Oh, fabulous – a Florida court has ruled that a mother has to have her 4-year-old son circumcised because his father wants it. A court has ordered a mother to get her son mutilated because that’s what his father wants.
As we reported in the spring, Boynton Beach mom Heather Hironimus was ordered by the court to have her then-3-year-old child circumcised, in accord with a parenting agreement she’d signed in 2011. However, in the intervening years, Hironimus had read up on the practice and come to learn it was not medically necessary and even risky.
She went to court to fight the father’s wish to have the procedure completed and was granted an emergency injunction.
Now, however, she has reportedly lost an appeal, and sympathizers are using social media to make pleas to the judge in the case and to raise awareness to her cause.
Rights of the child, folks. First do no harm. When in doubt, don’t mutilate. What should the default be? No mutilation.
A campaign called “#SavingChase Photo & Video Crusade” encourages parents to “take pictures and/or videos of you or your children pronouncing ‘Save Chase from Circumcision,’ or something along those lines, on camera with the hashtag #SavingChase.”
Many have complied:
Cindy Hetzer via Facebook
But wait! Can those children with the signs consent?
The irony — of people arguing that boys shouldn’t be circumcised until they can consent yet using their own toddlers to make points in social media campaigns — was not lost on some commenters, who fired back with statements like: “I don’t feel comfortable using children for political means. They can’t consent much like they can’t consent to genital surgery.”
Don’t be silly. The two are not comparable. One is an irrevocable removal of a piece of the body for no medical reason, and the other is holding a sign in a photograph. I’m not generally a big fan of enlisting children to hold political signs, but in this case the relevance is obvious – they are little children like Chase, who given a choice would prefer not to have pieces cut off them for no medical reason. (No, I don’t think parents should pierce their children’s ears.)