Finally, recall that, under Florida's amended Stand Your Ground Law, the burden of proof that Drejka was not justified in shooting McGlockton to death must still be borne by the state.
Updated 15 August 2018
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Update: On Friday, August 23, 2019, a jury convicted Drejka of manslaughter. His lawyers plan to appeal the verdict.
Updated 25 August 2019
David Balashinsky is originally from New York City and now lives near the Finger Lakes region of New York. He writes about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture, and politics.
In 2005, Florida passed a "Stand Your Ground," law. In the Florida Senate the vote received 39 yeas and 0 nays while in the House it received 94 yeas and 20 nays. It was signed into law on April 26th by then Governor Jeb Bush. Although this law deserved to be notorious before the ink had dried on the bill, and although there had been warnings about its potential to create chaos and lead to an increase in the number of homicides, its notoriety greatly increased in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin shooting in which the law figured prominently. Initially, Bill Lee, the police chief in the jurisdiction where the shooting occurred, declined to arrest Zimmerman, citing Florida's Stand Your Ground law as a reason. In addition, the jury that tried Zimmerman when he ultimately stood trial for killing Martin was given instructions that incorporated the self-defense principle as expanded under the 2005 Stand Your Ground law.
The main features of this bill are as follows. First, as a matter of public policy, it absolves citizens of the obligation to avoid an escalation of a conflict that may result in greater harm or death. In other words, whereas, prior to the passage of this bill, a person, unless in his home (the "castle doctrine"), had a duty to flee as a first course of action rather than resorting to lethal force when he felt that his life was in danger (or merely that he was in danger of sustaining "great bodily harm"), the Stand Your Ground law did away with that requirement. Instead, it grants the state's imprimatur to a right to shoot to kill as a matter of principle. "Why should I have to flee?" a gun-wielding person might argue. "I have every right to be where I am and if, by staying put, the only way that I can sufficiently defend myself is by shooting my adversary, so be it." The Florida legislature adopted this line of thinking, encouraged (and, no doubt, pressured) by the fanatical pro-gun organization, the National Rifle Association. This organization, which has elevated guns to the level of a fetish and that exists not so much to defend the 2nd amendment as to promote the sale of guns, must have recognized the potential bonanza in gun sales to which such legislation must inevitably lead. After all, if every person whom one accidentally jostles at the supermarket or inadvertently cuts off on the highway is carrying a gun and an argument ensues, that person need only claim that he feared for his life in order to be legally entitled to pull out his gun and shoot to kill. Given the threat posed by virtually anyone to everyone else, it would certainly behoove everyone else to carry a gun also, so as not to be caught unprepared when what once would have ended in angry words now ends with a bullet. And this personal arms race is, of course, precisely what the NRA wants: a gun in every purse and trouser pocket in America. Predictably, the law has, according to at least one study, led to a threefold increase in the number of homicides by shooting in Florida since it was enacted.
As a matter of law, and as a result of an amendment to the law which was signed by Governor Rick Scott in 2017, when a shooting occurs in which a claim of self-defense is asserted, the law now places the burden of proof on the state (when it contemplates prosecuting the shooter) rather than on the shooter himself in defense of his claim that the shooting was justified. That is, under the principle established by this law, a person who shoots and kills another human being must now be presumed to have acted in a legitimate exercise of the right of self-defense provided that he makes that claim. No longer obligated to deescalate the confrontation, much less to avoid it altogether, he merely has to assert his claim that he felt that his life was endangered or that he was in danger of sustaining great bodily harm. This is what Zimmerman did after shooting Trayvon Martin and this is why Florida did not initially prosecute Zimmerman for killing Martin. This is despite that fact that there were numerous non-lethal means at his disposal - and numerous opportunities to avail himself of them - with which Zimmerman could easily have dealt with any threat (whether real or imagined) that he thought Martin posed either to Zimmerman himself or to anyone else in the community. (Ultimately, Zimmerman did not rely upon a Stand-Your-Ground defense although, as noted above, the law did figure in the instructions that were given to the jury trying the case.)
It is impossible for anyone who does not relish the thought of our society's descent into a wild-west, lawless sort of free-for-all, to regard this law as anything other than a fig-leaf for legalized vigilantism and legalized manslaughter - even legalized murder. Want someone dead? All you need do in the state of Florida is start an argument with him (and be sure to bring your concealed gun) and, when the argument gets heated enough, pull out your gun and shoot. When the authorities arrive, you need only claim - not untruthfully, either - that you feared for your life. After all, isn't it safe to assume that that person was, like you, carrying a gun? And, in any case, that person seemed, really, really angry and menacing. It was him or you.
Florida is by no means the only state now with a Stand Your Ground law, although it was the first (there are currently thirty-three). There have been numerous incidents since these laws' passage that have illustrated how altercations that could easily have been deescalated or, at the worst, might have ended in fisticuffs with minor injuries, instead ended in someone's death. (But, of course, isn't that the whole point of the law: to make it easier to kill someone?) The perversity and injustice of these laws was demonstrated just last week - again, in Florida; this time in Clearwater - when, on Thursday, July 19th, Markeis McGlockton was shot and killed by Michael Drejka in a convenience-store parking lot. Drejka, who has a history of aggressive and threatening behavior, had instigated an argument with McGlockton's girlfriend, Britany Jacobs, who was waiting in her car with her and McGlockton's five-year-old son, because she had parked the car in a handicapped-parking-only spot. Hearing the commotion, McGlockton ran out of the store and pushed Drejka down onto the ground. In a video of the incident, McGlockton can be seen clearly retreating after Drejka pulls his gun, whereupon Drejka then fires, hitting McGlockton with the bullet that would kill him a short time later. Citing Florida's Stand Your Ground law, the the local sheriff, Bob Gaultieri, declined to arrest or charge Drejka for the shooting death of McGlockton. (The one hope for justice for this man, who rushed to the defense of his girlfriend and, for doing so, was shot and killed in front of her and their five-year-old son, is that, as of this writing, Gaultieri's office is referring the matter to the state attorney's office for possible prosecution. But, of course, the burden of proof is on the state attorney to demonstrate why Drejka should not enjoy the presumption that he was perfectly justified in shooting McGlockton.)
It has been pointed out that the Stand Your Ground laws and their predictable and inevitable consequences have disproportionately affected (surprise, surprise) black shooting victims. But these laws have now intersected in the most ominous way with another sort of right of self-defense that surely must be viewed within the context of the MeToo movement; namely, the right of (usually but not necessarily) a woman to mount a physical response to a sexual assault. Consider this scenario: A rapist, following the rape and emboldened by a Stand Your Ground law, goes on to shoot his victim in order to prevent her reporting his crime and testifying against him. He need only claim that, after an act of consensual sex (hence the presence of his DNA upon or within her body; and, of course, we have only his word for it since the victim has been permanently silenced), the deceased became enraged and began to act in a menacing way. She screamed at him and then charged him. He feared for his life and so pulled out his gun and shot her. But it was self defense: he feared for his life and was justified, therefore, in shooting her.
The plausibility of this scenario is now illustrated by a video that has "gone viral" of an incident in a restaurant in Savannah, Georgia in which a patron is clearly seen groping one of the waiters (or "waitresses") there. (As it happens, Georgia, too, has enacted a Stand Your Ground law.) Irate, the waiter, Emelia Holden, grabs the assailant from behind and throws him to the ground, exactly as Mr. McGlockton threw Mr. Drejka to the ground in that Florida parking lot last week. What if this episode had occurred not in a busy restaurant but in a secluded spot with no witnesses? Or, for that matter, in front of plenty of witnesses. After all, there were several witness to Drejka's killing of McGlockton. And what if the groper in the video, who has been identified as Ryan Cherwinski, had had a gun in his possession? Holden, who is (rightly, I think) being hailed as a hero to women for standing up for herself, clearly got the better of Cherwinski. Whether empowered by her sense of outrage or simply because of her superior agility, or perhaps merely aided by the element of surprise (because Holden grabbed Cherwinski from behind, he never saw what ensued coming), Holden clearly had Cherwinski at a disadvantage. Under exactly these circumstances - with Holden looming over him shouting while Cherwinski sits crumpled on the floor with his back against the wall - but with the sole exception of Cherwinski's carrying a loaded gun - what would have prevented Cherwinski from pulling out his gun, shooting Holden to death, and then asserting the perfectly reasonable claim that he was merely acting in self defense? Reasonable, that is, within the perverse internal logic and shoot-first ethos enshrined within the Stand Your Ground law. The burden of proof, it is to be remembered, would not be on Cherwinski to justify his actions but, rather, on the state to prove that his shooting Holden was not justified. How high or low that bar is - the burden of proof that the state must meet in order to charge the shooter with a crime - is, as as Galutieri himself has observed, an entirely subjective matter.
