The AAP’s rhetorical strategies unmasked

Zitat

"In “The facade of inevitability”, an MA thesis from Iowa State University, Chris Jones takes a cool and highly critical look at the policy statement on circumcision issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics in August 2012. He presents a provocative argument that, contrary to the AAP’s claims, it is not an objective scientific assessment, but an exercise in rhetoric and persuasion. While the AAP claims it is merely providing information to assist parents to make a decision, in reality the policy is nudging them, not so subtly, in making a decision in favour of circumcision. The significance of Jones’ thesis is wider than the specifics of his argument, for he is really declaring that the emperor has no clothes. The AAP likes to regard itself as the pre-eminent world authority on all matters relating to the health of children; according to this unimpressed graduate student, it is nothing more than a professional interest group with an ideological axe to grind.

http://www.circinfo.org/Young_US_schol…rcumcision.html

Zitat

"This research also shows that an infant has little role in the decisions being made about its body, and that even the parents, while said to be given the ultimate choice, are separated into those who make good choices and those who do not by the AAP’s technical report on male circumcision."