Infant circumcision is done without anesthetic, seems obvious subjecting a human to a lot of pain when he's only a few days old would cause some issues.
Which provides no analgesia during recovery, and that a topical or local is used in neonates where general anesthesia is standard of care for circumcisions later in life raises significant questions of its own.
I'm not dogmatic on the subject, which seems rare among those inclined to speak on it at all. But I do agree that the cited benefits don't seem to justify the intervention.
It was uncomfortable to explain to my fiance why parts of my penis were missing, she was horrified to learn that they do this to american baby boys and made me promise we won't do it to ours.
> one-third of males in the world are circumcised, primarily for cultural reasons. … the degree and magnitude of associated benefits and risks, remain contentious and hotly debated
It’s poplar to go in on curcumcision. Haven’t numerous studies shown that they reduce sti risk and are medical standard practice for African countries with aids epidemics?
Not sure why you’re being downvoted, this is perfect. Engineering for a single metric is catastrophic. It took social media to wake folks up to that but “let’s reduce STI metrics by cutting infants” really should have beaten it to the punch.
This used to be common practice in England in the 1950s. Not to babies, but to adults in early middle age. Once you'd lost a few teeth the dentist would recommend the removal of the rest and provide you with a nice set of dentures. All of my grandparents had dentures when I knew them.
No need. They're already having less sex than previous generations.
It turns out if you redefine the mechanics of docking to the point where nobody can recognize themselves or their role in the exchange of personnel, nobody can negotiate the Fucking Protocol.
Those "studies" have been thoroughly debunked. Give people soap and condoms. Don't give them wounds!
Circumcision is popular for the exact same reasons that FGM is popular: it's popular. If everyone you know did it, then what reason do you have to not do it? Can you explain that reason to those people? Of course not, you are too young to even know what is going on!
This is a failure of medical professionalism. When we allow unhealthy practices to be perpetuated by circular narratives, popularity of those narratives increases.
We are more afraid of cutting words than cutting people.
> Haven’t numerous studies shown that they reduce sti risk
Yes, but mostly for heterosexual men. And a large number of studies show that there is no association with sti risks for most common STIs. And some meta studies show that there's probably not a strong enough reason to justify circumcision.
The relatively small number of HIV infections you prevent in the West [0] is probably not a justifiable reason to encourage circumcision, especially when there are other ways to prevent infection.
[0] 22% of infection among heterosexual individuals through intercourse, which is very heavily biased towards women—it ends up being only a few percent of total infections, and the reduced risk would only prevent maybe half of those. We're talking about a maximum of a few hundred infections in the US per year.
Last I checked, the NNT was quite high. One hundred circumcisions prevents one (1) urinary tract infection. Meanwhile, in the United States, the procedure ends in death, one way or another, roughly 117 times per annum.
It's shocking that this barbaric act, done specifically to take sexual pleasure away from victims and their partners [1], is still happening in the 21th century.
> A total of 744 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) participants completed an online survey using the TurkPrime interface between July and December 2017.
Circumcision has been ongoing for thousands of years. Even now there are millions of men if not tens of millions of men who were circumcised as infants.
On a population basis, it doesn't seem to cause a whole lot of problems with mental processing as circumcised men are well-represented as entrepreneurs, comedians, actors, lawyers, doctors, and pretty much every other profession.
every day we have the chance to observe thousands of thousands of circumcised men and we have been doing this for thousands of men, and so far, nobody has noticed any emotional issues with them.
it's not fallacious, its simply saying that we've (informally) looked at a lot of data and found nothing. I.e. evidence of absence
I think infant circumcision is barbaric, but I'm still raising a lot of eyebrows over this study. Wouldn't the level of parental attunement generally be a huge factor? And wouldn't, for example, the parents of children in an era when 75% of boys were routinely circumcised, who opted their sons out also be more likely to be attuned to their children and skeptical of common practices?
It would also have been interesting to see data from another group who were circumcised after infancy, at different ages, to see if it was the infant trauma itself or the constant exposure of the glans that had an impact.
It's also an odd sample set to choose only those men who were willing to accept $4 in exchange for more than half an hour of their time through the Mechanical Turk program.
I bet every Jewish comedian will reach for "The causal link is a Jewish mother tearing through self-esteem like a grizzly bear tears trough a tree" type joke.
They would have a point. Circumcision can be indicator for causal reason associate with circumcision.