Holden is being hailed as a hero for standing up for herself. The video is being shown to girls for their edification and has inspired and emboldened women to defend themselves more forcefully in similar situations. But what if it had turned out otherwise? What if, instead of celebrating Holden's act of defiance and self-assertion, we were now mourning her as a martyr to the cause of women's empowerment sacrificed on the NRA's alter to guns?
That is a question that the Florida legislature and every legislature in a state with or merely considering a Stand Your Ground law, as well as every American citizen, ought to consider.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Update: The state attorney has now charged Drejka with manslaughter. Bear in mind, however, these important facts: First, manslaughter is defined as the unlawful killing of a human being but without malice aforethought. Manslaughter is regarded as less egregious a crime than murder and one who commits manslaughter is regarded as less culpable than one who commits murder. Second: Drejka allegedly has a history of provoking confrontations at that same location and elsewhere and he came armed and ready. That history - which, if established, represents a pattern of behavior - and the fact that Drejka initiated the confrontation after having prepared himself for it by arming himself with a loaded gun would seem together to constitute (they do to me, at any rate), on their face, premeditation.
Finally, recall that, under Florida's amended Stand Your Ground Law, the burden of proof that Drejka was not justified in shooting McGlockton to death must still be borne by the state.
Updated 15 August 2018
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Update: On Friday, August 23, 2019, a jury convicted Drejka of manslaughter. His lawyers plan to appeal the verdict.
Updated 25 August 2019
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Tuesday, May 22, 2018
Pro-Parental Choice Versus Pro-Circumcision: A Distinction Without a Difference
by David Balashinsky
It probably should not have come as a surprise when Romper (a parenting website aimed at millennials and owned by Bustle Digital Group) recently published two stealth pro-MGM articles (both written by Kelly Mullen-McWilliams). With the titles Will the Hospital Pressure Me To Circumcise? You Have Options & Rights As A Parent, and Are There Any Benefits Of Circumcision? What You Should Know About A Controversial Procedure, these headlines surely were intended to lead anyone reading them to assume that Romper had decided to give some space (for a change) to an alternative (that is, a non-pro-MGM) point of view. Romper, it must be remembered, has a history of publishing militantly pro-MGM screeds. (My responses to these may be found here and here, and these, of course, include links to the Romper essays themselves.)
Now, Romper seems to have taken a different tack. The phrasing of the question "Will the hospital pressure me to circumcise?" implicitly acknowledges that neonatal circumcision entails unsavory and unethical behavior on the part of the hospitals where circumcisions are performed and on the part of the medical personnel who perform them. After all, it goes without saying that pressuring parents into subjecting their neonate to a medically unnecessary surgery, when it occurs, is unethical. And if it doesn't occur, why raise the question? Similarly, modifying the noun "procedure" with the adjective "controversial" concedes at the outset that there is anything but a consensus concerning the myriad benefits that its supporters claim for it, the manifold harms for which its critics revile it, the amount of risk that it entails and the ethics of involuntary circumcision. Even the ominous admonition to the reader that "This is what you should know. . . . " in answer to the open-minded question "Are there any benefits to circumcision?" implies that the answer awaiting the reader is a decisive No! But this is not what the reader gets.
Perhaps Mullen-McWilliams deserves some credit for at least one of these articles (Will the Hospital Pressure Me To Circumcise?). Its first two thirds consist largely of her interview with Ashley Trueman of Your Whole Baby, an upbeat, pro-intact website that offers the following statement of its credo: "We believe if you have the information necessary to see circumcision in a new light - free from cultural blinders - you will not choose it for your son." If the point of Mullen-McWilliams's article was to demonstrate the way that the subtle or not-so-subtle coercion of new parents to subject their neonates to circumcision functions to perpetuate this surgery, she could have left it at that. Trueman is an excellent spokesperson and touches on most of the major points.
Unfortunately, and somewhat jarringly, the premise of virtually every one of these points is then undermined by Mullen-McWilliams's veering off in a completely different direction and giving the final word to Deena Blumenfeld (about whom I shall have much more to say below) who asserts, in this article and elsewhere, that the circumcision decision is the parents' "alone, and that there is no one right choice." One might wish to give Mullen-McWilliams the benefit of the doubt. She may indeed have intended to focus very narrowly on the exertion of undue pressure by hospitals on parents either way. But that is not what the title of her article leads readers to expect. Consequently, what the reader is led to believe will be a critique of non-therapeutic circumcision written specifically from the angle - and as an exposé - of hospitals' pressuring parents into circumcising their neonates, instead concludes by endorsing a laissez-faire approach to involuntary non-therapeutic circumcision.
The problem here is that Mullen-McWilliams so constructs her article as to make it appear that both Trueman and Blumenfeld are on the same side of the issue: both opposing undue pressure on parents either way. But they are not on the same side. This is an important distinction and one that Mullen-McWilliams completely obscures. Trueman's position is predicated on circumcision's being always the wrong choice. It follows, then, that if parents simply were given - and simply received - complete information about circumcision in an unbiased way, they would never choose it. This is why hospitals and staff resort to pressuring parents into subjecting their children to circumcision. There is no reason to do it so, in the absence of such pressure, less circumcisions undoubtedly would occur. The crux of the matter is that Trueman does not oppose pressuring parents because she believes that pressuring parents is wrong but because she believes that circumcision is wrong. Blumenfeld, in contrast, holds a detached and amoral view: involuntary circumcision is neither right nor wrong but pressuring parents one way or the other is. As presented here by Mullen-McWilliams, then, all questions related to the harms and ethics of involuntary circumcision itself are essentially shunted to the side in favor of what she plainly sees as the more pressing matter: the freedom of parents to choose one way or the other without undue pressure from either side.
Mullen-McWilliams does not, of course, declare an unbridled support for circumcision. Nevertheless, that her endorsement of the right of parents to impose genital cutting on their infant boys ultimately rests upon a foundation of endorsement of the surgery itself is at least suggested in the second of these two articles, What You Should Know About A Controversial Procedure. This consists largely of a rehash of many of the shopworn and discredited claims made on behalf of involuntary neonatal circumcision: claims that both greatly inflate its benefits while completely dismissing almost all of its harms. Thus, in keeping with the inveigling approach of her two pieces, Mullen-McWilliams affects a tone of reasonableness and moderation, acknowledging, for example, that whereas physicians "once believed that babies couldn't feel pain, they definitely do" (who knew?). She even concedes - as the AAP itself has grudgingly conceded (and one can only imagine with how much gnashing of teeth) that the purported benefits of this surgery are "not great enough to recommend universal circumcision for all newborns." The result of all this is that, after some undulation upon waves of conflicting and ultimately irreconcilable opinion, Mullen-McWilliams's bark is gently brought to rest upon this sunny shore: "That means that the decision is ultimately left up to parents, and to individual choice." Mullen-McWilliams, then, endorses deferring to parental prerogative in the absence of a definitive medical recommendation. Accordingly, these two articles are deftly crafted in language that is, at least on its surface, all about parental choice, hence, ostensibly neutral on the genital surgery itself.
