Though circumcision It has been a frequent practice in the USA. for many years, and it is also in other countries for religious reasons, experts in the United Kingdom consider that it is an unnecessary and risky practice and that is why they had been complaining about the sale of learning kits like the one shown in the image.
Apparently, Amazon sold it with the corresponding surgical material and a model of a child's genitals. A letter from the National Secular Society (NSS), which explains the risks and reasons for this practice, led those responsible for the well-known multinational to remove the aforementioned kit.
The letter from Dr. Antony Lempert of the NSS
As we read in The Guardian, in his letter, the president of the NSS medical forum explained to Amazon that in the United Kingdom there is no clear regulation regarding male circumcision, and he argued that the sale to the public of a learning kit could encourage to unskilled professionals to do unnecessary surgeries in dangerous conditions for them, even outside an operating room, putting the child at risk of major damage, and even at risk of infection.
And it is that in more and more countries it is considered that non-therapeutic circumcision is meaningless. In the words of Lempert:
(Circumcision) puts young children at risk of death and serious injury. This practice could be encouraged by the morally negligent sale of children's circumcision training kits to the public.
The kit was removed this Wednesday
Amazon confirmed the withdrawal of the kits this past Wednesday. Apparently, they were sold with models of different skin tones, and were advertised as "made with soft material, which is flexible, delicate and realistic to the touch" (we could almost add that they could be sold for other more perverse purposes).
One of the sellers of these products was the manufacturer Life / Form, and interestingly it is still for sale in the US, where the intervention, as I say, is still done in many cases for social reasons rather than religious (in many families it is done because the rest of the boys were circumcised at birth, as a tradition, or to prevent the little one from feeling different from the rest).
Circumcision is performed primarily in Jewish and Muslim families; In Catalonia, for example, where there is a large presence of families of Maghreb origin, it was carried out for religious reasons in public hospitals. However, a few years ago this practice was withdrawn from the service portfolio because it was considered that It was not a necessary or recommended practice.
According to Lempert, no medical association in the world recommends circumcision anymore, while the British Association of Pediatric Surgeons warns that the practice of circumcision in babies is very rare because there is no clinical reason, and that if done it should be practiced by medical experts in child surgery.
Circumcision Risks
Although in the US The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests that circumcision may entail certain benefits in the baby, such as a lower risk of urinary tract infections, penile cancer and sexual contact diseases (although the evidence is inconclusive), it is considered to be a painful intervention in many cases, and have also been associated injury cases and even deaths.
In 2009, 105 visits for circumcision-related injuries were recorded at the Birmingham hospital, and in 2011 they were 11 children admitted to a neonatal ICU for serious complications directly related.
Thus, they consider that the sale of these kits can normalize a practice that should cease to be carried out, especially in a country where, as it is not regulated, it can cause what we have already mentioned above: that people without the necessary qualification, or without adequate experience, carry out these interventions putting the lives of children at risk.
Quoting Lempert again, and as a conclusion to the post:
A growing number of doctors and lawyers question forced genital cutting and recognize the need to protect children from this unethical practice. Religious freedom is not an absolute right and certainly does not justify the amputation of healthy and functional parts of babies' bodies.
