VOS IZ NEIAS: NY Times Opinion Column On Metzitzah B'Pah

Monday, January 09, 2006

NY Times Opinion Column On Metzitzah B'Pah

2 Comments:

At 8:55 AM, AskMeLater said…

Dear Editor:

I'd like to take issue with your position on the issue. Religious interference aside, one must look at the data that is behind the campaign. What are the true risks that are associated with the act. According to available statistics, the rate of infection is lower than HIV with condom use - meaning, there is a greater chance of getting HIV with a condom, than getting herpes via Metziza Bpeh. Why is it that the NYC Health Dept isn't educating everyone about the risks of condom use, but are promoting it as a means of preventing HIV.

I believe that this is just an attempt by the social elite to take steps to eventaully ban a ritual that they determine as sadistic and ancient. There is no medical evidence backing their actions. Of the cases reported, it was later determined that the deaths were not as a result of the ritual, yet the health dep't continues to make believe it was. If it truly was the cause of death, then why hasn't the Attorney General brought manslaughter charges against the Mohel?

No one in the Jewish community is saying that if the risks were great then we should stop the practice. What is beings said is that the facts don't back their campaign, and therefore it is just a blatant blood libel. If we can't trust the commissioner to use statistics that are accepted worldwide, then how can we trust him at all. He is losing all his credibility by making an issue out of a no issue. A similar thing occured recently regarding the "Super AIDS virus" that was said to be discovered in NY. There were emergency warnings to the gay community about it, including evidence to back it. It was only a mere three weeks later that it was said to have been just on over panicked administration, and there was not need for the "education campaign"

Let's leave religion out of this, and deal with the facts.
At 9:47 PM, VOS IZ NEIAS said…

Taking a Stand on a Rite With Hazards

CONFLICTS of church and state can be so painful that the temptation is to buy time. Wait, and maybe the problems will go away. Alas, they always come back, as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is finding out the hard way.

At issue was the circumcision rite, an issue the administration delayed action on during the election.

During his re-election campaign, his health officials tried to get supporters of a controversial procedure used by some ultra-Orthodox Jews to abandon it - a circumcision ritual that can infect infants with herpes, and had done so in three recent cases, one fatal.
The mayor, who often champions his independence from the usual political forces, put the issue on hold during his campaign, deferring to leaders of a religious community whose votes he sought (and got). They agreed to stop the one practitioner, or mohel, responsible for the three infections. But the rabbis defended the practice, metzitzah b'peh, in which a mohel sucks the blood from the cut to clean it, as central to their religious practices. They still do.
Last month, city health officials announced that two more infants who underwent the procedure had been infected with herpes, and that one of them had suffered brain damage. The health commissioner, Thomas R. Frieden, subsequently issued an "open letter to the Jewish community" detailing the dangers of the procedure. A fact sheet will be distributed to parents of newborns in hospitals throughout the city.
The department's actions infuriated defenders of the practice among Orthodox leaders, who accused the city of infringing on their religious freedom, and charged the mayor with misleading them last year for their votes.
The health department did not prohibit the procedure, which is very common in most Hasidic sects, but otherwise is in limited use even among the Orthodox. Rabbis say it is performed on as many as 4,000 city infants each year.
Dr. Frieden says a ban would be unenforceable. There is also an argument that it would strongly telegraph the city's disapproval, and say that the mayor, boastfully unyielding in his pursuit of a smoking ban, doesn't play political favorites.
The religious component makes this different. But how different?
"This is a health issue, not a religious issue," said Dr. Jonathan M. Zenilman, chief of infectious diseases at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore and professor of epidemiology at the university's Bloomberg School of Public Health, named for its chief benefactor, New York's mayor. "There is no reason why this practice should be allowed."
Some Orthodox leaders disagree, though the health department concluded that "there is no reasonable doubt" that the practice led to several herpes cases.
SOME rabbis say that the mothers must have infected their babies. However, the health department said that several of the mothers tested negative for herpes. And, Dr. Zenilman explained, pregnant women infected with the herpes virus transmit protective antibodies to the fetus. Only if the mother is infected late in her pregnancy could she infect her child, and then lesions would appear all over the baby's body, not concentrated on the genitals, as in the cases in the city.
Some Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews question the procedure's safety but say that the religious community, not government, should decide on its use.
A hypothetical, then: If a group said female genital cutting was part of its religion, would the city allow its practice? "We would not," said former Mayor Edward I. Koch, who called metzitzah b'peh "an abuse" and said, "It should be stopped."
But by whom? Orthodox leaders are so infuriated by the city's educational efforts that some threatened to protest at the mayor's inauguration wearing yellow Stars of David. In other words, some Jewish New Yorkers were ready to display a symbol of Nazi persecution at City Hall because the health department issued advice to parents about a procedure than can kill babies.
The would-be protesters restrained themselves, a welcome decision to those who might have been troubled to see anyone in 21st-century New York equating a letter from public health professionals to the horrors of the Holocaust.
That anyone even thought of invoking - and demeaning - the Holocaust underscores something we suspect Mr. Bloomberg has figured out by now: There's no winning the really tough ones, so he may as well follow his own advice. Mayors, he advised in a speech last September, "solve problems not by taking both sides of big issues, but by deciding what's right and then going after it."

VOS IZ NEIAS

Monday, January 09, 2006

NY Times Opinion Column On Metzitzah B'Pah

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