19 January 2023 , 08:15
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The doctor’s watchdog is holding almost four disciplinary hearings a year into horribly botched circumcision operations on boys.
Complaints include penises being left deformed, babies requiring emergency blood transfusions, and unsterile equipment leading to infections.
All forms of ritual genital cutting on girls is illegal in the UK, but religious and cultural circumcision on boys is permitted, including by non-doctors, and largely occurs among Jewish, Muslim and some African Christian communities, where they are often considered a religious obligation.
Defenders of the practice claim the procedure is safe, but the insurance company for doctors the Medical Protection Society warns that it carries "considerable risks and complications”.
Now a Freedom of Information request by the National Secular Society has found that the General Medical Council heard 39 cases of complaints concerning male circumcisions between 2012 and 2022.
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Among those investigated was Dr Muhammad Chaudhary, who carried out circumcisions in Gosforth, Newcastle, for £150.
A tribunal ruled that he had tried to cover up details of an operation on a boy aged two months, posing as a relative so that he could intercept mail meant for the family that had complained.
He was allowed to continue practising, but was banned from carrying out private circumcisions.
A doctor who ran a ‘Mobile Children’s Circumcision Service’ was struck off and has been charged with offences of causing actual bodily harm.
In one alleged case he did not check that the local anaesthetic was working and continued operating while the baby screamed.
Dr Sanchez of the National Secular Society“These complaints lay bare the dangers of medically unnecessary circumcision in babies and children,” said Alejandro Sanchez, a doctor and campaigns officer for the National Secular Society.
“It is a myth that circumcision is simple and safe.
“Subjecting a non-consenting child to a painful, dangerous and irreversible procedure to satisfy the religious wishes of parents flies in the face of medical ethics and child rights.”
He added that the findings were the tip of the iceberg because they only include complaints against doctors.
“The harms caused by non-medically trained individuals, who under the law can also carry out circumcision, hardly bear thinking about,” Dr Sanchez said.
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“The medical establishment and the government must now act, as they have done with female genital mutilation, to protect boys from medically unnecessary religious and cultural genital cutting.”