I was going to ignore this because I hate when these threads go off topic and I don't want to contribute to it. But if you're going to get on some kind of intellectual high horse, you should at least have your facts mostly straight.
The
history of circumcision as a practice mainly relates to religion/culture. The notion of circumcising for "health benefits" is actually a fairly recent idea (relative to the length of its existence). Further, the health benefits are minimal, and it's debatable whether they justify the practice. Only about
2% of uncircumcised males infants will get a UTI, which is roughly the same percentage of circumcised male infants who will have
complications from their procedure (e.g. prolonged bleeding or infection).
The cancer you're presumably referring to is penile cancer, which effects less than
1 in 100,000 men in the US and has plenty risk factors that aren't related to being uncut. Further, suggesting that being uncircumcised in itself is a risk factor is too vague a description. Only uncircumcised men who experience
phimosis are at an
increased risk. Phimosis impacts less than 1% of adult uncircumcised males so again and it's usually caused by some kind of trauma or infection, not the kind of thing that generally just happens. (In extreme cases a man with phimosis may have to be circumcised as an adult but steroid creams and good hygiene practices are sufficient in most cases for preventing additional problems).
Lastly, if I recall correctly, the studies suggesting that circumcision helps prevent HIV were done in African countries. HIV is much more widespread across that continent than in other places, you can't really generalize based on that data. The
US population has been harmed far more by HIV and AIDS than most countries in Europe, despite having a higher circumcision rate. Probably because the actually barriers to preventing HIV are social, economic, geographic, etc.
As a last point, I should mention those studies in Africa were done on heterosexual men, which further separates the results from the population often most at risk in the US/Europe (i.e. men who have sex with men). If we want to prevent HIV in that group,
condoms and
PrEP are quite obviously more helpful than circumcisions.
Apologies to the people who weren't being obnoxious for this block of text.