"A personal view of religious circumcision in Britain today, made by Jewish father and filmmaker Victor Schonfeld. The program includes graphic footage of the procedure and images which will inevitably distress some viewers." Also: bris (baby's intact penis, mohel's sharpened pointed thumbnail, mohel forcing baby's foreskin back, slipping shield over foreskin, cutting foreskin off, then sucking blood from screaming baby's penis through a glass tube); the baby's non-Jewish father watching a video of the bris just described; 5-month old smiling intact Jewish baby; segment about pain study; "One Baby's Story" and "The Stories They Fail to Mention." First aired in London, Channel 4, Sept. 9, 1995, despite attempts to suppress it.

41 minutes. VHS. $295 institutions, $195 individuals, $65 rental. Filmmakers Library, 124 E. 40 St., NY, NY 10016. Tel: 212-808-4980. Fax: 212-808-4983.
 

Dr. Adrian Lloyd Thomas, Pediatrician (in response to being asked about circumcision without anesthesia): "You can see there a very definite response from the baby as soon the forceps are applied to the foreskin. The baby is holding his breath, shivering. Infants having an operation may actually experience more pain than adults do having the same procedure, and the reason for this is that the control mechanisms, particularly in the spinal cord, which are highly developed to damp down and suppress pain in a mature adult nervous system, are not so well developed in the small baby. So, the pain signals travel through uncontrolled, unsuppressed ... I think it would be unwise to draw that conclusion [that the baby stopped crying because the pain was over]. I'd more prefer to think that the experience had been so overwhelming that the baby can't ... put up a fight anymore ... My personal feeling as a pediatric anesthetist is that it is not ethical to perform circumcisions without some form of topical anesthesia."

Narrator: "[T]he British medical consensus is that newborn circumcision is not medically warranted, that the baby has been made to give up a protective covering of erogenous tissue, and that the glans of his penis, an internal organ biologically, will now be exposed."

Woman pediatric surgeon: "Some other complications ... occur later ... when children have realized that they have been circumcised, they feel psychologically that something is grossly wrong with their sex life."

Man: "My penis, instead of ... hanging straight up and down so that the top faces forwards and the under-neath faces back ... the underneath will face to the right or ... will start facing forwards so it describes a sort of corkscrew twist to the left ... There is an interweaving of the physical mutilation which I've had to live with for nearly 50 years as well as the awareness that I have been deprived of one of life's basic pleasures."

African mother: "He was taken to hospital ... a few minutes later they [told us] that the child is dead."

Jewish mother: "I'm a Jewish mother. My son Max is five months old and I refuse to have him circumcised. [I told my mother,] 'I would do anything not to hurt you, my parents, except hurt my child.'"

Dr. Majid Katme, President, Islamic Medical Assoc.: "Is she, the mother or the father, are they really listening and submitting to the teaching of their religion or are they using their mind and questioning things?"

Dr. Jenny Goodman, Medical Doctor and Psychotherapist: "None of us do it for medical reasons. We do it because we fear being cast out from the tribe. But after having done it, we comfort ourselves with these medical myths ... If we could progress from sacrifice through castration to circumcision, then we can continue to progress all the way away from any kind of physical injury."

http://www.sexuallymutilatedchild.org/itsaboy.htm

NOCIRC Circumcision Video: Neonatal circumcision with Plasti-bell device. Includes female genital mutilation segment. 16 minutes.  Color. VHS. $20.
NOCIRC, POB 2512, San Anselmo, CA 94979.