But parental choice in practice means no choice for the person having part of his penis amputated when the exercise of that parental choice results in an involuntary circumcision. Thus, to endorse a pro-parental-choice position, as both Blumenfeld and Mullen-McWilliams do, is to endorse a position that is one of de facto support for involuntary circumcision itself. To claim that one is not pro-circumcision but merely pro-parental-choice is to offer a distinction without a difference. And when Mullen-McWilliams refers to "individual choice," what she means by that is the exact opposite of what the phrase "individual choice" is understood to mean - by medical professionals and laymen alike - in the context of informed consent to an irreversible cosmetic surgery. Note in the following sentence, for example, the legerdemain by which Mullen-McWilliams obscures the fact that involuntary neonatal circumcision supplants the agency of the person most concerned in this surgery with that of his parents. "The biggest reason to circumcise is because it fits your religious beliefs, your own personal preferences, or because it's traditional in the U.S." To anyone just entering a room and hearing Mullen-McWilliams utter these words, the obvious and most reasonable inference would be that the man to whom she was speaking had just confided to her that he was considering undergoing a voluntary circumcision himself but was feeling ambivalent about it. A more accurate rephrasing of that sentence in the way Mullen-McWilliams actually meant it would go something like this: "The biggest reason to circumcise [not your own penis but someone else's penis] is because it fits your religious beliefs [as opposed to the future religious beliefs of the person whom you intend to subject to the genital surgery], your own personal preferences [not regarding your own penis but your "personal" preferences regarding someone else's penis], or because it's traditional in the U.S. [and a tradition is properly carried forward not by the individual who embraces it but by someone else upon whose body the tradition has been imposed by - and thus on behalf of - the individual who embraces the tradition]." While Mullen-McWilliams endorses the right of bodily autonomy for girls and women (as do I), apparently the same right of bodily autonomy for boys and men doesn't exist within her ken. For women, it's Her body - Her choice. For men, His body - His parents' choice.
This is a great deal of parental power over boys' bodies and sexual futures (and, necessarily, over men's bodies and sexuality) that Mullen-McWilliams is arguing for. Or not so much arguing for as stating by fiat: a limitless power of a parent to circumcise (which is a discreet way of saying to mutilate) his or her child's penis "because it fits [his or her] religious beliefs, [his or her] own personal preferences, or because it's traditional in the U.S." That's a radical but by no means uncommon position in the United States. It's hard to tell whether Mullen-McWilliams herself is seeking cover or merely wishes to provide some for her readers (those, that is, who intend to subject their neonates to circumcision) but, however it may be, in both of these articles she invokes an authority from whom an imprimatur for this exercise in parental prerogative is readily obtained. This authority appears in the august personage of Deena Blumenfeld, the owner of Shining Light Prenatal Education. On her website, Blumenfeld describes what she does as follows: "I guide women to the threshold of motherhood so they may step through the door on their own with grace and confidence." She describes herself as "the owner, principal educator and doula madame at Shining Light Prenatal Education and Shining Light Doulas in Pittsburgh, PA." Blumenfeld adds that "I also author The Silent Mother, a blog about the unspoken and ugly parts of motherhood, with a historical twist." On her Silent Mother blog, Blumenfeld describes herself as "a historian, a collector, a writer, a Lamaze certified childbirth educator and a Prenatal Yoga instructor." The pages of Blumenfeld's websites are suffused with eastern imagery and soft hues and replete with mystical phrases that bespeak a decidedly holistic and Yoga-influenced approach to the birth process. The very name of her company - Shining Light - has a spiritual ring to it and is more than suggestive of spiritual, emotional and intellectual enlightenment. It is difficult to reconcile all this professed love of nurturing, wellness, peace, balance, respect for nature and for the very sexuality that culminates in childbirth with the brutality and violence of taking a scalpel or a clamp to an infant's penis and leaving it bloodied, irreparably damaged and scarred for life.
As someone who was subjected to genital cutting, it was with a sense of outrage that I read the statements regarding forced circumcision with which Blumenfeld had furnished Mullen-McWilliams for her Hospital piece. Statements such as these:
With respect to her statement that involuntary circumcision "is a fully elective procedure where parental preference should be respected either way," I reminded her that, when parents make medical decisions on behalf of their child, they are legally obligated to do so in their child's best interests. I noted that circumcision of an infant's penis in the absence of a medical indication for the surgery is never in a child's best interests; moreover, that it violates numerous statutes and medical ethical guidelines. (These points are all thoroughly explored and firmly grounded in a legal framework, including statutory and constitutional law, in Peter Adler's monumental Is Circumcision Legal? They are also well covered from a bioethics perspective by Brian D. Earp in The AAP Report on Circumcision: Bad Science + Bad Ethics = Bad Medicine.) I observed that a parent's preference for amputating part of her or his child's penis should no more be respected than her or his preference for amputating any other body part would be. Parental preference should never be respected when that preference results in harm to the child. Non-therapeutic infant circumcision is a harm in and of itself (again, see Adler). Besides exposing the infant to needless pain, suffering and the risk of additional complications, it also adversely affects sexual sensation, function, and body image. Beyond all this, forced circumcision deprives boys - and the men that they become - of their fundamental right of bodily autonomy.
Thus began what became a somewhat extended back-and-forth by email that, it should probably come as no surprise, ended acrimoniously. In the course of this exchange, it occurred to me that I might come to write this very essay and, anticipating that possibility, took the opportunity to request Blumenfeld's permission to quote directly from our personal correspondence. This she summarily (and somewhat curtly) denied. I do not know what she imagined I had in mind but I think it only fair to give one's adversary an opportunity to have her or his views fairly represented in one's critique of them. I was not a little amused, therefore, when I found this quote, attributed to Thomas Merton, prominently displayed on one of Blumenfeld's websites: "If a writer is so cautious that he never writes anything that cannot be criticized, he will never write anything that can be read. If you want to help other people you have got to make up your mind to write things that some men will condemn."
As it happens, Blumenfeld is a prolific blogger so my inability to address the specific comments that she made in our private email exchanges did not fatally impede my taking up Blumenfeld (via Merton) on her implicit challenge to her readers to criticize and to condemn some of what she has written. As a matter of fact, it was Blumenfeld herself who pointed me in this direction. Although
she denied me the opportunity to quote her directly from our personal correspondence, I do not believe that it violates either the letter or the spirit of her injunction when I note that, in her first reply to me, Blumenfeld referred me (and was considerate enough to provide a link) to an essay she had written back in 2012 for Science & Sensibility, which describes itself as "A Lamaze research blog about pregnancy, birth, and beyond." I will also go so far as to explain here (nor do I believe that I am violating her wishes when I do) that, from her initial response to my email, I got the distinct impression that Blumenfeld seemed to think that I had misconstrued her position on the question of involuntary circumcision based upon her comments as they had been reported in Mullen-McWilliams's Hospital piece. This possible misunderstanding (at least as Blumenfeld may have perceived it), not surprisingly, turned on the very distinction without a difference for which I criticize both her and Mullen-McWilliams above in my discussion of Mullen-McWilliams's two Romper articles. Namely, the notion that being pro-parental choice does not necessarily entail being pro-circumcision. (But, of course, it does.) I assume that this was what Blumenfeld was getting at because, as I have just mentioned, instead of addressing the substance of my email directly, she sent me the link to her essay, Parental Autonomy in Decision Making: A Follow-Up to the AAP's Newborn Male Circumcision Policy Statement. In this essay, Blumenfeld, while scrupulously avoiding either endorsing or condemning forced circumcision itself - in fact, going so far as to express her own "personal bias towards leaving boys intact" - argues passionately that not only do parents' wishes regarding the anatomical structure of their son's penis matter - their wishes are the only thing that matters.
The fact that Blumenfeld sent me her Science & Sensibility essay in the apparently mistaken belief that it would dispel my concerns about her being affirmatively pro-genital cutting only confirmed for me how blind she is to the ethical heart of the question. Namely, that the only person whose wishes actually matter is the one whose penis is subjected to the circumcision. It means nothing that Blumenfeld herself may be personally biased "towards leaving boys intact." The fundamental human rights of individuals are not contingent upon the personal biases of others. Blumenfeld's inability to recognize this could be what was behind her thinking that her position may have come across in the Hospital article in a way that lent itself to misinterpretation: namely, that her position was pro-circumcision as opposed to "merely" pro-parental choice. But, of course, if that is what she thought, she need not have sent me her Parental Autonomy essay. On the contrary, the position that she staked out in the Romper piece was all too clear. Again and again - in both Romper articles cited above and in her 2012 Science & Sensibility essay - Blumenfeld endorses the AAP position, which is one of support for the "primacy of parental decision making." Time and again she asserts that whether a male human being gets to live his life with the penis he was born with or, instead, is compelled to go through life with one radically altered and irreparably harmed is a decision that belongs not to him but to his parents and to them alone.
