I am circumcised, and have spent most of my life believing that circumcision was the right thing to do. However at some point in the recent past, it hit me like a ton of bricks: there are people out there who still have their foreskins intact. A lot of them in fact: most of my good friends and the people I have lived with still have the jacket on their little firefighter. As it turns out, I am actually the odd one out in my circle of friends, so I was recently driven to question the practice of removing the male prepuce.After doing a lot of research, and coming to the hard realization that I had lost something that I would never get back, I changed my mind. I now believe that circumcision is barbaric, unneccesary, and a terrible way to welcome your child into the world.
As you might imagine, I am a tad bitter about the whole affair, and while I don’t blame my parents for doing what they thought was best, I do take issue with the pervasive opinion that forcibly removing part of a child’s genitals is a good idea, and I have taken it as my charge to challenge circumcision at birth* whenever possible.
The most common reason I hear for circumcision is the same reason I was originally circumcised: religious affiliation. Now that I’m an atheist, I couldn’t imagine a worse reason to do anything, let alone subjecting your infant to surgery. However, I’d expect even the religious could appreciate that their children may not share their faith when they become adults. Given that in recent years, people have been changing faiths or abandoning faith altogether at unprecedented rates, any loving parent should concede that committing their child to one religion through body modification is unfair. They should at least wait until the age of consent.
Another commonly cited argument is that circumcision prevents disease. There is in fact a tenuous correlation between circumcision and lower incidences of contracting HIV, penile cancer, and–for female partners of circumcised men—cervical cancer. However, there is no disease circumcision combats that could not otherwise be prevented by good hygiene or responsible sexual behavior. More importantly, it shouldn’t even matter what the benefits are, as long as it’s such a violation of personal liberty. One could argue that giving a newborn gastric bypass surgery would lower their chances of obesity and diabetes later in life, but this conjecture would and thrown out before the benefits are even weighed, because it’s so ludicrous. Other than circumcision, there’s no other elective procedure I could subject my child to at birth , and still be considered a responsible parent.
Circumcision proponents often point out that a circumcised penis is cleaner. They’re right: it is cleaner. But to use an all-too-fitting expression, don’t cut off your nose to spite your face. Removing the prepuce is a high price to pay for genital cleanliness, as would be removing the ear for auricular cleanliness. No sane person would suggest cutting off their children’s outer ears just because they have to wash behind them. As with any other part of the body that requires care, you have to teach your kids to take care of their penises. We teach our children to brush their teeth, wipe their behinds, and wear tampons; cleaning under the prepuce is just part of the maintenance that comes with the human body.
To make a brief speculative aside, I believe the cleanliness issue may have played a part in the origin of the practice, but not in the way you might suspect. Uncircumcised genitals require extra care at bathtime. Thus, in the sexually repressive Abrahamic religions, mandating that the prepuce be removed ensured that the appendage wouldn’t draw any more attention then necessary. Another possibility is that circumcision was a rite of passage, whose intention was to demonstrate the machismo of the male undergoing it, as it still is in parts of Africa. Over time, the importance of the act as a rite of passage may have dwindled, but its importance to cultural identity remained, so men chose to perform the procedure on their children.
This brings me to another common contention of circumcision supporters, which is that circumcision doesn’t hurt if the child is young enough. However, if you have ever seen a circumcision, you cannot maintain this opinion. The procedure is manifestly painful, and doctors rarely use anaesthesia. It’s so painful in fact, that babies frequently go into shock. Entirely incapable of crying, their bodies flip into “I’m gonna die” mode. But since an infant does not have the vocal or expressive capabilities of an adult human, so it only seems not to hurt them. The cues that an individual is in mortal pain are not in the expressive range of a newborn, so parents may not realize the harm they are inflicting upon him. Therefore, although there is no evidence of a pain in the long term, it’s devious to assume that this constititues evidence for a lack of pain.