As a non-circumcised man, I am completely certain that circumcision is completely stupid and abusive, because the skin that is removed is one of the most sensitive parts of the body and losing it would be as bad as losing any other senses.
Nevertheless, I find it hard to believe that someone circumcised as an infant would be traumatized in any way by this, because they would never know what they have lost, like someone who has been born deaf or without the sense of smell.
Regarding the pain of the procedure, even if it could be somehow remembered, there seems to be no way how it could affect development, because many children may experience even more painful accidents from which they can recover perfectly without any long-term consequences.
As you say, there may be only some indirect correlation, e.g. caused by the differences between the parents who would choose to circumcise their sons and the parents who would make the opposite choice.
I do think there's a different emotional response to accidental pain and pain deliberately inflicted by a (previously) trusted person, even for little children.
If a child falls off his bunk bed and needs staples in his head, there's no relational harm from the incident. If anything, a caring parental response makes the child feel safer, knowing someone will intervene on their behalf to take care of them when dangerous things happen.
Seems dangerously close to arguing that you could do anything to a baby.
I think the problem with this sort of surgery is you will one day find out that somebody did this to you, that somebody took something from you that you can never get back.
It's a trauma that I'm sure most people get over but some don't.
Loss of sensation is definitely a potential side effect but statistically quite rare - in my experience (fully circumcised for medical reasons as an adult), I definitely didn't lose any sensation. It's a little different, but I was actually surprised at how little things changed after recovery actually.
> Previous preliminary research has reported an association between circumcision and alexithymia (i.e., dysfunctions in emotion recognition, social attachment, and interpersonal relations) in adults (Bollinger and Van Howe, 2011). More recently, two large-sample studies suggested a positive correlation between circumcision and autism spectrum disorder (ASD; Bauer and Kriebel, 2013; Frisch and Simonsen, 2015a). Although the causal implications of this research has been questioned (Morris et al., 2012; Morris and Wiswell, 2015), these studies suggest that early-circumcision might have an impact on adult psychosocial functioning.
This can't be right...one of those correlation is not causation situations?
I hesitate to take the side of Brian J. "B.J." Morris (a contentious individual, to be polite) but here we are.
US surgery rates have been declining since the 60s as autism diagnoses increase. Half the population in Israel, the Middle East and southeast Asia should be autistic by now.
I don't see where they looked at how many intact kids were diagnosed with autism, only that there's a "positive association" with circumcision, which means little. We fell for that logic once already with the HIV prevention claims. Fool us twice and we...can't get circumcised again?
This is interesting though:
> Circumcised infants display increased pain responses during subsequent vaccination, suggesting that behavioral effects of the surgery can last, at a minimum, up to 4–6 months
And this:
> Finally, one recent study has found that neonatal male circumcision and prematurity were associated with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), providing support for the allostatic load hypothesis (i.e., the result of cumulative perinatal painful, stressful, or traumatic events) as an explanation for SIDS (Elhaik, 2018).
Circumcision, vaccinations, autism, SIDS all mentioned in the same context...
Girls don't get clipped but everybody gets vaccines. Most other cultures that snip boys tend to wait until puberty. They also inconsistently vaccinate and don't have mysterious infant death syndromes.
Maybe there's something to avoiding causing infants pain.
I am not circumcised but I guess it does not stop you from getting pleasure from sex. It does with women.
Can you imagine your penis being slit along, live, when you are 7 yo or so? I am not taking about removing a bit of skin, but about craving into your penis with your family holding you.
This is something that proves that forced sterilization should be a thing for families that plan to do this to their children.
What kind of "purely symbolic" FGM do you have in mind?
Every part in women genitals is useful and removing it means problems down the road (as opposed to removing a foreskin where the damages are relatively benign - of course it is proof of a profound mental illness of the ones doing it on children in all cases).
I've read (a long time ago) a newspaper article mentioning a simple pricking of the skin to produce one drop of blood. A pure ritual with no practical effect. Not sure how widespread it is though, or if it's just a wishful thinking on part of some Western cultural mediation agency.
I must say that the only reports I know of (I am French) are those of tortures of children girls who have their whole clitoris excised by their own family. This is simply insane to me.
Any such ritual that subordinates someone to something is disgusting to me, though the one you described is indeed symbolic, at least it does not leave any physical traces (I do not know about mental ones)
“generally a less damaging version of what is done to men”
This is untrue. Male circumcision involves the removal of the foreskin (not the glans) while female genital circulation often involves not only removing the clitoral hood and inner labia, but the clitoral glans as well.