Whether it is the AAP or Blumenfeld who invokes "the primacy of parental decision-making" in support of genital cutting, doing so might entail acceptance of one of two premises: that parents have an absolute ownership of (and therefore a right to harm) their children's bodies or, alternatively, that neonatal circumcision is medically necessary in all cases. In these extreme formulations, both of these premises are obviously false. But a qualified form of parental ownership of her or his child's body can easily be justified by the claims of religion, culture or tradition and this is precisely what Blumenfeld does. In her Science & Sensibility essay, she writes "Circumcision is a fundamental part of the core belief system for many people, whether stemming from religious practice or social norms."
Of course - to cite a rather obvious parallel - so is female genital mutilation: it, too reflects sincerely held religious beliefs and has profound cultural significance for those who practice it. So, in order to be logically and morally consistent, one must either endorse the right of parents to subject their daughters to genital cutting or one must repudiate the right of parents to subject their sons to genital cutting. One must either endorse the right of parents to subject both boys and girls to non-therapeutic genital surgery or one must draw a line beyond which parental prerogative may not extend, in which case, the right of bodily autonomy of the child, irrespective of the sex of that child, supersedes the right of parental decision-making.
Blumenfeld's argument, however, as far as I can tell, seems to be that a prima facie claim exists for the validity of any cultural or religious practice - presumably, no matter how harmful and no matter to what extent that practice violates contemporary norms of bodily autonomy and fundamental human rights - provided that three conditions are met: first, that the practice have a long history; second, that someone currently regard that practice as culturally or religiously significant; and, third, that that person want to continue it. As she writes in her essay,
Among the most troubling moral and ethical inconsistencies in Blumenfeld's essay arises from what I can only interpret as her desire to have it both ways. As noted above, she professes a "bias towards leaving boys intact" yet the theme that she sounds, over and over again, is that boys (and the men that they become) do not, in fact, have an inherent right of ownership of their own bodies and, specifically, of their own penises. Blumenfeld makes numerous statements in support of a parent's right to cut off part of her or his child's penis but not one in support of that child's right not to have (ergo, that man's right not to have had) part of his penis removed. Even when she offers the merest hint of her own personal opposition to circumcision itself (her "bias towards leaving boys intact"), Blumenfeld situates this opposition foursquare within the context of her own personal preference. Thus, she views circumcision in an entirely subjective way instead of viewing it from the perspective of the person who is subjected to it. That is why she opposes circumcision (to the extent that she does oppose it) on her own behalf instead of opposing it on behalf of the person who is subjected to it. That is how Blumenfeld can sustain the fictive distinction between being pro-circumcision (which she is not) and pro-parental choice (which she is). To put that another way, for all intents and purposes, Blumenfeld is simultaneously anti-circumcision yet pro-forced-circumcision. Accordingly, nowhere throughout Blumenfeld's essay (or in her comments in either of the two Romper articles) is there any trace of empathy for the infants (and men) whose subjection to forced circumcision she goes to such extraordinary lengths to defend and validate.
This lack of empathy and respect for the body rights of boys and men is even more troubling given Blumenfeld's other writings concerning the bodily autonomy of girls and women - and of herself. For example, in her essay, Me Too, Sexual Harassment / Assault (in The Silent Mother), Blumenfeld writes, "Point Blank - our society still sees women's bodies as property and objects and we are treated as such." That is exactly how many men who have been subjected to forced circumcision feel.
Or this, from her 2012 essay Fighting the War on Women . . . With a Watergun (This is what a feminist looks like) (in Elephant Journal):
Or this, from another of Blumenfeld's essays in Elephant Journal, Human Rights in Childbirth: Women's Choices in Childbirth Are Restricted and We Are Not Going to Take It Lying Down!: " . . . a woman is an autonomous individual and she has a human right to have dominion over her own body." Yup.
Even the pseudo-medical justifications (including the medicalization of natural female biological processes and the pathologizing of women's bodies) for intervening in and controlling pregnancy and childbirth to which Blumenfeld takes such great exception when directed at female bodies are matters of no concern to her whatsoever when precisely the same tendencies are directed toward male bodies. In the same essay (Human Rights in Childbirth), she writes "You have to understand that pregnancy is not an illness." Exactly. And the male prepuce is not a congenital deformity. Blumenfeld continues:
After reading through a good deal of Blumenfeld's writings on the theme of bodily autonomy for women, counterpoised against her other writings in which she completely dismisses the same right of bodily autonomy for men, I came away with the conviction that her thinking on all this is disordered by one of several factors. First and foremost, Blumenfeld herself comes from a male-genital-cutting tradition and culture. (So do I, however, so that's no excuse.) In her mind, forced circumcision is probably as insignificant a human-rights violation as gladiatorial contests were to the Romans or human sacrifice was to the Aztecs. Then again, I also suspect that it could be attributable to the fact that she has lived her life securely ensconced within the privilege of genital inviolability. She simply cannot fathom what it is to have one's genitals mutilated against one's will. Finally, it could be due to an inability to empathize with members of the opposite sex. Or perhaps it is some combination in various proportions of each of these.
Whatever the cause, of these three reasons, this last one - an inability to empathize with persons who were born with penises - is the hardest for me to grapple with. I hope that that is not what's going on here but I have noticed a pattern of like-minded thinking on the part of women who profess themselves feminists yet seem incapable of applying - in fact, seem downright outraged at the notion that they should apply - the principles of feminism evenhandedly to both female and male bodies and, of course, to intersex bodies. In other words, it somehow escapes them that they should extend to others the same respect for bodily autonomy, human dignity and individual choice in every and all matters related to sexuality that they quite rightly demand for themselves. It's very difficult for me to understand why that is. I certainly do not hold myself up as a paragon of empathetic virtue but I have always been incensed and affronted by what I believe to be infringements on girls' and women's rights to bodily autonomy just as passionately as if they had been infringements on my own. I will never be pregnant but that in no way diminishes my conviction that I would not want anyone preventing me from using certain types of contraception or denying me my right to obtain an abortion. That is why, although I do not have a uterus, I have always supported abortion rights. I have supported them actively, with donations, by demonstrating for them in the streets, and with online advocacy. More to the point, however, is that I have supported them on principle. That principle is the fundamental principle that each and every human being is born with an inherent right of ownership of her or his or their own body. That means that no one can tell you what to do with your body and, crucially, that no one can do anything to your body without your consent. That, in a nutshell, is the principle that underlies the genital autonomy movement. It seems so obviously self-evident to me that every argument every self-professed feminist has ever made on behalf of women's bodily autonomy must necessarily apply equally to men's and intersex bodies that I simply cannot fathom the logical and ethical inconsistency and sexual double standard that enable them to tolerate forced male circumcision.
It occurred to me that, in order to get though to someone like Blumenfeld (or Ej Dickson, or Liza Wyles, or Mullen-McWilliams, or so many others of that ilk), I needed to personalize my approach. I needed to try to get Blumenfeld to empathize with male victims of forced genital cutting - past, present, and future - by encouraging her to put herself in my place. And so I asked her, in one form or another, in each of the several emails that I sent, the following questions.
I asked Blumenfeld how she would feel about a debate concerning the forced, permanent amputation of one of her body parts in which the right of her parents to subject her to that amputation was presented as not merely valid but as sacrosanct.
I asked her how she would feel about it if the amputation were framed merely in terms of the "benefits versus the risks" without any acknowledgement of the intrinsic value to her of the body part itself.
