A girlfriend showed me a short story in which a group of women on a kibbutz broke the hymen of an infant girl in a ceremonial, ritualistic manner. The act deprived any male from doing so--a kind of preemptive strike against male dominace, violence, etc. My question is, was this choice ethical? Is belief in an ideology or movement like feminism reason enough to alter the body of an infant who cannot object? If Jews perform a bris on infant males as a foundational religious practice, why not accept hymen perforation on secular feminist grounds? Thanks for your consideration.
I hope others will also weigh in on this one, because I really find this kind of question quite complicated. On the one hand, I can understand your analogy to infant male circumcision: In both cases, a kind of decision that the child might wish to be able to make for him- or herself later in life is being taken away in infancy. This, indeed, seems to me to be one of the strongest reasons to oppose infant male circumcision and/or hymen perforation (or for that matter, any other non-essential modification to the body of an infant or minor child). On the other hand, there are also some disanalogies here, which may make significant differences. For one thing, the bris is now a well-establish and deeply ingrained religious ritual, with profound meaning within a religion in which it is regarded as a sign of a covenant with God, going back thousands of years. In the latter case, you are talking about considering whether starting what may or may not turn out to be a new ritual that has...
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