National Secular Society gets its knickers in a twist over male circumcision

The National Secular Society (NSS) is currently waging a campaign against male circumcision which plumbed astonishing depths in July when they published an article on their website (with apparent endorsement) making the following astonishing claim:

‘Why MGM and FGM are not considered equally reprehensible defies compassionate reason’.

This is a truly outrageous statement.

FGM (female genital mutilation) is a barbaric act involving cutting off a woman’s clitoris, an organ designed purely for giving women pleasure during sexual intercourse.

As well as being deeply dehumanising to women FGM leads to serious complications which can even be fatal. It can result in abscesses, cysts and fistulas and is a potent cause of vaginal stenosis and obstructed labour from which women and babies can die.

I not infrequently had to deal with some of the horrendous consequences of FGM when working as a surgeon in East Africa. It is rightly deplored and understandably illegal in Britain.

But the National Secular Society apparently believes that male circumcision, a common cultural practice in some faith communities and also a recognised surgical procedure for certain medical conditions, is ‘equally reprehensible’ and should be renamed MGM (male genital mutilation).

They have backed a bizarre recent court decision in Germany to ban it.

The ruling on circumcision was handed down by a court in Cologne in June but the German government has since announced it will legislate to explicitly legalise the practice.

Last month, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published a review of scientific evidence saying that ‘the health benefits of newborn male circumcision outweigh the risks of the procedure’.

However, the AAP added it did not recommend it for all newborn boys, saying the decision was best left to parents, in consultation with doctors.

So it’s difficult to understand what the National Secular Society is getting its knickers in a twist about.

Equating FGM with male circumcision is not only incredibly stupid. It is also profoundly insulting to the thousands of women who have butchered through FGM.

The NSS campaign seems to be motivated more by religious prejudice, in particular a disdain for Islam and Judaism, than scientific fact. But in these days of rising secular fundamentalism and intolerance, I guess this should not surprise us.

Male circumcision is not a Christian requirement and so Christians are free to choose about the practice. The New Testament emphasises that what is in one’s heart is more important than one’s outward appearance or conformity to religious ritual.

Regardless, the secularists should not be trying to force their bigoted ideology on others, be they Muslims, Jews or those of any other faith.

‘A person is not a Jew who is one only outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a person’s praise is not from other people, but from God.’ (Romans 2:28, 29)

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My reply to BMJ article on the Secular Medical Forum

Last week the British Medical Journal gave a platform to the Secular Medical Forum to attack Christianity and promote abortion, physician assisted suicide and embryonic stem cell research.

The 900 word one page article, titled ‘Secularism needs a distinctive medical voice’, which appeared in the BMJ’s ‘personal view’ column, claimed to be ‘not commissioned; not externally peer reviewed’.

It was, however, essentially an advertorial for the author Colin Brewer’s organisation.

I have critiqued the article on this blog, but also posted a rapid response on the BMJ website which I have reproduced here:

The Christian contribution to medicine is considerable

In his full page advertorial for the ‘Secular Medical Fellowship’, Colin Brewer gives an inaccurate and highly selective overview of the relationship between faith and medicine and neglects to mention that Christian doctors motivated by Jesus Christ’s teaching and example have been profoundly influential in shaping healthcare's history.

Many of medicine's pioneers were men and women of faith: Pare, Pasteur, Lister, Paget, Barnado, Jenner, Simpson, Sydenham, Osler, Skudder, Livingstone and many more.

Christians remain active in all fields of medicine today but particularly in AIDS care and education, drug rehabilitation, child health, palliative care, relief of poverty and in service to the developing world. In a recent survey, to which over 1,000 members of Christian Medical Fellowship (CMF) responded, 230 respondents had served long term in 48 countries around the world, 74% with a mission or church organization, and 459 had made short term visits (<6 months) to 98 countries, most commonly to train and teach (1).

Although respecting the authority of the Bible, CMF’s 4,000 doctor and 1,000 medical student members are not ‘text worshippers’ but rather, like 2.3 billion other of the world’s inhabitants, worship God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, who we believe revealed himself in the historical person of Jesus Christ.

Christ's dynamic entry into first century Palestine was marked by miraculous healing of many illnesses for which even today there are no known treatments. But along with his compassion to restore health he brought a message of healing of broken relationships - between human beings, between human beings and the planet and most crucially between human beings and God.

In his historical account of those events, Luke, probably the first ever Christian physician, tells us that Jesus sent his followers out 'to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick' (Luke 9:2). He is still sending them out today - to attend to the spiritual and physical needs of a suffering world.

BMJ readers who are interested in a more accurate and informative account of the Christian contribution to medicine are welcome to peruse the footnoted articles (2,3,4) on the CMF website, most of which were published in the Millennium edition of our journal Triple Helix (5).