To reply, no - your eyes would not continue to exist if the eyelids are removed. Nor would your teeth if the lips were removed. You’re hyperbolic false equivalencies won’t win anyone over (and we have the same general stance on this issue!).
I was born in Ireland, my wife was born in the US. We had our eldest son in San Francisco a few years ago (he’s in elementary school). My wife gave birth at UCSF, a world class hospital in a liberal city, in the land of personal freedom.
We did not want our son circumcised but hospital staff couldn’t seem to comprehend this. Six separate people attempted to schedule a circumcision, one saying (condescendingly) “well, you know it is safer that we do it now than you waiting for later”. One person asked us twice, the second time asking if we had changed our mind.
Either they were on some kind of commission for extra services, or they genuinely couldn’t grok that we didn’t want our son cut. It was a very strange experience.
It is true, and it is the rotting heart of the matter. Religious rites aside, this is the reason that the practice persists to this day. The very same doctors who take the Hippocratic Oath get a nice payday for every foreskin removed. The removed tissue is then sold to make fancy cosmetics.
I thought maybe it wasn't done much anymore even here in the US, but was recently talking to our neighbor (who is not in anyway Jewish) and he mentioned that they just had their son circumcised at ~1Year old. I almost asked "why?" but held my tongue.
True but that would be a procedure ordered up in response to the condition. We're talking about a majority of neonates getting cut without that underlying condition.
I didn't know what phimosis was, so I looked it up. For others:
”phimosis: A condition in which tight foreskin can't be pulled back over the head of the penis.
Tight foreskin is normal in an uncircumcised child. It often goes away over time with regular, gentle retraction."
It's mostly driven by inertia started with US moral panic and not related to any sort of Jewish pushed or trying to be agenda (the procedure was incorrectly believed to be a masturbation deterrent). A good paper on the topic: https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
But yes, I agree with the other commenters that the only real reason it continues is it's a billable service from the hospitals, so easy low risk of complication procedure they can tack onto the bill.
It's remarkable to me that this persists. Who are these ghouls that look at a newborn infant and say with straight face, "Lets cut a piece of his penis off"?
Sure, not a medical procedure. It's really a religious ritual. I only support it when the baby was born to the "tribe" that performs it during infancy (the Jews, some Christians, etc). After all, who are we to tell a culture about their customs, especially for a very safe procedure.
At least they slightly acknowledge the benefits of neonatal circumcision:
> "The present research is framed within the context of developmental and socio-affective psychology. Therefore, questions about whether neonatal circumcision.... is associated with therapeutic benefit (e.g., reduction in sexually transmitted and urinary tract infections as well as penile cancer.... fall outside the scope of this research.
I hate to be tone police, but can we please temper language around this procedure?
No one that was circumcised at birth made that decision themselves. Calling someone that is circumcised “mutilated” or “barbaric” is just as bad, in my mind, as making fun of any other disability that a person was born with.
Just think of the person that you are calling mutilated. They had no choice in the matter.
> Just think of the person that you are calling mutilated.
I'm thinking of myself. I was medically mutilated as an infant. The circumcision was wholly unnecessary. It's why I chose to NOT have my son circumcised.
FWIW, I was circumcised. I have no problem referring to the procedure as "mutilation" and "barbaric", and I also don't feel as though I am "mutilated" or "barbaric" for having been circumcised, nor do I feel that others view me, or others like me, as such when they refer to the procedure using said language.
OP was suggesting that calling it "mutilation" is making fun of the circumcised individual in a derogatory manner. To my point, I am perfectly comfortable referring to my having been circumcised as a "mutilation" without my feeling "mutilated" in a derogatory sense. I don't mind others referring to the process as mutilation because it doesn't make me feel "mutilated" or "barbaric" when they do so.
Morality of the procedure aside, this is a very low quality study.
The most glaring omission is that they didnt account for possible confounding due to religious/political beliefs. To be fair, they acknowledge that this is a limitation, but I'd bet that this is possibly the main driving factor behind any differences in personality between the two groups.
We know for a fact that religious/conservative populations are markedly different across a variety of character traits, and they are also significantly likely to circumcise their child.
Any study that doesnt account for this is invalid IMO.
