Circumcision - Green Party consult on ban

It may be of interest here that the Green Party of England and Wales earlier this year became the first major UK political party to consider a ban on non-medical infant male circumcision. I should add that this is not current Green policy, and nothing has been decided yet. Furthermore, I think it very unlikely that the members would agree to an outright ban. I was researching the whole issue this morning. With Reform UK's deep links to Zionist organisations there is certainly no chance of any restrictions, let alone bans, on non-medical male circumcision from that quarter. I did wonder, however, whether Rupert Lowe's little fascist outfit Restore Britain might be in favour of banning circumcision, since they differ from Reform (1) in saying the quiet bit out loud, and (2) in being antisemitic as well as Islamophobic; but, oddly enough, though they wish to ban a number of non-Christian religious practices, they are silent on the issue of circumcision. The Greens' consideration of this issue was part of the Green Party's Health Policy Working Group. The consultation asked members whether they believed that “non-therapeutic male circumcision should only be performed on children who are old enough to make an informed choice”. The Jewish Chronicle has a suitably alarmist article on the consultation on its website. In response to the consultation, Muslim Greens and Jewish Greens issued a joint statement, advising against a ban. It spoke of the dangers of driving the practice underground (which is a serious issue, that I would not dismiss lightly), and argued that a ban would risk isolating and alienating Jewish and Muslim communities even further (which is also a serious point). Instead they called for: - education – educate the importance [of] bodily autonomy, consent and risk of harm - regulation - only allow registered surgeons, including trained mohels, to carry out procedures. Audit and publish outcomes for surgeons publicly - support – anyone adversely affected by surgical procedure is supported I would certainly appove of these measures, but I think I would personally go quite heavily on the first of these recommendations, providing all parents of Jewish or Muslim faith or culture with information about the potential harms of circumcision, and debunking the myths that tend to justify the practice. In particular, as the joint statement linked to above points out, "Islamically, circumcision in the first days after birth is preferable but not a Fard (mandatory) and can be carried out later in life when the child/young man can consent for themselves." So there might be a possibility of pushing back against infant male circumcision in the Muslim community, even if traditional Judaism remains a harder nut to crack. I should emphasise that education and information should alone be the tools, and that in the end a legal prohibition would probably be very unwise for the reasons given in the joint statement. But all this is yet another example of an area in which the Greens are pushing the Overton window in a manner that I think is very much to be welcomed.