1. Survey of CMF Graduate Members about International Work in Resource-poor Settings
2. May P. Jesus - the Pivot of History and Medical Care
3. Parry E. Luke - the Physician's Gospel
4. Beal-Preston R. The Christian Contribution to Medicine
5. Triple Helix Millennium Edition

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BMJ gives platform to Secular Medical Forum to attack Christianity and promote abortion, physician assisted suicide and embryonic stem cell research

On 30 November the British Medical Journal published an article by Colin Brewer, ‘a director of the Secular Medical Forum’ , titled ‘Secularism needs a distinctive medical voice’.

The 900 word one page article, which appeared in the BMJ’s ‘personal view’ column, and claimed to be ‘not commissioned; not externally peer reviewed’, is essentially an advertorial for Brewer's organisation.

It depicts atheist doctors as a historically persecuted minority and claims that they are ‘still vilified by religious leaders’ who ‘typically suppress dissent’ and ‘forbid fundamental criticism of their sacred texts’.

He adds that ‘most Europeans now have relaxed views on both faith and their texts’ and ‘are often indistinguishable in their daily behaviour from frank unbelievers’. This, according to Brewer, ‘displeases the minority of enthusiasts who take their ideologies seriously and want us to live and die as they believe their texts dictate’.

He claims that ‘few matters of current medicoethical concern are mentioned in sacred texts, and then often obscurely or contradictorily’.

The Bible apparently ‘does not condemn suicide’ but nevertheless, ‘there are well organised religious campaigns against legalising assisted dying’. Objection to abortion is similarly misguided as the view that life begins at fertilisation dates to 1869 when the Vatican ‘moved the goalposts’. Other ‘religious practices’ involving ‘childhood transfusions and genital mutilation’ are now categorised as ‘child abuse’.

We are told that ‘text worshippers are inherently unwilling to re-examine old dogmas’ and that the ‘separation of church and state is more important than ever’.

All this is preparation for an appeal to doctors to join the ‘Secular Medical Forum’ (SMF) which represents people who ‘unlike text worshippers… are poorly organised, do not gather weekly, and have no priests to encourage us personally to badger our MPs and BMA representatives about proposed legislation’.

Instead the SMF ‘exists to give a voice to the many secular health professionals’ and its members ‘have varying views on the great ethical issues’.

I was interested therefore to examine the SMF website see if these claims about ‘varying views on the great ethical issues’ actually rang true.

The following ‘views’ of the forum are pasted verbatim from its website:

1. ‘The Secular Medical Forum strongly supports the right of women to have legal and safe abortions’;

2. ‘The Secular Medical Forum (SMF) believes that legislation for Physician assisted suicide, with adequate safeguards, for terminally ill, competent adults should be introduced in the UK as soon as possible’;

3. ‘The Secular Medical Forum fully supports embryonic stem cell research - and also the creation of hybrid embryos’;

4. ‘The SMF considers that people with strong objections to offering normal medical care and activities should responsibly choose to work in a speciality which does not bring their personal views into conflict with patient care’;

5. ‘The SMF thinks it imperative that patients are made aware of relevant personal views (of doctors) at the earliest opportunity … and would like for there to be a register of these people, centrally kept by the appropriate professional bodies to which they belong, which can be open to the public.’

On its ‘resources’ page it lists some submissions it has made to various official bodies and gives links to the British Humanist Association, National Secular Society and Lawyers' Secular Society along with others to ‘pro-choice’ and pro-euthanasia organisations including Abortion Rights, Brook Advisory Centres, Marie Stopes International, Education for Choice, Dignity in Dying and Friends At The End (FATE).

The website gives very little information about SMF’s membership or office holders, and no address or contact details apart from a contact email for a Dr Anthony Lempert, an anti-circumcision campaigner who received the 2010 ‘academic’ prize at the Erotic Awards, an annual British event that ‘honours achievement in erotica worldwide’.

We are told that the SMF was established in December 2006 ‘following informal discussions at the AGM of the National Secular Society’ and that it ‘drafted statements on a variety of subjects (ranging from physician-assisted suicide to HIV/AIDS, and from abortion to stem-cell research) during January and February 2007’.

The SMF website does not tell us that its first coordinator, ‘Michael Irwin, a retired GP and a former Medical Director of the United Nations’, was also previously head of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society (now 'Dignity in Dying') and is currently leader of the controversial pro-euthanasia group ‘Society for Old Age Rational Suicide’, nor that he was struck off the medical register by the General Medical Council in 2005 for trying to help a friend kill himself. Irwin admitted obtaining sleeping pills to help his friend die and a GMC panel found him guilty of serious professional misconduct.

And neither the website nor the BMJ article tell us that Colin Brewer himself was also struck off the medical register in 2006 after being found guilty of serious professional misconduct by the GMC following allegations of inappropriate drug prescribing for patients with addictions.

From all appearances the SMF is a small pressure group led by doctors with extreme views who are considered no longer fit to practice, which has been set up to promote abortion, assisted suicide and embryonic stem cell research. I would think that most atheist doctors would not choose to be associated with it.

How interesting that the BMJ editors have taken it upon themselves to give it an international platform.

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