Religion aside I think a majority of American men and a significant portion of South Korean men are circumcised. These are the two largest populations last I checked. Neither do so for religious reasons but more likely by doctors pushing junk science and peer pressure. The foreskin I believe are sold in many hospitals to pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies, so there is perverse incentive.
Interesting study for sure but it feels very preliminary. As someone who deals with trauma from childhood, asking “how far back can it go” is a very interesting question.
Interestingly. The crowd that is *most* in favor of male genital mutilation has some overlap with the crowd that has problems with full grown adults consenting to a medical gender transition.
The lack of consent (it is a newborn after all) is far more disturbing to me than the procedure itself. I wish I wasn’t mitigated for goofy religious reasons.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadhttps://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/circumcision/abo...
I'm not dogmatic on the subject, which seems rare among those inclined to speak on it at all. But I do agree that the cited benefits don't seem to justify the intervention.
there's a step called "Metzitzah B'Peh" (oral suction). Plenty of chance to get an infection.
IMNSHO, you should go to jail for this.
It’s poplar to go in on curcumcision. Haven’t numerous studies shown that they reduce sti risk and are medical standard practice for African countries with aids epidemics?
It turns out if you redefine the mechanics of docking to the point where nobody can recognize themselves or their role in the exchange of personnel, nobody can negotiate the Fucking Protocol.
Circumcision is popular for the exact same reasons that FGM is popular: it's popular. If everyone you know did it, then what reason do you have to not do it? Can you explain that reason to those people? Of course not, you are too young to even know what is going on!
This is a failure of medical professionalism. When we allow unhealthy practices to be perpetuated by circular narratives, popularity of those narratives increases.
We are more afraid of cutting words than cutting people.
Source? The CDC has a very thoroughly reviewed set of literature and studies that support up to a 50% reduction in STI transmission.
https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/male-circumcision.html
Yes, but mostly for heterosexual men. And a large number of studies show that there is no association with sti risks for most common STIs. And some meta studies show that there's probably not a strong enough reason to justify circumcision.
The relatively small number of HIV infections you prevent in the West [0] is probably not a justifiable reason to encourage circumcision, especially when there are other ways to prevent infection.
[0] 22% of infection among heterosexual individuals through intercourse, which is very heavily biased towards women—it ends up being only a few percent of total infections, and the reduced risk would only prevent maybe half of those. We're talking about a maximum of a few hundred infections in the US per year.
Yes.
https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/male-circumcision.html
[1]https://www.cirp.org/library/cultural/maimonides/
Circumcision has been ongoing for thousands of years. Even now there are millions of men if not tens of millions of men who were circumcised as infants.
On a population basis, it doesn't seem to cause a whole lot of problems with mental processing as circumcised men are well-represented as entrepreneurs, comedians, actors, lawyers, doctors, and pretty much every other profession.
every day we have the chance to observe thousands of thousands of circumcised men and we have been doing this for thousands of men, and so far, nobody has noticed any emotional issues with them.
it's not fallacious, its simply saying that we've (informally) looked at a lot of data and found nothing. I.e. evidence of absence
It would also have been interesting to see data from another group who were circumcised after infancy, at different ages, to see if it was the infant trauma itself or the constant exposure of the glans that had an impact.
It's also an odd sample set to choose only those men who were willing to accept $4 in exchange for more than half an hour of their time through the Mechanical Turk program.
I think this connection is so far-reaching that you could never truly resolve the confounding variables.
Frankly, I don't really care about the results anyway! As you neatly put it, we already know that infant circumcision is barbaric. That's enough!
They would have a point. Circumcision can be indicator for causal reason associate with circumcision.
Nevertheless, I find it hard to believe that someone circumcised as an infant would be traumatized in any way by this, because they would never know what they have lost, like someone who has been born deaf or without the sense of smell.
Regarding the pain of the procedure, even if it could be somehow remembered, there seems to be no way how it could affect development, because many children may experience even more painful accidents from which they can recover perfectly without any long-term consequences.
As you say, there may be only some indirect correlation, e.g. caused by the differences between the parents who would choose to circumcise their sons and the parents who would make the opposite choice.
If a child falls off his bunk bed and needs staples in his head, there's no relational harm from the incident. If anything, a caring parental response makes the child feel safer, knowing someone will intervene on their behalf to take care of them when dangerous things happen.
I think the problem with this sort of surgery is you will one day find out that somebody did this to you, that somebody took something from you that you can never get back.
It's a trauma that I'm sure most people get over but some don't.
This can't be right...one of those correlation is not causation situations?
