About a year ago, I stumbled across an interesting corner of Twitter, and subsequently a bunch of other websites, where people were complaining about the ethics of circumcision. At first I found it puzzling, but the more I thought about it, the more I started to realize that they had a point. Still, I didn’t get too deep into it, because at that point, twenty two years removed from said procedure, I didn’t have much skin in the game (pun intended).
A few months later, in episode six of Adam Ruins Everything (you can find it on Netflix), Adam tackles some of the more common misconceptions surrounding routine infant circumcision, and this got me thinking about the topic again, so I decided to finally educate myself a bit. My conclusion was that, for a long list of reasons, infant circumcision is, in fact, a deeply unethical practice. In short, it is medically unnecessary, permanent, and nonconsensual. Allow me to elaborate.
The Medical Argument
From a medical perspective, there is little conclusive evidence that circumcision provides a worthwhile benefit to the baby it is performed upon. While it does seem to reduce instances of urinary tract infections, the difference is negligible. Approximately one out of 1.5% uncircumcised male babies will have a UTI before the age of two, while approximately 1% of circumcised male babies will have a UTI before age two. There is a difference, but surgery as a preventive measure seems extreme when the cure for a UTI is a course of oral antibiotics, especially given the rarity of UTIs regardless of whether or not the child has been circumcised.
While there is also some evidence that circumcision slightly reduces the risk of acquiring sexually transmitted infections and diseases, the difference here is similarly small. In any case, if this is something that an individual deems worth the tradeoff, they can elect to have the surgery a decade or so later before becoming sexually active but after a point at which they could reasonably understand the risks and benefits of such a procedure.
The usual discussions around the medical benefits of infant circumcision (like reducing UTIs and STIs) usually fail to acknowledge the short and long term risks of the procedure. Every year, 100 baby boys die from complications resulting from circumcision. It’s not difficult to imagine why, when you consider the obvious risk of infection that comes with having an open wound in a diaper. Speaking of long term risks, the penis is likely to have significant scarring, and there’s a large possibility that the penis could heal in a manner that results in skin bridges from the shaft to the head of the penis (a very common side effect of the procedure) as a result of the skin fusing together during healing. Such grotesque scarring and deformities ought to be enough to silence anyone who employs the selfish claim that penises should be circumcised simply because they look more attractive, which is a distinctly American preference (also, let’s not forget we’re talking about infant penises here: it’s a bit weird to over sexualize them). Another long term risk is that depending on how the circumcision is performed, a boy could be left with quite a bit of motile skin, or they could be cut so tightly that they will experience painful erections, and the restricted ability of the penis to fully harden during childhood and adolescence will lead to drastic, permanent, unnatural penile curvature.
There is a way to avoid that though. Circumcisions performed on adult and adolescent penises are far less likely to result in such deformities, because the doctor is more capable of determining the best place to make an incision when the penis is ten or twenty years closer to its full size. Imagine being asked to peel the tip of a banana with a scalpel: difficult, but not impossible. Now imagine that banana is the size of a Mike & Ike: things get a lot trickier AND there’s a lot less room for error, because you don’t know what that Mike & Ike-sized banana is gonna look like in fifteen years.
The Ethical Argument
There is also a double standard regarding nonconsensual genital modification surgeries: far less invasive practices aimed at baby girls done under the guise of religion are internationally recognized as human rights violations, while baby boys are regularly subjected to far more horrific procedures and there is no public outcry.
Speaking of religious rituals, this seems like one of the worst justifications for infant circumcision. Just because parents adopt a set of religious beliefs doesn’t mean that the child will adopt them, and in fact, evidence shows that young people in the United States are becoming increasingly less religious than their parents. If a child were to grow up and resent the religious beliefs of their parents, then their circumcision would serve as a permanent reminder on the most intimate part of their body of the religious views they reject. Not only that, it can get pretty fucking weird. In some Jewish ceremonies, they perform the circumcision without anesthesia, and then a priest puts the baby’s bloody dick in his mouth for some batshit crazy reason. Barbarism. Pedophilia. Take your pick.
