Metro Pulse/In Loco Parentis/Circumcision

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by Katie Allison Granju

A month or so after my first child was born in 1991, my husband and I received our final hospital bill. As we looked it over, we noticed that we had been charged for a surgical procedure that hadn't been performed on our newborn son: circumcision. I called the hospital and explained that our son hadn't been circumcised, so we couldn't be charged for this. The woman in billing with whom I spoke was adamant that all male babies born at her hospital were circumcised. No amount of reasoning would allow her accept that we had actually chosen to forego having our baby circumcised.

Ten years and two more uncircumcised babies (one girl and one boy) later, our decision not to circumcise is becoming a much more common one. In part, this is due to the fact that major medical organizations are increasingly taking a vocal stance in opposition to the practice. In 1996, the Australian College of Paediatrics stated that "Neonatal male circumcision has no medical indication. It is a traumatic procedure performed without anesthesia to remove a normal, functional, and protective prepuce [foreskin]." In the same year, the Canadian Paediatric Society's Fetus and Newborn Committee announced that "[The Committee] does not support recommending circumcision as a routine procedure for newborns." And in 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released a new policy statement on circumcision, stating: "After analysis of almost 40 years of available medical research on circumcision, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has issued new recommendations stating that the benefits are not significant enough for the AAP to recommend circumcision as a routine procedure...."

On the surface, the issue of circumcision seems deceptively simple. Why in the world would modern American parents choose to medically or ritually slice off a part of their child's body that science has revealed to house three feet of veins, arteries, and capillaries, 240 feet of nerves, and 20,000 nerve endings, as well as muscles, glands, and epithelial tissue? Additionally, increasing numbers of parents from all faiths believe that routine male circumcision constitutes a fundamental, painful, and unnecessary violation of a boy's human rights, in which a significant body part is removed without consent, leading to potential complications and lifelong alteration of his sexual functioning.

Until the late 19th century, male circumcision in the United States was virtually unknown outside the (at that time) relatively small Jewish and Muslim communities. In 1870, however, an American physician named Lewis Sayre began publicizing his views linking the intact male foreskin to a wide variety of medical maladies, including gout, asthma, curvature of the spine, and tuberculosis. Universal infant circumcision, claimed Sayre, could prevent such diseases. Although Sayre's views gained a wide audience, the pseudo-scientific hypothesis that most significantly fueled the secular-medical circumcision craze in the United States was the growing belief during the Victorian era that circumcision would "cure" masturbation, a practice believed by most Americans of the era to be both sinful and dangerous. Physicians frightened concerned parents into circumcising their babies by threatening that masturbation could send a boy to jail, the insane asylum...or straight to hell.

Although few Americans accept it as so, the parallels between our beliefs and practices regarding male circumcision and the now widely reviled, mostly African practice of female circumcision (often called "female genital mutilation" by human rights groups) are clear and compelling. According to the World Health Organization, female circumcision is routinely practiced in approximately 28 countries, with about 130 million African women circumcised. African women are circumcised at some point between infancy and puberty.

The parallels between male and female circumcision aren't particularly surprising, since the roots of both spring from the desire to lessen interest in sexual habits thought by various cultures to be sinful and undesirable. In the case of female circumcision, the practice originated in an attempt to prevent women from engaging in sex before or outside of marriage. Uncircumcised women are also thought to be more likely to engage in lesbianism.

In African cultures where female circumcision is the norm, girls who are left with their genitals intact are considered highly unattractive, of low caste, and "dirty." Mothers and grandmothers insist that their daughters be circumcised so that they will "fit in" with other women and not risk being ridiculed by the circumcised majority. Uncircumcised girls are also believed to be at greater risk for disease. In the United States, parents who circumcise their sons often do so for exactly the same reasons.

With the recent publication of the new AAP position statement on circumcision, and as the facts regarding male circumcision become more widely known, it is likely that the number of parents choosing the procedure for their own sons will continue to drop. Within the Jewish community, there is even a burgeoning movement to develop meaningful ceremonies for infant boys that will provide an acceptable alternative for parents who are not comfortable with ritual circumcision. Perhaps in the next millennium more families will listen to the advice of the pioneering Dr. Benjamin Spock who, when asked for his views on routine circumcision said, "My own preference, if I had the good fortune to have another son, would be to leave his little penis alone."

Katie Allison Granju is the author of "Attachment Parenting: Instinctive Care for Your Baby and Young Child" (Simon and Schuster/1999). She lives in Knoxville with her husband and three children.