I asked her to imagine that she had been subjected to genital cutting as an infant. I asked her to imagine further how she might then feel about this statement: Parents need to know all of their options, with regard to female circumcision. Do it, or not; do it in hospital, in the doctor’s office or at home in a religious setting; do it now, do it later. Or this one: This is a fully elective procedure where parental preference should be respected either way. Or this one: Parents need to know that the female-circumcision decision is theirs alone. Or this one: The decision regarding female circumcision lies solely with her parents and the argument for infant or child autonomy becomes moot. With very minor alterations, these, of course, are all Blumenfeld's own words about forced male circumcision.
Not waiting for a reply to my questions, I went on to speculate (in the first email in which I posed them) that, had a part or parts of Blumenfeld's own external
genitalia been amputated without her consent, she, herself, might
exhibit the very sort of "vitriol," "anger," and "overly aggressive
behavior" (as she puts it in her Parental Autonomy essay) to which she apparently takes exception when, presumably, it is exhibited by
men who have been subjected to forced circumcision. (I say presumably because Blumenfeld does not actually specify to whom she refers when using these words but, from the context, it seems obvious that she is referring to men who resent what was done to their bodies without their consent and who are not shy about expressing how they feel about it.)
Once again it probably will not come as a surprise when I report that, throughout the course of several emails back and forth, and despite my posing these question more than once to her, Blumenfeld steadfastly avoided answering a single one of them.
When I revisit all of this in my mind - the Romper articles, Blumenfeld's own essays, her apparent incapacity for manifesting even an iota of empathy for the victims of forced circumcision - I keep coming back to this thought: Blumenfeld and I probably have much in common. In fact, there is probably much more that unites us than divides us: our backgrounds, our views on women's rights and women's bodily autonomy, our views on health and wellness and - especially in this last regard - a philosophical objection to the medicalization of natural biological events and a deep suspicion of unnecessary medical interventions. Yet, as disappointing as it is that someone like this cannot seem to connect the dots that lead irresistibly and inexorably to actively opposing male genital cutting on the same grounds on which one ought to oppose female genital cutting, and that lead to recognizing for boys and men the selfsame personal autonomy, bodily integrity and basic human rights that one ought to recognize for girls and women, what is even more disappointing is Blumenfeld's apparent lack of empathy. It goes without saying that I am bothered by Blumenfeld's double standard. I believe that she has a moral blind spot with respect to the forced circumcision of boys. But even this failing, I believe, is not as egregious as her utter lack of sympathy for victims - past, present and future - of forced circumcision. If one cannot get on board with a particular human-rights issue as a matter of principle - even if one has never personally experienced or been subjected to the sort of rights violation in question - one ought at least to be able to make a leap of faith, hear what victims are saying and believe them when they declare themselves aggrieved. Although I happen to believe that to do just that is, on a very basic level, a quintessentially feminist thing to do, one does not have to be a feminist in order to do it. One has only to be a human being with an ability to empathize.
It was with a sense of grim irony, then (mingled with an acute sense of the ridiculous), that I came to the concluding part of Blumenfeld's essay, in which she urges her fellow birth instructors to "Please keep your sense of compassion when discussing the issue of circumcision with new parents in your classes and with those whom you interact with online." As if that weren't enough, Blumenfeld then embellishes her essay with a quote from Plato on, of all things, the virtue of kindness. She gilds her essay even more ostentatiously with two additional quotes on the same themes: one from Yogi Bhajan and the other from the Dalai Lama. That Blumenfeld should invoke these sentiments, all in defense of a parental right to subject infant boys to genital mutilation, struck me as an especially gratuitous misuse of the words of the three men she quotes here. Particularly given that these three men, from everything that we know about them, would, in all probability, have been opposed to forced male circumcision: they would regard it as a mutilation of the body. They'd be right.
It probably should not have come as a surprise when Romper (a parenting website aimed at millennials and owned by Bustle Digital Group) recently published two stealth pro-MGM articles (both written by Kelly Mullen-McWilliams). With the titles Will the Hospital Pressure Me To Circumcise? You Have Options & Rights As A Parent, and Are There Any Benefits Of Circumcision? What You Should Know About A Controversial Procedure, these headlines surely were intended to lead anyone reading them to assume that Romper had decided to give some space (for a change) to an alternative (that is, a non-pro-MGM) point of view. Romper, it must be remembered, has a history of publishing militantly pro-MGM screeds. (My responses to these may be found here and here, and these, of course, include links to the Romper essays themselves.)
Now, Romper seems to have taken a different tack. The phrasing of the question "Will the hospital pressure me to circumcise?" implicitly acknowledges that neonatal circumcision entails unsavory and unethical behavior on the part of the hospitals where circumcisions are performed and on the part of the medical personnel who perform them. After all, it goes without saying that pressuring parents into subjecting their neonate to a medically unnecessary surgery, when it occurs, is unethical. And if it doesn't occur, why raise the question? Similarly, modifying the noun "procedure" with the adjective "controversial" concedes at the outset that there is anything but a consensus concerning the myriad benefits that its supporters claim for it, the manifold harms for which its critics revile it, the amount of risk that it entails and the ethics of involuntary circumcision. Even the ominous admonition to the reader that "This is what you should know. . . . " in answer to the open-minded question "Are there any benefits to circumcision?" implies that the answer awaiting the reader is a decisive No! But this is not what the reader gets.
Perhaps Mullen-McWilliams deserves some credit for at least one of these articles (Will the Hospital Pressure Me To Circumcise?). Its first two thirds consist largely of her interview with Ashley Trueman of Your Whole Baby, an upbeat, pro-intact website that offers the following statement of its credo: "We believe if you have the information necessary to see circumcision in a new light - free from cultural blinders - you will not choose it for your son." If the point of Mullen-McWilliams's article was to demonstrate the way that the subtle or not-so-subtle coercion of new parents to subject their neonates to circumcision functions to perpetuate this surgery, she could have left it at that. Trueman is an excellent spokesperson and touches on most of the major points.
Unfortunately, and somewhat jarringly, the premise of virtually every one of these points is then undermined by Mullen-McWilliams's veering off in a completely different direction and giving the final word to Deena Blumenfeld (about whom I shall have much more to say below) who asserts, in this article and elsewhere, that the circumcision decision is the parents' "alone, and that there is no one right choice." One might wish to give Mullen-McWilliams the benefit of the doubt. She may indeed have intended to focus very narrowly on the exertion of undue pressure by hospitals on parents either way. But that is not what the title of her article leads readers to expect. Consequently, what the reader is led to believe will be a critique of non-therapeutic circumcision written specifically from the angle - and as an exposé - of hospitals' pressuring parents into circumcising their neonates, instead concludes by endorsing a laissez-faire approach to involuntary non-therapeutic circumcision.
The problem here is that Mullen-McWilliams so constructs her article as to make it appear that both Trueman and Blumenfeld are on the same side of the issue: both opposing undue pressure on parents either way. But they are not on the same side. This is an important distinction and one that Mullen-McWilliams completely obscures. Trueman's position is predicated on circumcision's being always the wrong choice. It follows, then, that if parents simply were given - and simply received - complete information about circumcision in an unbiased way, they would never choose it. This is why hospitals and staff resort to pressuring parents into subjecting their children to circumcision. There is no reason to do it so, in the absence of such pressure, less circumcisions undoubtedly would occur. The crux of the matter is that Trueman does not oppose pressuring parents because she believes that pressuring parents is wrong but because she believes that circumcision is wrong. Blumenfeld, in contrast, holds a detached and amoral view: involuntary circumcision is neither right nor wrong but pressuring parents one way or the other is. As presented here by Mullen-McWilliams, then, all questions related to the harms and ethics of involuntary circumcision itself are essentially shunted to the side in favor of what she plainly sees as the more pressing matter: the freedom of parents to choose one way or the other without undue pressure from either side.
