Swedish Province Will Ban Circumcision for Boys
A county in Sweden is planning to ban non-medical circumcision of boys, its commissioner said.
Per-Ola Mattsson, commissioner of Blekinge County, said he would move ahead with plans to ban ritual circumcision by bringing the subject up in February with the county’s health board, according to an article published Thursday by the Sydöstran Daily.
According to Dagens Medicin, Mattsson, who is also chairman of the Public Health Board of Blekinge, said he opposed the practice because minors “have no possibility to say no to the surgery and therefore the county should not perform these procedures.”
Located in southern Sweden, Blekinge County has a population of about 150,000.
In Sweden, nonmedical and medical circumcision may be performed only by licensed professionals, as per legislation from 2001.
Under the legislation, Jewish ritual circumcisers, or mohelim, in Sweden receive their licenses from the country’s health board, but a nurse or doctor must still be present when they perform the procedure. Representatives of the country’s Jewish community told JTA they are pleased with the arrangement as it does not prevent them from performing the ritual.
In recent years, Scandinavian countries have seen an intensification of efforts to ban ritual circumcision by activists who say it violates children’s rights and by anti-immigration nationalists who seek to limit the effect that Muslim presence is having on Swedish society.
In September, the rightist Sweden Democrats Party submitted a motion in parliament in favor of banning ritual circumcision.
In October, the children’s ombudsmen of all Nordic countries — Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway — released a joint declaration proposing a ban on circumcision.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
