North StarsWhy are foreskin activists protesting Oprah in Ottawa?
Oprah Winfrey may be the most influential celebrity of the year, but some Canadians are intent on swaying popular opinion.
The 59-year-old media mogul is set to speak to 14,000 fans on Thursday at Ottawa's Scotiabank Place as part of her "An Evening with Oprah Winfrey" tour, and the Canadian Foreskin Awareness Project will be there in opposing force, the Ottawa Citizen reported.
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Yep, you heard right: CAN-FAP, which opposes baby circumcision, is protesting Winfrey's appearance. The reason? The talk show host's endorsement of SkinMedica -- namely, TNS Essential Serum, an anti-aging product that Winfrey calls her "fountain of youth" and allegedly uses skin cells sourced from baby foreskin. The product sells for a whopping $260 per ounce.
Glen Callender, the Vancouver resident who founded CAN-FAP, also protested Winfrey's event in the B.C. city in January.
“If you were to [circumcise] me right now, today, as an adult, it would be aggravated sexual assault. You’d go to prison for 14 or 15 years,” he told the Ottawa Citizen. “I can’t see how that would be any different if you did that to me as a defenceless baby.”
But, according to San Diego CityBeat, SkinMedica only uses the culture of a skin cell line derived from a single foreskin ("the healing properties of infant skin are superior") that the company acquired some 20-odd years ago.
“Initially, there was a misunderstanding and people thought we were actually grinding up the foreskin,” SkinMedica founder Dr. Richard Fitzpatrick told the publication in 2010. “So, there was a lot of snickering and laughing about people putting this foreskin product on their face.”
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Callender still isn't sold. “Even if it was just one foreskin, that foreskin was stolen from a baby boy who did not consent to his foreskin being used in commercial cosmetics products," he told the Toronto Sun in January.
Do you agree with him?