Mullen-McWilliams does not, of course, declare an unbridled support for circumcision. Nevertheless, that her endorsement of the right of parents to impose genital cutting on their infant boys ultimately rests upon a foundation of endorsement of the surgery itself is at least suggested in the second of these two articles, What You Should Know About A Controversial Procedure. This consists largely of a rehash of many of the shopworn and discredited claims made on behalf of involuntary neonatal circumcision: claims that both greatly inflate its benefits while completely dismissing almost all of its harms. Thus, in keeping with the inveigling approach of her two pieces, Mullen-McWilliams affects a tone of reasonableness and moderation, acknowledging, for example, that whereas physicians "once believed that babies couldn't feel pain, they definitely do" (who knew?). She even concedes - as the AAP itself has grudgingly conceded (and one can only imagine with how much gnashing of teeth) that the purported benefits of this surgery are "not great enough to recommend universal circumcision for all newborns." The result of all this is that, after some undulation upon waves of conflicting and ultimately irreconcilable opinion, Mullen-McWilliams's bark is gently brought to rest upon this sunny shore: "That means that the decision is ultimately left up to parents, and to individual choice." Mullen-McWilliams, then, endorses deferring to parental prerogative in the absence of a definitive medical recommendation. Accordingly, these two articles are deftly crafted in language that is, at least on its surface, all about parental choice, hence, ostensibly neutral on the genital surgery itself.
But parental choice in practice means no choice for the person having part of his penis amputated when the exercise of that parental choice results in an involuntary circumcision. Thus, to endorse a pro-parental-choice position, as both Blumenfeld and Mullen-McWilliams do, is to endorse a position that is one of de facto support for involuntary circumcision itself. To claim that one is not pro-circumcision but merely pro-parental-choice is to offer a distinction without a difference. And when Mullen-McWilliams refers to "individual choice," what she means by that is the exact opposite of what the phrase "individual choice" is understood to mean - by medical professionals and laymen alike - in the context of informed consent to an irreversible cosmetic surgery. Note in the following sentence, for example, the legerdemain by which Mullen-McWilliams obscures the fact that involuntary neonatal circumcision supplants the agency of the person most concerned in this surgery with that of his parents. "The biggest reason to circumcise is because it fits your religious beliefs, your own personal preferences, or because it's traditional in the U.S." To anyone just entering a room and hearing Mullen-McWilliams utter these words, the obvious and most reasonable inference would be that the man to whom she was speaking had just confided to her that he was considering undergoing a voluntary circumcision himself but was feeling ambivalent about it. A more accurate rephrasing of that sentence in the way Mullen-McWilliams actually meant it would go something like this: "The biggest reason to circumcise [not your own penis but someone else's penis] is because it fits your religious beliefs [as opposed to the future religious beliefs of the person whom you intend to subject to the genital surgery], your own personal preferences [not regarding your own penis but your "personal" preferences regarding someone else's penis], or because it's traditional in the U.S. [and a tradition is properly carried forward not by the individual who embraces it but by someone else upon whose body the tradition has been imposed by - and thus on behalf of - the individual who embraces the tradition]." While Mullen-McWilliams endorses the right of bodily autonomy for girls and women (as do I), apparently the same right of bodily autonomy for boys and men doesn't exist within her ken. For women, it's Her body - Her choice. For men, His body - His parents' choice.
This is a great deal of parental power over boys' bodies and sexual futures (and, necessarily, over men's bodies and sexuality) that Mullen-McWilliams is arguing for. Or not so much arguing for as stating by fiat: a limitless power of a parent to circumcise (which is a discreet way of saying to mutilate) his or her child's penis "because it fits [his or her] religious beliefs, [his or her] own personal preferences, or because it's traditional in the U.S." That's a radical but by no means uncommon position in the United States. It's hard to tell whether Mullen-McWilliams herself is seeking cover or merely wishes to provide some for her readers (those, that is, who intend to subject their neonates to circumcision) but, however it may be, in both of these articles she invokes an authority from whom an imprimatur for this exercise in parental prerogative is readily obtained. This authority appears in the august personage of Deena Blumenfeld, the owner of Shining Light Prenatal Education. On her website, Blumenfeld describes what she does as follows: "I guide women to the threshold of motherhood so they may step through the door on their own with grace and confidence." She describes herself as "the owner, principal educator and doula madame at Shining Light Prenatal Education and Shining Light Doulas in Pittsburgh, PA." Blumenfeld adds that "I also author The Silent Mother, a blog about the unspoken and ugly parts of motherhood, with a historical twist." On her Silent Mother blog, Blumenfeld describes herself as "a historian, a collector, a writer, a Lamaze certified childbirth educator and a Prenatal Yoga instructor." The pages of Blumenfeld's websites are suffused with eastern imagery and soft hues and replete with mystical phrases that bespeak a decidedly holistic and Yoga-influenced approach to the birth process. The very name of her company - Shining Light - has a spiritual ring to it and is more than suggestive of spiritual, emotional and intellectual enlightenment. It is difficult to reconcile all this professed love of nurturing, wellness, peace, balance, respect for nature and for the very sexuality that culminates in childbirth with the brutality and violence of taking a scalpel or a clamp to an infant's penis and leaving it bloodied, irreparably damaged and scarred for life.
As someone who was subjected to genital cutting, it was with a sense of outrage that I read the statements regarding forced circumcision with which Blumenfeld had furnished Mullen-McWilliams for her Hospital piece. Statements such as these:
It is a fully elective procedure where parental preference should be respected either way.
Parents need to know that the decision is theirs alone and that there is no one right choice. Whatever they choose, it will be right for their son.I was impelled to contact Blumenfeld directly in order to share with her the perspective of someone who feels that this "choice" was not, in fact "right" for me. I was incensed at the callous disregard for my body, my sexuality, my well-being and my rights that was so thoughtlessly and cavalierly yet so unambiguously conveyed by Blumenfeld's words. In the short email that I sent her that very day, I explained that I was writing in order to point out several important errors of fact and of ethics in her comments as they had been reported in Mullen-McWilliams's Hospital article.
With respect to her statement that involuntary circumcision "is a fully elective procedure where parental preference should be respected either way," I reminded her that, when parents make medical decisions on behalf of their child, they are legally obligated to do so in their child's best interests. I noted that circumcision of an infant's penis in the absence of a medical indication for the surgery is never in a child's best interests; moreover, that it violates numerous statutes and medical ethical guidelines. (These points are all thoroughly explored and firmly grounded in a legal framework, including statutory and constitutional law, in Peter Adler's monumental Is Circumcision Legal? They are also well covered from a bioethics perspective by Brian D. Earp in The AAP Report on Circumcision: Bad Science + Bad Ethics = Bad Medicine.) I observed that a parent's preference for amputating part of her or his child's penis should no more be respected than her or his preference for amputating any other body part would be. Parental preference should never be respected when that preference results in harm to the child. Non-therapeutic infant circumcision is a harm in and of itself (again, see Adler). Besides exposing the infant to needless pain, suffering and the risk of additional complications, it also adversely affects sexual sensation, function, and body image. Beyond all this, forced circumcision deprives boys - and the men that they become - of their fundamental right of bodily autonomy.
Thus began what became a somewhat extended back-and-forth by email that, it should probably come as no surprise, ended acrimoniously. In the course of this exchange, it occurred to me that I might come to write this very essay and, anticipating that possibility, took the opportunity to request Blumenfeld's permission to quote directly from our personal correspondence. This she summarily (and somewhat curtly) denied. I do not know what she imagined I had in mind but I think it only fair to give one's adversary an opportunity to have her or his views fairly represented in one's critique of them. I was not a little amused, therefore, when I found this quote, attributed to Thomas Merton, prominently displayed on one of Blumenfeld's websites: "If a writer is so cautious that he never writes anything that cannot be criticized, he will never write anything that can be read. If you want to help other people you have got to make up your mind to write things that some men will condemn."
