If you could change your circumcision status...?

[Frozen Heart]

Agreed, circumcision is a surgery fundamentally, and it's a "body mod" when performed outside of rare medical need. Some people want body mods, some people don't. Some people want a Prince Albert, some people don't. Everyone understands that body mods are a matter of personal preference. Therefore we don't force body mods on people without their consent.....except for circumcision, absurdly.

Re: religion. When people force body mods on infants/children they are implying that their child is going to embrace the exact same religious beliefs when they are older. That's not how the world works, necessarily. I'm glad that when I rejected my parents' religion, my only scars were psychological, from their anti-gay attitudes. I can heal psychological scars, but if my parents' religion had also physically marked me, I'd have a harder time feeling free.

Religion shouldn't take all the blame though, because the even bigger issue that prolongs non-consensual circ is that a lot of parents think they "own" their children. Parents are merely temporary caretakers and protectors. No one can own anyone else.

It is not that simple... In the parents point of view, they are taking care of their child when they have a surgery like that on a child. If you believe in a God and this God ordered you to circumcise your children, in their head they are doing something beneficial for the child.

I thought about this subject a little bit... In MY personal opinion, I wouldn't interfere with this tradition. You can have a healthy sexual life if you are cut. I was circumcised when I was older and I don't feel like the difference of being cut and uncut is enough to outlaw this ancient tradition.

Now, if your don't follow a religion that asks you to circumcise your children, I would never recommend this surgery for another person.

USA, South Korea, Canada, Australia... They are an exception in the world. In most countries the circumcisions are done due medical or religious reasons, so this conflict is almost non-existent.

 

[9759931]

It is not that simple... In the parents point of view, they are taking care of their child when they have a surgery like that on a child. If you believe in a God and this God ordered you to circumcise your children, in their head they are doing something beneficial for the child.

I thought about this subject a little bit... In MY personal opinion, I wouldn't interfere with this tradition. You can have a healthy sexual life if you are cut. I was circumcised when I was older and I don't feel like the difference of being cut and uncut is enough to outlaw this ancient tradition.

Now, if your don't follow a religion that asks you to circumcise your children, I would never recommend this surgery for another person.

USA, South Korea, Canada, Australia... They are an exception in the world. In most countries the circumcisions are done due medical or religious reasons, so this conflict is almost non-existent.

So, you have empathy/sympathy for people who believe that God has instructed them to remove body parts from their children. If the parent feels like it is a good thing, then it is ethically allowable, right? I get their motivations too, but I also know that religious people are capable of erring, while being 100% sincere.

Infants don't have a religion. All they know is, am I in pain, or am I not in pain? Am I protected or not protected? As they feel a knife going into them, un-anaesthetized, are they thinking "I'm being taken care of," "This is beneficial for me"? No, they're having the worst experience of their short lives. They may never have an experience that jarring again, for the rest of their lives. These children have heightened cortisol (stress) for six months afterward. It is that traumatic. They also have been shown to cry harder/be more distressed when they get a vaccination well after the circumcision. The body forms a memory, even if the mind doesn't.

Leaving aside the ethics of pain, do you have any empathy or sympathy for people who had body parts removed as children, who wish to have them back, who can never have them back? Or, let's say the circumcision was more poorly done. There are people who had relatively more botched infant circumcisions, who certainly have less sensation than you have after your (I assume, voluntary) circumcision. Mistakes will happen when it comes to extremely delicate surgeries on newborns. We can't just shame the people who screwed up and go about our day, as if we solved a problem. The mistake happened because surgery on newborns is a fundamentally bad idea. The surgery shouldn't be performed, except for by a specialist treating an existing issue.

To me, the distress of tiny humans in excruciating pain is a lot more compelling than the distress of someone who has to rethink one of the teachings of their religion.

