Contents & Videos

Sections:

News Stories

TV Show Segments

Doctors

Moms, Students, Men etc

The above sections all have their videos embedded in the right column. The links in the following left column sections, all open in a new window. On any video if you want, you can click the rightmost lower button on it to view it full screen.

Feature Documentaries

Decision Circumcision -- 19mins

Produced by the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers, it contains an excellent overview of all the things you need to know but haven't heard.

Penn & Teller's BS Circumcision -- 29mins

This funny and bold documentary uses extensive strong language while interviewing circumcisers, parents, doctors, and activists both for and against routine infant circumcision.

Cut: Slicing Through the Myths -- 37mins

The critically acclaimed documentary on male circumcision by Chicago filmmaker Eli Ungar-Sargon. It highlights Jewish reasons but also contains much value for Christian and secular parents.

Mother, why did you circumcise me? -- 35mins

Follow Dutch journalist/filmmaker Michael Schaap as he interviews his own mother, circumcisers, politicians, Jews and Muslims, a restored British man, and some American activists.

Cutting with Tradition -- 24mins

This sensitive religious circumcision documentary follows two Jewish couples as they deal with the decision of circumcising their sons.

Learn about Foreskin

15 Square Inches of Erogenous Tissue -- 2mins

This animation drawing shows the full size of the foreskin and describes some of it's functions.

Explanation of Foreskin -- 3mins

This animation shows what foreskin does and what happens when it is taken away.

Computer Model of Male Foreskin -- 2mins

This animation focuses on the foreskin's mobility.

The Functions of the Foreskin -- 19mins

From a medical perspective, the development of the prepuce is traced from before birth to adulthood, and then its immunological and sexual functions are described.

Watch Baby Foreskinectomies

Routine Infant Circumcision -- 6mins

The doctor narrates as he does it. If you listen carefully, you can hear the mother in the background.

Plastibell Infant Circumcision -- 4mins

Here, a doctor is teaching others the technique so each step is explained.

Still Photo Sequences of Main Techniques -- 3mins

Shows photos of the different circumstraints and several different Gomco clamp, Mogen Clamp and the Plastibell infant circumcisions.

Gomco Clamp Infant Circumcision -- 6mins

Watch an actual circumcision done on a baby by a doctor in a hospital with the father watching.

________________________________________

Historical Quotes

While these quotes from historical luminaries were collected with this issue in mind, they apply equally well to many other important parenting causes. These quotes were culled from Yuki's Intactivism Resources.

Quotes on Conformity:

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect."

--Mark Twain

"Commandment #1 of any truly civilized society is this: Let people be different."

--David Grayson

"Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority."

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

"When we lose the right to be different, we lose the right to be free."

--Anonymous

"Our posterity will wonder at our ignorance of things so plain."

-- Seneca (Roman statesman and philosopher)

Quotes on Medicine:

"Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm."

--Hippocrates

"We shall have to learn to refrain from doing things merely because we know how to do them."

--Theodore Fox, Speech to College Physicians

"Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient."

--Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary

"Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little to cure diseases of which they know less in human beings of whom they know nothing."

--Voltaire

"Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.

--Thomas Szasz

"The treatment is worse than the disease."

--Francis Bacon

"Surgeons must be very careful

When they take the knife!

Underneath their fine incisions

Stirs the Culprit - Life!"

--Emily Dickinson

Quotes on Children:

"What's done to children they will do to society."

--Karl Menninger

"The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children."

--Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"We can't form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us."

--Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

"Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event."

--Gaston Bachelard

"What the mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin."

--Henry Ward Beecher

"Men are more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children."

--William Penn

"Oh what a tangled web do parents weave when they think that their children are naïve."

--Ogden Nash

"If you bungle raising your children I don't think whatever else you do matters."

--Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

"Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They came through you but not from you

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you."

--Kahlil Gibran, On Children

Quotes on the Body/Nature:

"Nature does nothing uselessly."