As it happens, Blumenfeld is a prolific blogger so my inability to address the specific comments that she made in our private email exchanges did not fatally impede my taking up Blumenfeld (via Merton) on her implicit challenge to her readers to criticize and to condemn some of what she has written. As a matter of fact, it was Blumenfeld herself who pointed me in this direction. Although
she denied me the opportunity to quote her directly from our personal correspondence, I do not believe that it violates either the letter or the spirit of her injunction when I note that, in her first reply to me, Blumenfeld referred me (and was considerate enough to provide a link) to an essay she had written back in 2012 for Science & Sensibility, which describes itself as "A Lamaze research blog about pregnancy, birth, and beyond." I will also go so far as to explain here (nor do I believe that I am violating her wishes when I do) that, from her initial response to my email, I got the distinct impression that Blumenfeld seemed to think that I had misconstrued her position on the question of involuntary circumcision based upon her comments as they had been reported in Mullen-McWilliams's Hospital piece. This possible misunderstanding (at least as Blumenfeld may have perceived it), not surprisingly, turned on the very distinction without a difference for which I criticize both her and Mullen-McWilliams above in my discussion of Mullen-McWilliams's two Romper articles. Namely, the notion that being pro-parental choice does not necessarily entail being pro-circumcision. (But, of course, it does.) I assume that this was what Blumenfeld was getting at because, as I have just mentioned, instead of addressing the substance of my email directly, she sent me the link to her essay, Parental Autonomy in Decision Making: A Follow-Up to the AAP's Newborn Male Circumcision Policy Statement. In this essay, Blumenfeld, while scrupulously avoiding either endorsing or condemning forced circumcision itself - in fact, going so far as to express her own "personal bias towards leaving boys intact" - argues passionately that not only do parents' wishes regarding the anatomical structure of their son's penis matter - their wishes are the only thing that matters.
The fact that Blumenfeld sent me her Science & Sensibility essay in the apparently mistaken belief that it would dispel my concerns about her being affirmatively pro-genital cutting only confirmed for me how blind she is to the ethical heart of the question. Namely, that the only person whose wishes actually matter is the one whose penis is subjected to the circumcision. It means nothing that Blumenfeld herself may be personally biased "towards leaving boys intact." The fundamental human rights of individuals are not contingent upon the personal biases of others. Blumenfeld's inability to recognize this could be what was behind her thinking that her position may have come across in the Hospital article in a way that lent itself to misinterpretation: namely, that her position was pro-circumcision as opposed to "merely" pro-parental choice. But, of course, if that is what she thought, she need not have sent me her Parental Autonomy essay. On the contrary, the position that she staked out in the Romper piece was all too clear. Again and again - in both Romper articles cited above and in her 2012 Science & Sensibility essay - Blumenfeld endorses the AAP position, which is one of support for the "primacy of parental decision making." Time and again she asserts that whether a male human being gets to live his life with the penis he was born with or, instead, is compelled to go through life with one radically altered and irreparably harmed is a decision that belongs not to him but to his parents and to them alone.
Whether it is the AAP or Blumenfeld who invokes "the primacy of parental decision-making" in support of genital cutting, doing so might entail acceptance of one of two premises: that parents have an absolute ownership of (and therefore a right to harm) their children's bodies or, alternatively, that neonatal circumcision is medically necessary in all cases. In these extreme formulations, both of these premises are obviously false. But a qualified form of parental ownership of her or his child's body can easily be justified by the claims of religion, culture or tradition and this is precisely what Blumenfeld does. In her Science & Sensibility essay, she writes "Circumcision is a fundamental part of the core belief system for many people, whether stemming from religious practice or social norms."
Of course - to cite a rather obvious parallel - so is female genital mutilation: it, too reflects sincerely held religious beliefs and has profound cultural significance for those who practice it. So, in order to be logically and morally consistent, one must either endorse the right of parents to subject their daughters to genital cutting or one must repudiate the right of parents to subject their sons to genital cutting. One must either endorse the right of parents to subject both boys and girls to non-therapeutic genital surgery or one must draw a line beyond which parental prerogative may not extend, in which case, the right of bodily autonomy of the child, irrespective of the sex of that child, supersedes the right of parental decision-making.
Blumenfeld's argument, however, as far as I can tell, seems to be that a prima facie claim exists for the validity of any cultural or religious practice - presumably, no matter how harmful and no matter to what extent that practice violates contemporary norms of bodily autonomy and fundamental human rights - provided that three conditions are met: first, that the practice have a long history; second, that someone currently regard that practice as culturally or religiously significant; and, third, that that person want to continue it. As she writes in her essay,
Parents need to know all of their options, with regards to circumcision. Do it, or not; do it in hospital, in the doctor’s office or at home in a religious setting; do it now, do it later; benefits and risks, and so on. They also need to know that their upbringing, social norms, religion, etc. matter. Not only does the AAP think they matter, but I do too.Oddly, Blumenfeld then weakens her argument, rather than bolstering it, by citing the example of Jehovah's Witnesses, writing that,
On the softer, but no less valid side, are our belief systems. We use our religion, our upbringing, and our societal norms to help us determine the right course of action. For example, a Jehovah’s Witness will decline a blood transfusion or other blood products because it is not within their framework. There are those who say this is "silly" or "dangerous," yet we respect this practice in hospital because it is appropriately respectful of that individual’s autonomy.But, as a matter of fact, we do not respect this practice when it comes to the children of Jehovah's Witnesses. Courts in the United States have routinely found that parents do not have a legal right (their first-amendment right of religious freedom notwithstanding) to withhold appropriate medical treatment from a child when to do so endangers that child's life. Perhaps not surprisingly, if highly inconsistently, the AAP, too, has staked out a position of unambiguous opposition to parents' withholding blood transfusions (or other life- or health-saving medical interventions) when such parental choice is exercised in conformity with the parents' religious beliefs. (One wonders, of course, what the AAP position on these practices and interventions would be were its membership comprised predominantly of Jehovah's Witnesses. [See, in particular, Cultural Bias in the AAP's 2012 Technical Report and Policy Statement on Male Circumcision as well as Brian D. Earp's response to the AAP 2012 policy statement, The AAP Report on Circumcision: Bad Science + Bad Ethics = Bad Medicine cited above and, especially, Earp's Update in the same place.] )
Among the most troubling moral and ethical inconsistencies in Blumenfeld's essay arises from what I can only interpret as her desire to have it both ways. As noted above, she professes a "bias towards leaving boys intact" yet the theme that she sounds, over and over again, is that boys (and the men that they become) do not, in fact, have an inherent right of ownership of their own bodies and, specifically, of their own penises. Blumenfeld makes numerous statements in support of a parent's right to cut off part of her or his child's penis but not one in support of that child's right not to have (ergo, that man's right not to have had) part of his penis removed. Even when she offers the merest hint of her own personal opposition to circumcision itself (her "bias towards leaving boys intact"), Blumenfeld situates this opposition foursquare within the context of her own personal preference. Thus, she views circumcision in an entirely subjective way instead of viewing it from the perspective of the person who is subjected to it. That is why she opposes circumcision (to the extent that she does oppose it) on her own behalf instead of opposing it on behalf of the person who is subjected to it. That is how Blumenfeld can sustain the fictive distinction between being pro-circumcision (which she is not) and pro-parental choice (which she is). To put that another way, for all intents and purposes, Blumenfeld is simultaneously anti-circumcision yet pro-forced-circumcision. Accordingly, nowhere throughout Blumenfeld's essay (or in her comments in either of the two Romper articles) is there any trace of empathy for the infants (and men) whose subjection to forced circumcision she goes to such extraordinary lengths to defend and validate.
This lack of empathy and respect for the body rights of boys and men is even more troubling given Blumenfeld's other writings concerning the bodily autonomy of girls and women - and of herself. For example, in her essay, Me Too, Sexual Harassment / Assault (in The Silent Mother), Blumenfeld writes, "Point Blank - our society still sees women's bodies as property and objects and we are treated as such." That is exactly how many men who have been subjected to forced circumcision feel.
Or this, from her 2012 essay Fighting the War on Women . . . With a Watergun (This is what a feminist looks like) (in Elephant Journal):
We fight government officials who . . . try to . . . [restrict] abortion and . . . access to birth control. But it's not actually about abortion or birth control.
Regardless of your personal feelings or religious beliefs on either matter, it's about the belief that, as a woman, I have no autonomy; I have no say in what I do with my body; my body must be controlled by the state.
This is a slippery slope.