 

[9759931]

@Frozen Heart: And just in summary, I just don't understand how well-meaning people - who want to be tolerant of other people's religious beliefs - can turn off their minds and their hearts to the subject of circumcision. Somehow, they are even able to even turn off the parental instinct that would normally make them recoil at the thought of an infant screaming/crying as body parts are taken off in a non-numbed surgery.

I'll always be devastated by what this says about human beings. We are fully capable of turning off all of our compassion, at will, even for helpless infants, if it means avoiding a politically fraught issue.

 

[Lance97]

Circumcision is a surgery whether its done for medical, cultural or religuous reasons. Every surgery has risks (even death) yet is the only surgery where the majority of clients aren't the ones facing these risks. A single death from this in the US should be enough to outlaw it when its not necesary yet around 100 newborns die from it every year.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...FjABegQIAxAF&usg=AOvVaw2z8BvoG0pzgxGyxnXD7bx9

 

[9759931]

Circumcision is a surgery whether its done for medical, cultural or religuous reasons. Every surgery has risks (even death) yet is the only surgery where the majority of clients aren't the ones facing these risks. A single death from this in the US should be enough to outlaw it when its not necesary yet around 100 newborns die from it every year.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240804903_Lost_Boys_An_Estimate_of_US_Circumcision-Related_Infant_Deaths#:~:text=This%20study%20finds%20that%20more,of%20these%20deaths%20are%20avoidable.&ved=2ahUKEwjy7Jj7mprwAhXGTMAKHXV8CJoQFjABegQIAxAF&usg=AOvVaw2z8BvoG0pzgxGyxnXD7bx9

I shared that infant mortality statistic in an (American) college class. We had been discussing the case of a guy who had been raised as a girl because his botched neonatal circumcision had destroyed his penis, who later committed suicide perhaps due to gender dysphoria. Some people expressed shock that a circumcision could have led to all that. I told the class about the risks and the pain.

A nursing major next to me looked at me pityingly, like I was needlessly concerned, and said "The other nursing majors said that they give them a sugar-covered pacifier and they're fine."

It's a bad situation we have here in the US. There is willful ignorance.

 

[Frozen Heart]

Circumcision is a surgery whether its done for medical, cultural or religuous reasons. Every surgery has risks (even death) yet is the only surgery where the majority of clients aren't the ones facing these risks. A single death from this in the US should be enough to outlaw it when its not necesary yet around 100 newborns die from it every year.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240804903_Lost_Boys_An_Estimate_of_US_Circumcision-Related_Infant_Deaths#:~:text=This%20study%20finds%20that%20more,of%20these%20deaths%20are%20avoidable.&ved=2ahUKEwjy7Jj7mprwAhXGTMAKHXV8CJoQFjABegQIAxAF&usg=AOvVaw2z8BvoG0pzgxGyxnXD7bx9

Look at this:

Benefits of Circumcision Outweigh Risks, Pediatric Group Says - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

"By one estimate, put forth by Dan Bollinger, a prominent opponent of circumcision, based on his review of infant mortality statistics, about 117 boys die each year as a result of circumcision. That estimate is cited often by critics of routine circumcision but widely disputed by medical professionals. A spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the agency did not keep track of deaths from infant circumcision because they are exceedingly rare. In the agency’s last mortality report, which looked at all deaths in the country in 2010, no circumcision-related deaths were found."


Don't do this man... Don't quote numbers that are far from being accepted except by the most extreme critics on this subject. If his statistics were true, the USA would have a higher infant mortality rates caused by circumcision than countries with much worse health care systems.

Almost all circumcision-related deaths are caused by cardiac arrest due to induction of general anesthesia and hypersensitive reactions to local anesthetic agents, but they are an extremely rare occurrence.

Look at the study below (page 35+). There are graphics for you to feast your eyes on. It is from the World Health Organization, a more trustable source. The data inside it will help you speak ill of circumcision.


neonatal_child_MC_UNAIDS.pdf (who.int)

So, you have empathy/sympathy for people who believe that God has instructed them to remove body parts from their children. If the parent feels like it is a good thing, then it is ethically allowable, right? I get their motivations too, but I also know that religious people are capable of erring, while being 100% sincere.

