The city has reportedly delayed its plans to repeal its policy of mandatory parental consent for metzitzah b’peh, a controversial ultra-Orthodox Jewish circumcision ritual in which a mohel sucks blood from a baby’s snipped penis.
In 2012, the Bloomberg administration and the Board of Health began requiring parents to sign circumcision consent forms before undergoing the ritual, after a number of infants became infected with herpes. That move outraged members of the ultra-Orthodox community, and during his campaign de Blasio pledged to work with rabbis to repeal those regulations. Last month, the mayor said he'd swap the consent forms for voluntary herpes testing for mohels, provided a child became infected post-circumcision. But the repeal decision's hit a snag, now that health officials have moved the vote on the proposal to June.
Sources told the Wall Street Journal that the delay was due to legal issues, as well as "working out the specifics on how public health investigations will be conducted."
Passage of the rule change will also rely on board members installed by Bloomberg reversing their initial decisions. But the rabbis don't seem too worried: "The mayor has personally committed to ensure public safety in a very responsible and collaborative way with the community,” Rabbi David Niederman, president of United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg and North Brooklyn, told the paper. “These delays, I understand, are procedural stuff with the city. I have no doubt that everyone is on the same page and that this issue is going to be resolved to the satisfaction of all concerned.”
According to the city's Health Department, since the year 2000 at least 17 babies who were circumcised via metzitzah b'peh were infected with herpes as a result; two of those babies have died.
