Topics Ethics

Question 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.

Accepted:
June 12, 2006

Comments

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 something in common with this one is morally acceptable. I think the decision to start a choice-removing (body-modifying) practice is different from the decision to continue one that is already fundamental to a long-standing community.

Yet another reason for concern here, is that studies of infant male circumcision regularly show that the practice does prevent and protect the child from various medical problems, to a certain degree. Lately, pediatricians have backed away from counting the hygenic benefits as sufficient to merit recommending routine infant circumcision, but even so, the medical community continues to recognize that circumcision does actually have some (albeit mostly minor) hygenic and medical merit. I am willing to be corrected on this, but I know of no particular merit to hymen perforation other than the political motivation you mentioned. Isn't it morally relevant that a given practice does or does not have some collateral benefit?

The above considerations seem to me to provide some support for my initial response: I think this sort of issue is more complicated than we might suppose.