From a FB thread on Banning Circumcision

Dustin Gray: Calling it "genital mutilation" is incorrect. I suggest you look up the word "mutilation."

Me: I would ... like to hear a definition of mutilation that excludes cutting away pieces of someone else's flesh with neither their express nor implied consent.

Dustin Gray: ‎@ Isaiah Sage; Sure, will you accept one from wordnet?
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=mutilation

(n) mutilation (an injury that causes disfigurement or that deprives you of a limb or other important body part); (n) defacement, disfigurement, disfiguration, mutilation (the act of damaging the appearance or surface of something) "the defacement of an Italian mosaic during the Turkish invasion"; "he objected to the dam's massive disfigurement of the landscape"

Again, I understand why the term "genital mutilation" better fits your narrative, but that does not make it an accurate or effective term. If you feel as though the facts of your argument are not persuasive enough, opting for more aggressive terminology does not strike me as a good way to go about improving it.

Instead of defending the use of an inaccurate (yet satisfying) term, why not approach it the problem reasonably: is it a beneficial medical procedure or is it pointless?

The consent issue confuses me and seems to be besides the point. Neonates are incapable of giving consent. Should we not perform and medical procedure that may result in the loss of some part of their body? What if the newborn REALLY wanted a lotus birth (where the umbillical cord is not cut off, and is allowed to fall off naturally)? By your own logic wouldn't that be belly button mutilation?

Me: The wordnet definition does not exclude removing the foreskin from a newborn boy. You're assuming that the foreskin is not an important part of the body, but it is. I treasure mine, and I empathize with men who resent having been deprived of theirs. http://www.youtube.com/user/TLCTugger#p/u/14/aZ2ZyxyZJrk.

Consent is very relevant here. Whether a procedure is a beneficial medical procedure is really only relevant when (as you point out about newborns) the patient is presently incapable of giving consent. If you are a libertarian, Dustin Gray (though I don't know if you are), you would oppose any medical treatment of an adult against his express denial of consent, even if it were beneficial to him. So (and again, this is assuming you're a libertarian) you wouldn't boil everything down to medical beneficience vs. pointlessness. The medical beneficience of a procedure on a baby is necessary because it establishes *implied* consent.

The benefit of a medical procedure has to be substantially high to form implied consent. It has to be necessary to address an immanent threat of death or serious bodily injury or disfigurment, or - if the threat is not immanent - it has to have serious numbers behind it, like the decreased infant mortality rates that result from the innoculation of infants. Claims about the medical benefits of circumcision are too dubious to establish implied consent.

Your example about belly button mutilation vs. lotus birth is clever and very worth considering, but cutting the umbelical cord is only a little analagous to infant male circumcision. When a baby boy is circumcized, he is more or less permanently deprived of something from which he could have derived much sensual pleasure as an older boy and as an adult. When a baby's umbelical cord is cut, he is deprived of something that would have fallen off two to three days after birth anyway. Yes, I do think a lotus birth is more in-line with libertarian principles; but "belly button mutilation", as you suggest I call it, is nowhere near as invasive and nowhere near as presumptuous as cutting off a baby boy's foreskin.