Another common rationalization is that the infant won’t remember it later in life. However, this is a poor reason to hurt to someone you love. I don’t remember being in a crib, so my parents could have gotten away with keeping me in a cardboard box, but they didn’t.
Many circumcision proponents make an appeal to tradition. As a friend of mine once jokingly said “it’s just one of those things you do. You drive on the right side of the road and you get circumcised.” But as someone who is already generally suspicious of tradition, this argument has to be one of the worst for circumcision. Even if we’ve been doing something since time immemorial, that does not lend any legitimacy to it. On the contrary, I think it is one of our highest moral imperatives to closely examine our traditions to see if they are worth passing on. Just think of all the barbaric traditions we have abandoned: slavery, public execution, denying women the right to vote or own property, corsets, foot binding, hair shirts, etc. In the end, I prefer to think of appealing to tradition as “I refuse to evaluate the prudence of my actions, because no one else has.” That does not constitute an argument.
The final argument for circumcision is the one I understand least: aesthetics. Many women—and some men—claim that a circumcised penis is more pleasing to the eye. Well, I believe a man’s right make it to adulthood with intact genitalia trumps a woman’s or a parent’s right to impose their aesthetic preference on a defenseless child. If a man wants to have his penis modified, he should wait until his eighteenth birthday, as he must for tattoos and other body modification.
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So circumcision isn’t a good idea, but who’s to say it’s a bad one? It could still be true that while the procedure is ethically questionable, it’s ultimately harmless. In point of fact, a strong case can be built against circumcision. There are various studies that have identified a strong correlation between circumcision and decreased penile sensitivity, but I won’t go into that here. I feel there is a strong enough case without it. Moreover, there are likely members of my audience for whom risk of genital desensitization would not bear heavily on their choice to circumcize.
I feel the strongest ethical argument against male genital mutilation is the simplest: it isn’t your body, it isn’t your choice. The slight chance that the child may grow up to be like me, and wish the procedure had never been done, should give parents pause. Modifying the body of an unconsenting individual is cruel, regardless of their age.
When it comes down to it though, there are some really gruesome facts about circumcision that most people don’t know. It often results in deformity of the penis, and can ruin sexual pleasure entirely. Like any surgery, circumcisions can be botched, and they often are. Removing thirty to fifty percent of the skin from an organ the size of an almond is a risky endeavor, and if the procedure is performed incorrectly, or if the penis heals improperly, there can be terrible consequences [warning, this section links to graphic material]. The skin can heal too tightly on one side of the penis, resulting in erectile curvature. Too much skin can be removed, causing tearing or stretching of the remaining tissue during erection. Or instead, pubic skin can be drawn upward onto the shaft, resulting in a freakish condition known as ‘hairy shaft.’ Another risk is that the skin heals itself to the glans of the penis, forming what’s called a skin bridge. These side-effects are all too common, but once in a blue moon, something really bad happens. Keep in mind that an infant’s penis is very small and delicate, and thus very hard to operate on. Sometimes the entire glans is removed along with the prepuce, leaving a penis with no head. In the worst case scenario, a child’s penis is mutilated so completely, that it has to be removed. In certain cases, the child may even die. I am not making this up, this happens.
Do the perceived benefits of circumcision warrant these risks? Is the prospect of HIV or VD so terrifying that we should jeopardize our children’s sex lives? Is adhering to tradition so imperative that we must do so even when faced with these dangers? I say no.
For a naturalist like me, the final argument is that we evolved the foreskin for a reason; if it had no function, or were harmful to the organism, it would have been bred out a long time ago. Granted, there may not be an immediately obvious function for the thing, and we may be able to live without it, but it’s still part of our biology. It’s still part of what it is to be an intact human male, and no one has the right to take that away.
*I feel it necessary to specify at birth because I really don’t care if people do it when they are adults. Just like I don’t care if they are into S&M, testicle torture, genital peircing, or any of the other weird ass shit adults have the right to engage in. Just don’t do it to kids.
