Enough to Raise Hippocrates From the Grave

Forget John Yoo's twisted legal rationales; ignore 24's pornographic violence. The original source of the mind-set that torture is acceptable may be the apparent disappearance of ethical training in the medical field.

Remember the doctors who were called in to "oversee" torture of prisoners at Guantanamo? The psychologists who strayed so far from the tenets of their profession that they actually gave advice as to the most effective methods of "enhanced interrogation?"

The ethical rot appears to have spread to the doctors who treat children, because their professional organization is now recommending and describing how to perform female genital mutiliation.

PZ Myers:

The American Academy of Pediatrics has come up with a compromise on female genital mutilation.

International human rights organization Equality Now is stunned by a new policy statement issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which essentially promotes female genital mutilation (FGM) and advocates for "federal and state laws [to] enable pediatricians to reach out to families by offering a 'ritual nick'," such as pricking or minor incisions of girls' clitorises. The Policy Statement "Ritual Genital Cutting of Female Minors", issued by the AAP on April 26, 2010, is a significant set-back to the Academy's own prior statements on the issue of FGM and is antithetical to decades of noteworthy advancement across Africa and around the world in combating this human rights violation against women and girls. It is ironic that the AAP issued its statement the very same day that Congressman Joseph Crowley (D-NY) and Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) announced the introduction of new bipartisan legislation, The Girls Protection Act (H.R. 5137), to close the loophole in the federal law prohibiting FGM by making it illegal to transport a minor girl living in the U.S. out of the country for the purpose of FGM.

Nice bit of accommodationism there. "We'll just mutilate baby girls a little bit, to make the misogynist patriarchal assholes happy." Well, we have no obligation to make misogynist patriarchal assholes happy at all, especially not when it involves waving scalpels about in the genitals of children.

Read the whole thing.