When the state takes away one right, it sets the precedent to take away others. Restricting access, to what are fundamentally personal choices, tells us that women are incapable of making those choices on their own. . . .Again, men who were subjected to forced circumcision can relate perfectly to virtually every point that Blumenfeld makes here. What is involuntary circumcision if not being deprived of autonomy? What is it if not being denied a say in what one does with one's body? What is it if not being denied the right to make a fundamentally personal choice and being told, in effect, that one is incapable of making that choice on one's own? And if the state fails to protect males and intersex children from genital cutting, who's to say that it won't reverse course on female genital cutting? Who's to say that some clever anti-choice politician will not cite the permissibility of involuntary circumcision as a precedent for further regulating and controlling girls' and women's bodies? It's a slippery slope, indeed.
Or this, from another of Blumenfeld's essays in Elephant Journal, Human Rights in Childbirth: Women's Choices in Childbirth Are Restricted and We Are Not Going to Take It Lying Down!: " . . . a woman is an autonomous individual and she has a human right to have dominion over her own body." Yup.
Even the pseudo-medical justifications (including the medicalization of natural female biological processes and the pathologizing of women's bodies) for intervening in and controlling pregnancy and childbirth to which Blumenfeld takes such great exception when directed at female bodies are matters of no concern to her whatsoever when precisely the same tendencies are directed toward male bodies. In the same essay (Human Rights in Childbirth), she writes "You have to understand that pregnancy is not an illness." Exactly. And the male prepuce is not a congenital deformity. Blumenfeld continues:
Pregnant women aren't sick. But yet, an overwhelming majority of women are treated as if they are sick. You'll get IV fluids "just in case," full time electronic fetal monitoring "just in case," an epidural "just in case" you need a c-section, or a c-section "just in case" we are right and there's something wrong with the baby and so on. Better to be safe, than sorry!Isn't this virtually identical to the sort of medical rationalizing that we keep hearing in ever new versions - "just in case" - for neonatal circumcision? Better circumcise "just in case" of a urinary tract infection; better circumcise "just in case" of penile cancer; better circumcise "just in case" of STDs; better circumcise "just in case" of poor personal hygiene; and so on. "Better to be safe than sorry!"
After reading through a good deal of Blumenfeld's writings on the theme of bodily autonomy for women, counterpoised against her other writings in which she completely dismisses the same right of bodily autonomy for men, I came away with the conviction that her thinking on all this is disordered by one of several factors. First and foremost, Blumenfeld herself comes from a male-genital-cutting tradition and culture. (So do I, however, so that's no excuse.) In her mind, forced circumcision is probably as insignificant a human-rights violation as gladiatorial contests were to the Romans or human sacrifice was to the Aztecs. Then again, I also suspect that it could be attributable to the fact that she has lived her life securely ensconced within the privilege of genital inviolability. She simply cannot fathom what it is to have one's genitals mutilated against one's will. Finally, it could be due to an inability to empathize with members of the opposite sex. Or perhaps it is some combination in various proportions of each of these.
Whatever the cause, of these three reasons, this last one - an inability to empathize with persons who were born with penises - is the hardest for me to grapple with. I hope that that is not what's going on here but I have noticed a pattern of like-minded thinking on the part of women who profess themselves feminists yet seem incapable of applying - in fact, seem downright outraged at the notion that they should apply - the principles of feminism evenhandedly to both female and male bodies and, of course, to intersex bodies. In other words, it somehow escapes them that they should extend to others the same respect for bodily autonomy, human dignity and individual choice in every and all matters related to sexuality that they quite rightly demand for themselves. It's very difficult for me to understand why that is. I certainly do not hold myself up as a paragon of empathetic virtue but I have always been incensed and affronted by what I believe to be infringements on girls' and women's rights to bodily autonomy just as passionately as if they had been infringements on my own. I will never be pregnant but that in no way diminishes my conviction that I would not want anyone preventing me from using certain types of contraception or denying me my right to obtain an abortion. That is why, although I do not have a uterus, I have always supported abortion rights. I have supported them actively, with donations, by demonstrating for them in the streets, and with online advocacy. More to the point, however, is that I have supported them on principle. That principle is the fundamental principle that each and every human being is born with an inherent right of ownership of her or his or their own body. That means that no one can tell you what to do with your body and, crucially, that no one can do anything to your body without your consent. That, in a nutshell, is the principle that underlies the genital autonomy movement. It seems so obviously self-evident to me that every argument every self-professed feminist has ever made on behalf of women's bodily autonomy must necessarily apply equally to men's and intersex bodies that I simply cannot fathom the logical and ethical inconsistency and sexual double standard that enable them to tolerate forced male circumcision.
It occurred to me that, in order to get though to someone like Blumenfeld (or Ej Dickson, or Liza Wyles, or Mullen-McWilliams, or so many others of that ilk), I needed to personalize my approach. I needed to try to get Blumenfeld to empathize with male victims of forced genital cutting - past, present, and future - by encouraging her to put herself in my place. And so I asked her, in one form or another, in each of the several emails that I sent, the following questions.
I asked Blumenfeld how she would feel about a debate concerning the forced, permanent amputation of one of her body parts in which the right of her parents to subject her to that amputation was presented as not merely valid but as sacrosanct.
I asked her how she would feel about it if the amputation were framed merely in terms of the "benefits versus the risks" without any acknowledgement of the intrinsic value to her of the body part itself.
I asked her to imagine that she had been subjected to genital cutting as an infant. I asked her to imagine further how she might then feel about this statement: Parents need to know all of their options, with regard to female circumcision. Do it, or not; do it in hospital, in the doctor’s office or at home in a religious setting; do it now, do it later. Or this one: This is a fully elective procedure where parental preference should be respected either way. Or this one: Parents need to know that the female-circumcision decision is theirs alone. Or this one: The decision regarding female circumcision lies solely with her parents and the argument for infant or child autonomy becomes moot. With very minor alterations, these, of course, are all Blumenfeld's own words about forced male circumcision.
Once again it probably will not come as a surprise when I report that, throughout the course of several emails back and forth, and despite my posing these question more than once to her, Blumenfeld steadfastly avoided answering a single one of them.
When I revisit all of this in my mind - the Romper articles, Blumenfeld's own essays, her apparent incapacity for manifesting even an iota of empathy for the victims of forced circumcision - I keep coming back to this thought: Blumenfeld and I probably have much in common. In fact, there is probably much more that unites us than divides us: our backgrounds, our views on women's rights and women's bodily autonomy, our views on health and wellness and - especially in this last regard - a philosophical objection to the medicalization of natural biological events and a deep suspicion of unnecessary medical interventions. Yet, as disappointing as it is that someone like this cannot seem to connect the dots that lead irresistibly and inexorably to actively opposing male genital cutting on the same grounds on which one ought to oppose female genital cutting, and that lead to recognizing for boys and men the selfsame personal autonomy, bodily integrity and basic human rights that one ought to recognize for girls and women, what is even more disappointing is Blumenfeld's apparent lack of empathy. It goes without saying that I am bothered by Blumenfeld's double standard. I believe that she has a moral blind spot with respect to the forced circumcision of boys. But even this failing, I believe, is not as egregious as her utter lack of sympathy for victims - past, present and future - of forced circumcision. If one cannot get on board with a particular human-rights issue as a matter of principle - even if one has never personally experienced or been subjected to the sort of rights violation in question - one ought at least to be able to make a leap of faith, hear what victims are saying and believe them when they declare themselves aggrieved. Although I happen to believe that to do just that is, on a very basic level, a quintessentially feminist thing to do, one does not have to be a feminist in order to do it. One has only to be a human being with an ability to empathize.
It was with a sense of grim irony, then (mingled with an acute sense of the ridiculous), that I came to the concluding part of Blumenfeld's essay, in which she urges her fellow birth instructors to "Please keep your sense of compassion when discussing the issue of circumcision with new parents in your classes and with those whom you interact with online." As if that weren't enough, Blumenfeld then embellishes her essay with a quote from Plato on, of all things, the virtue of kindness. She gilds her essay even more ostentatiously with two additional quotes on the same themes: one from Yogi Bhajan and the other from the Dalai Lama. That Blumenfeld should invoke these sentiments, all in defense of a parental right to subject infant boys to genital mutilation, struck me as an especially gratuitous misuse of the words of the three men she quotes here. Particularly given that these three men, from everything that we know about them, would, in all probability, have been opposed to forced male circumcision: they would regard it as a mutilation of the body. They'd be right.
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