Back to that thing I mentioned about anesthesia: circumcisions are not performed while the baby is put to sleep, because it’s too risky to put a baby under general anesthesia. Instead, they use a small amount of topical anesthesia (think Orajel) which barely does anything; after all, the body part they’re about to chop off has more nerve endings than any other part of a man’s body. And you can tell that it doesn’t work: look up videos of the procedure being performed, and find one with audio. You’l hear the child screaming at the top of his lungs while a doctor literally straps his arms and legs to a table made specifically for this purpose, and saws off the most sensitive part of his body. The pain can be so severe that doctors will often recommend waiting to have a child circumcised if he was born with a heart condition because the shock and trauma could cause a heart attack.
Even if the kid doesn’t die, there’s no way to know what psychological damage we may be inflicting by allowing this excruciatingly painful, terrorizing event to be one of the first things that happens to a child after it’s born. Some people argue that the child is so young that he won’t remember the pain, but does not remembering a trauma make it okay? Is it okay to rape someone if you get them so drunk they won’t remember it? Absolutely not.
This is not like having a baby girl’s ears pierced. That’s a brief moment of mild pain with no permanent damage. Circumcision is life threatening, incomparably painful, and irreversible. There is absolutely no reason that this procedure couldn’t wait until the child is old enough to consent to it for himself, at such a time when it would be safe for him to be put to sleep to have it done.
The Fun Argument
Last but not least, sex feels better for uncircumcised men. For many men in the U.S., the head of the penis is the most sensitive part because it has a whopping 8,000 nerve endings. What those men usually don’t know is that the removed foreskin tissue had 20,000 nerve endings of its own. Further, because the head of the penis was intended to be an internal organ, and circumcision removes the tissue that protects it, over time it will become desensitized as a result of rubbing against clothing. This couples with a process called keratinization, whereby the whole head of the penis develops a dryer, more calloused look and texture when compared to the head of an uncircumcised penis, and it causes what nerve endings the have left to recede and become less sensitive. Men who were circumcised as adults testify to the drastic and permanent decrease in sensitivity that follows the procedure. Experts have found that circumcised penises are 80% less sensitive to tactile stimulation than intact penises.
Of course you could say “my penis works just fine and I’m circumcised” or “my partner is circumcised and he never complains about it”. Go ahead and ask your partner or yourself this question: how much more penis should we chop off? How much less sensitivity would be ideal? Regardless of how good sex feels for a man, he is never going to want his dick to be any smaller or to be able to feel less of the sensations that accompany sex. As is evidenced by the fact that some men have loose circumcisions and some have tight circumcisions, there’s no right amount to cut off, so why stop with just the foreskin? Why not go ahead and chop off the head, too? I’ll tell you why, because that would be barbaric. But so is permanently chopping off any amount of anyone’s body part without their consent.
In Conclusion: Don’t Cut Baby Dicks
At this point, I am utterly convinced that infant circumcision is a deeply unethical practice, and I would encourage anyone with a penis (whether circumcised or not) to speak up for future generations who face the threat of having their genitals cut without their consent. Of course, you don’t have to be a man to advocate for the bodily integrity of infants. Everyone, expectant parent or not, should educate themselves more on this problematic practice. Several good Intactivist websites exist to advocate for the bodily integrity of young boys; YourWholeBaby.org and LittleImages.org* are great resources.
If you’re expecting a child, be sure to watch this lecture from Brian Earp of Yale University. He does a great job of running through many of the points I mentioned in more detail, and he brings a lot of hard data to the table. It’s thirty minutes long, so it’s a bit of a commitment, but it’s absolutely essential for parents expecting a baby boy.
Write to your legislators and tell them how fucked up this practice is, and tell them that you think it should be illegal to perform irreversible, medically unnecessary surgeries without someone’s consent. You can also consider making a donation to an intactivist organization like Your Whole Baby or Little Images.