I hesitate to take the side of Brian J. "B.J." Morris (a contentious individual, to be polite) but here we are.
US surgery rates have been declining since the 60s as autism diagnoses increase. Half the population in Israel, the Middle East and southeast Asia should be autistic by now.
I don't see where they looked at how many intact kids were diagnosed with autism, only that there's a "positive association" with circumcision, which means little. We fell for that logic once already with the HIV prevention claims. Fool us twice and we...can't get circumcised again?
This is interesting though:
> Circumcised infants display increased pain responses during subsequent vaccination, suggesting that behavioral effects of the surgery can last, at a minimum, up to 4–6 months
And this:
> Finally, one recent study has found that neonatal male circumcision and prematurity were associated with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), providing support for the allostatic load hypothesis (i.e., the result of cumulative perinatal painful, stressful, or traumatic events) as an explanation for SIDS (Elhaik, 2018).
Circumcision, vaccinations, autism, SIDS all mentioned in the same context...
Girls don't get clipped but everybody gets vaccines. Most other cultures that snip boys tend to wait until puberty. They also inconsistently vaccinate and don't have mysterious infant death syndromes.
Maybe there's something to avoiding causing infants pain.
I am not circumcised but I guess it does not stop you from getting pleasure from sex. It does with women.
Can you imagine your penis being slit along, live, when you are 7 yo or so? I am not taking about removing a bit of skin, but about craving into your penis with your family holding you.
This is something that proves that forced sterilization should be a thing for families that plan to do this to their children.
Every part in women genitals is useful and removing it means problems down the road (as opposed to removing a foreskin where the damages are relatively benign - of course it is proof of a profound mental illness of the ones doing it on children in all cases).
Any such ritual that subordinates someone to something is disgusting to me, though the one you described is indeed symbolic, at least it does not leave any physical traces (I do not know about mental ones)
This is untrue. Male circumcision involves the removal of the foreskin (not the glans) while female genital circulation often involves not only removing the clitoral hood and inner labia, but the clitoral glans as well.
I was born in Ireland, my wife was born in the US. We had our eldest son in San Francisco a few years ago (he’s in elementary school). My wife gave birth at UCSF, a world class hospital in a liberal city, in the land of personal freedom.
We did not want our son circumcised but hospital staff couldn’t seem to comprehend this. Six separate people attempted to schedule a circumcision, one saying (condescendingly) “well, you know it is safer that we do it now than you waiting for later”. One person asked us twice, the second time asking if we had changed our mind.
Either they were on some kind of commission for extra services, or they genuinely couldn’t grok that we didn’t want our son cut. It was a very strange experience.
So yes, hospital staffers are heavily incentivized to promote it.
”phimosis: A condition in which tight foreskin can't be pulled back over the head of the penis. Tight foreskin is normal in an uncircumcised child. It often goes away over time with regular, gentle retraction."
But yes, I agree with the other commenters that the only real reason it continues is it's a billable service from the hospitals, so easy low risk of complication procedure they can tack onto the bill.
At least they slightly acknowledge the benefits of neonatal circumcision:
> "The present research is framed within the context of developmental and socio-affective psychology. Therefore, questions about whether neonatal circumcision.... is associated with therapeutic benefit (e.g., reduction in sexually transmitted and urinary tract infections as well as penile cancer.... fall outside the scope of this research.
No one that was circumcised at birth made that decision themselves. Calling someone that is circumcised “mutilated” or “barbaric” is just as bad, in my mind, as making fun of any other disability that a person was born with.
Just think of the person that you are calling mutilated. They had no choice in the matter.
I'm thinking of myself. I was medically mutilated as an infant. The circumcision was wholly unnecessary. It's why I chose to NOT have my son circumcised.
The most glaring omission is that they didnt account for possible confounding due to religious/political beliefs. To be fair, they acknowledge that this is a limitation, but I'd bet that this is possibly the main driving factor behind any differences in personality between the two groups.
We know for a fact that religious/conservative populations are markedly different across a variety of character traits, and they are also significantly likely to circumcise their child.
Any study that doesnt account for this is invalid IMO.
Interestingly. The crowd that is *most* in favor of male genital mutilation has some overlap with the crowd that has problems with full grown adults consenting to a medical gender transition.
The lack of consent (it is a newborn after all) is far more disturbing to me than the procedure itself. I wish I wasn’t mitigated for goofy religious reasons.