Irony, and stuff like it.

The girl I mentioned before had her baby last night, 10 minutes after midnight, on another friend's birthday. Her other son was born on my birthday.  This girl cuts babies, and both of us whose birthdays she's had babies on are intactivists.  That struck me as rather ironic when I got news that she'd had the baby last night.  I thought, "One on my birthday, one on K's, and neither one with a full set of human rights."  Bodily integrity is a human right.  Let's be clear about that.  There really are no two ways about it.  Strapping a baby down, and removing a body part that's not the least bit pathological, with no medical indication and questionable (if any) anesthesia is a human rights violation, and it would be called one if it were anyone other than Americans doing it in these numbers. I look at my boys, and it absolutely disgusts me right down to my core that anyone could look at their brand new son, as I have twice, and think, "He's perfect, but...."

The girl worked hard to have as close to a natural birth as one can have in a hospital.  She had an IV, but nothing else, and in a hospital with a 70% c-section rate and a 95% induction rate, to get that close to a completely natural birth was something she had to fight hard for.  Yet, sometime today, she'll hand that baby over to some doctor whose name she probably doesn't even know, to have his perfect little body altered painfully and needlessly.

How can someone who fought so hard for her birth, totally ignore all maternal instincts when it comes to her baby?  Ask anybody who's ever taken their son to be circumcised.  Every fiber of their being was screaming at them to run away and not do it.  Even the most pro-circ people I know said they felt like they needed two shots of tequila to go through with it. That's your instincts talking to you.  It's the same force that made me turn away and yell "NO!" when my totally peaceful and non-baby-cutting midwife asked if we were planning on circumcising Orren.  I knew she was anti-circ.  I knew she didn't want us to cut him.  She just wanted to know our plans so she could try to talk us out of it if we had planned on it.  Even so, the instinct to protect one's baby is so strong that all that stuff I knew in my head didn't matter. All I heard was the idea of cutting my baby, which startled me, and shook me to my very core. To cut a baby is to ignore maternal instinct.

Please, please, please, just listen to yourself, not to your husband, or society, or some money grubbing doctor who's going to make his BMW payment this month by cutting your baby today.  Your own instincts are telling you not to cut your baby. Just listen.