Here’s a common faulty assumption within the male circumcision debate. From Forbes, in response to the San Francisco ballot initiative, Daniel Fisher writes:
One can only hope the courts do the practical and intuitive thing, and strike this down after it passes. It will save parents from taking their sons outside city borders to be born. And hundreds of thousands of male San Franciscans are saved from the distinctly uncomfortable prospect of making the decision for themselves as adults.
How many of those “hundreds of thousands” a males does Mr. Fisher think will actively contemplate non-therapeutic circumcision? Given the statistics on males left intact through childhood ultimately choosing or needing circumcision as adults, the lament he offers is unsupported. However, even if it were supported, that doesn’t change the ethical defect in circumcising all of them as children to avoid a possibly tough decision as adults. Surely he does not believe that every one of those males will want to be circumcised. Those who decide they want to be circumcised may still choose. Those who don’t want to be circumcised can’t unchose the procedure.
To properly use the article’s headline opener, “I’m Not Making This Up Dept.”, disbelief should be placed where it belongs. I’m Not Making This Up Dept.: Parents Willingly Cut Their Healthy Sons’ Genitals.
Yes, this is all part of the circumcised mindset, that circumcision is normal and the foreskin is “extra skin” that will inevitably be cut off. For the great majority of men in the world intact genitals are normal and circumcision doesn’t even appear on the radar.
The experiment has been done: circumcision was nearly universal in Australia and New Zealand, now it’s almost unknown in New Zealand and some Australian states (with more than four out of five babies going home whole in the others) and there has been no outbreak of any of the ailments it ws supposed to be good for. (A generation of men has grown up not looking like their fathers, and no problems there, either.)