-- Aristotle (384-322 BCE)

"If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred."

--Walt Whitman

"We should show greater respect for the genius of Nature's designs, rigorously tested and refined over millions of years."

-- Charles, Prince of Wales

"This was the most unkindest cut of all."

--William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

"The body is a sacred garment. It is your first and last garment; it is what you enter life in and what you depart life with, and it should be treated with honor."

--Martha Graham

"Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies."

--Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

"Nature is a possessive mistress, and whatever mistakes she makes about the structure of the less essential organs such as the brain and stomach, in which she is not much interested, you can be sure that she knows best of the genital organs."

-- Sir James Spence

"The trouble about always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind."

--G. K. Chesterton

"We live in a atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, or our relatives, or our incomes, of our accents, or our opinions, or our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins."

--George Bernard Shaw

"As the body is prior in order of generation to the soul, so the irrational is prior to the rational. The proof is that anger and wishing and desire are implanted in children from their very birth, but reason and understanding are developed as they grow older. Wherefore, the care of the body ought to precede that of the soul, and the training of the appetitive part should follow; none the less our care of it must be for the sake of the reason, and our care of the body for the sake of the soul."

--Aristotle

Quotes on Education/Activism:

"All truth goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed.

Then it is violently opposed.

Finally, it is accepted as self-evident."

--Arthur Schoepenhauer

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

--Margaret Mead

"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."

--Thomas Jefferson

"Each time a person stands up for an idea, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

--Robert F. Kennedy

"It's not the facts which guide the conduct of men, but their opinions about the facts; which may be entirely wrong. We can only make them right by discussion."

--Sir Norman Angell

"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."

--Friedrich Nietzsche

"What history teaches us is that men have never learned anything from it."

--Georg Wilhelm Hegel

"It is never too late to give up your prejudices."

--Henry David Thoreau

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

--Marcel Proust

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Quotes on Custom/Tradition/Habit:

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we have been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth... It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken."

--Carl Sagan

"In civilized society most educated people are not even aware of the extent to which savage ignorance survives at their doors."

--Sir James Frazer

"Tradition will accustom people to any atrocity."

--George Bernard Shaw

"Habit and routine have an unbelievable power to waste and destroy."

--Henri de Lubac

"As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities."

--Voltaire

"When people are mutilated, it is criminal, not cultural."

-- Madeleine Albright, former US Secretary of State

"Often the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it."

--Mark Twain

"[A] long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason."

--Thomas Paine, Common Sense

"We are more sensible of what is done against custom than against nature."

--Plutarch

"Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed; - history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!"

--Frederich Nietzsche

"Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean."

--George Santayana

"He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the great innovator."

--Francis Bacon

"Quick decisions are unsafe decisions."

--Sophocles

"Habit with him was all the test of truth;

It must be right, I've done it from my youth."

--George Crabbe

"Habit is a great deadener."

--Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

"The cruelest lies are often told in silence."

--Robert Louis Stevenson

"Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence"

--Aristotle

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."

--Bertrand Russell

"Puritanism: The haunting fear that somewhere, someone might be happy."

--H.L. Mencken

"All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"...the conclusion is always there ready-made before the thinking process; the thinking does not serve, as in the rational realm, to arrive at a correct conclusion; rather, it serves to confirm an already existing irrational conclusion and to rationalize it. This is generally called "prejudice"; what is overlooked is that this prejudice has social consequences of considerable magnitude, that it is very wide-spread and practically synonymous with what is called 'inertia and tradition'; it is intolerant, that is, it does not tolerate the rational thinking which might do away with it; consequently, the thinking of the emotional plague is inaccessible to arguments; it has its own technique within its own realm, its own 'logicality', as it were; for this reason, it gives the impression of rationality without being actually rational."

--Wilhelm Reich

*

For quotes specifically about circumcision, view my page:

Notable Quotes on Routine Infant Circumcision

~*~

Back to Top