Engineered skin products may well be great products with many uses. But there's a serious ethical problem with using foreskins taken from, not donated by, non-consenting minors.
So what's the big deal, boys are going to be circumcised anyway, why not profit from it?
It's the profit motive that's the problem.
Parents report being pressured by hospital staff to circumcise their newborn sons. In fact, the anti-circumcision organization IntactAmerica.org was originally funded by couple in response to their disgust at having been pressured to have their boy cut.
Infant boys' foreskins may be very valuable to tissue engineering companies but they are more valuable and rightfully belong to the boys themselves.
Infant circumcision is an unnecessary amputation that cannot be refused by the prospective amputee himself. That makes it a forced amputation, a very serious human rights violation.
Circumcision advocates within the CDC are now pushing to get the agency to endorse circumcision as an HIV preventative. Sounds great, but if you read further there is no real claim of effectiveness. You still have to wear a condom if you want to be actually protected from infection. The circumcision-HIV experiment has already been conducted on a mass scale and the result was negative. America has the highest circumcision rate in the developed world and also the highest HIV rate. Perhaps that's why circumcision advocates are careful to say that you still need to wear a condom. Being cut is simply of no use in fighting HIV.
So why push parents to have their baby boy cut when it's not going to protect him from anything?
Follow the money. Amputating infant foreskins is a billion dollar business. And now someone else wants his foreskin, the tissue engineering companies.
The mass production of living tissue would be a fine development if it didn't depend on infant foreskins. Treating non-consenting minors as a source of spare parts violates our most basic ethical standards.
