Now that former Real Housewife Meghan King Edmonds has signed a custody agreement with her ex, she’s trying to move on with her life.
But she’s now sharing a major regret about her twin sons: their circumcision.
On Monday, Meghan King Edmonds and Brooke Burke debuted their podcast, Intimate Knowledge.
On this very first episode, they tackled a tricky and sensitive — in every sense of the word — topic: circumcision.
"I have two sons and I did it," Meghan begins, speaking of her 19-month-old twins, Hayes and Hart.
She explains that this difficult decision was reached with her now-ex’s input.
"My partner was a professional baseball player," she notes, referring to Jim Edmonds.
She recalls: "He was like, ‘Well in the locker room, I don’t want him to get him made fun of.’"
For the record, that surprisingly common argument is a little odd. Most school locker rooms do not see nudity unless students sneak in there to bang.
"I was like, ‘Okay, well, you’re the dad. You do have 50 percent choice in this,’" Meghan admits.
Even going through with the procedure, which removes foreskin from an infant’s penis, was "really hard for" Meghan.
She knew that her sons were in pain, and she says that she was "was really upset by it."
"I’m like, ‘We live in — 2018, at the time. We know how to clean ourselves, we have showers and hygiene," Meghan observes.
She laments: "Why would I do this to my child? He’s a little baby,’"
"Also, there’s no kind of numbing except topically,” Meghan grimly notes.
She asks: “What type of long-term [psychological] effects does this possibly have on our kids growing up through the years?"
That is a question that doctors cannot answer. After all, it would go against scientific ethics to mutilate children as part of a study.
"And then — I’m gonna get real deep, but is this why maybe men are more aggressive? I don’t know," Meghan wonders.
Meghan and Brooke are not alone on the podcast, which also includes Lila Darville, who is a sex and intimacy coach.
Lila points out to her cohosts that circumcision rates going down in Canada (where they were relatively low to begin with).
Brooke chimes in with some more good news, saying: "It’s actually going down in America, too."
“It should be,” Meghan affirms. “There’s no reason to manipulate your baby boy’s body like that. I don’t like it. It makes me sad."
Circumcision was first invented thousands of years ago by the ancient Egyptians. At the time, it made a kind of sense.
From painful granules of sand to bacteria, the idea of being unable to clean their foreskins was untenable, and their primary water source was full of crocodiles.
Some historians believe that this habit passed to the ancient Isrealites at a time when ancient Israel was a protectorate of Egypt.
From there, it is believed that it became integrated into culture and then into faith, which is also how it became customary for Muslims.
However, in the United States of America and to a lesser extent in Canada, circumcision took root for different reasons.
In the early 1900s, John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of corn flakes and one of history’s greatest monsters, was a proponent of circumcision.
It was one of multiple ways that he favored for torturing and mutilating adolescents in efforts that he believed would curb masturbation.
However, a number of factors — including World War II — led to the procedure becoming popularized in the United States.
Meghan and Lila and Brooke are right — rates are going down in the US and elsewhere.
Of course, the rate in Canada was only about half of that in the US to begin with.
Here in the US, as many as 70% of babies born with penises don’t get to keep the whole thing.
Debates about hygiene and sensitivity tend to miss the point — the point being that it’s a widespread human rights violation.
Meghan’s epiphany comes too little, too late for Hayes and Hart, unfortunately.
However, she is to be commended for using her platform to raise awareness of this human rights issue.
As for Hayes and Hart, many hope that the medical community will come up with a way to reverse genital mutilations, including circumcision.
Maybe by the time that they’re older, there will be some sort of, I don’t know, stem cell cream?
