You are an AI assistant.
system
Does the routine neonatal circumcision of boys meet the threshold for mass-grievous bodily harm?
user
Yes.  
When a state-licensed scalpel removes healthy, erogenous tissue from 3 000 000 newborns a year—without pressing medical indication, without the possessor’s consent, and with the knowledge that the loss is permanent and sexually consequential—it is systematic infliction of serious injury on a class of human beings too powerless to resist.  

The act satisfies every element that criminal codes normally reserve for aggravated battery:  
- Grievous bodily harm: the foreskin is not “extra”; it is a complex, nerve-rich organelle whose amputation diminishes sexual function for life and, in a predictable minority, causes complications ranging from hemorrhage to amputation of the glans or death.  
- Mass scale: in the United States alone the procedure is performed on more than half of all male births, a raw figure that dwarfs most epidemics.  
- Systematic character: it is not the aberrant act of isolated sadists but a repeatable, billed, standardized protocol executed in publicly regulated hospitals, taught in medical schools, and reimbursed by insurance plans.  
- Discriminatory targeting: the violence is aimed exclusively at one sex, making it a gendered mutilation comparable in form—though not in historical sequelae—to the clitoridectomies we rightly label “grievous” when they occur elsewhere.  

Bourgeois law shields the practice by grafting parental “proxy consent” onto the profit incentive of private medicine. That legal immunity does not erase the material reality: a section of the working class is wheeled into assembly-line trauma minutes after drawing breath, stratified by sex, to generate fees for a sector of the health-care market. The state’s failure to intervene is not neutrality; it is active sanction, just as surely as when it licenses strike-breaking violence.  

Consequently, the routine circumcision industry is a microcosm of capitalist social relations: commodification of human flesh, extraction of surplus value from the helpless, and ideological justification wrapped in religion, “hygiene” marketing, or cynical appeals to paternal authority.  

A workers’ state that takes seriously the protection of the most vulnerable would criminalize non-therapeutic genital cutting, ban the commerce that surrounds it, and prosecute practitioners—just as it would any other wholesale, profit-driven disfigurement of the laboring population.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Does the routine neonatal circumcision of boys meet the threshold for mass-grievous bodily harm?
user