Infants don't have a religion. All they know is, am I in pain, or am I not in pain? Am I protected or not protected? As they feel a knife going into them, un-anaesthetized, are they thinking "I'm being taken care of," "This is beneficial for me"? No, they're having the worst experience of their short lives. They may never have an experience that jarring again, for the rest of their lives. These children have heightened cortisol (stress) for six months afterward. It is that traumatic. They also have been shown to cry harder/be more distressed when they get a vaccination well after the circumcision. The body forms a memory, even if the mind doesn't.

Leaving aside the ethics of pain, do you have any empathy or sympathy for people who had body parts removed as children, who wish to have them back, who can never have them back? Or, let's say the circumcision was more poorly done. There are people who had relatively more botched infant circumcisions, who certainly have less sensation than you have after your (I assume, voluntary) circumcision. Mistakes will happen when it comes to extremely delicate surgeries on newborns. We can't just shame the people who screwed up and go about our day, as if we solved a problem. The mistake happened because surgery on newborns is a fundamentally bad idea. The surgery shouldn't be performed, except for by a specialist treating an existing issue.

To me, the distress of tiny humans in excruciating pain is a lot more compelling than the distress of someone who has to rethink one of the teachings of their religion.

And yes, I am against circumcisions conducted in non-clinical conditions. They should be prohibited. They are barbaric rituals. But don't tell a story as if every circumcised boy on Earth had undergone a barbaric ritual. That is just an ill intentioned way of explaining your thoughts. That is one of the reasons why this prohibition talk never goes anywhere: people demonize the procedure and tell horror stories as if they were the norm, but then somebody appears and easily disproves it.

The one thing in commom almost all boys that suffered with complications have: circumcisions conducted in non-clinical conditions. But, as with any surgical procedure, circumcision can result in those complications:

- the most common early (intra-operative) complications tend to be minor and treatable: pain, bleeding, swelling or inadequate skin removal;
- late (postoperative) complications include the formation of a skin bridge between the penile shaft and the glans, infection, urinary retention, meatal ulcer, impetigo, fistulas loss of penile sensitivity, sexual dysfunction and oedema of the glans penis.
- severe complications are extremaly rare;
- deaths are beyong rare.

Circumcision is a simple procedure and complications are rare, but most of them could be avoided if the surgery is done in a clinical environment and by a qualified medical staff. That is what I hope and would fight for when it comes to circumcision: every person, baby or adult, should have this procedure in a decent hospital with a good medical staff. This procedure should not be allowed in unsafe environments.

 

[9759931]

Look at this:

Benefits of Circumcision Outweigh Risks, Pediatric Group Says - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

"By one estimate, put forth by Dan Bollinger, a prominent opponent of circumcision, based on his review of infant mortality statistics, about 117 boys die each year as a result of circumcision. That estimate is cited often by critics of routine circumcision but widely disputed by medical professionals. A spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the agency did not keep track of deaths from infant circumcision because they are exceedingly rare. In the agency’s last mortality report, which looked at all deaths in the country in 2010, no circumcision-related deaths were found."


Don't do this man... Don't quote numbers that are far from being accepted except by the most extreme critics on this subject. If his statistics were true, the USA would have a higher infant mortality rates caused by circumcision than countries with much worse health care systems.

Almost all circumcision-related deaths are caused by cardiac arrest due to induction of general anesthesia and hypersensitive reactions to local anesthetic agents, but they are an extremely rare occurrence.

Look at the study below (page 35+). There are graphics for you to feast your eyes on. It is from the World Health Organization, a more trustable source. The data inside it will help you speak ill of circumcision.


neonatal_child_MC_UNAIDS.pdf (who.int)





And yes, I am against circumcisions conducted in non-clinical conditions. They should be prohibited. They are barbaric rituals. But don't tell a story as if every circumcised boy on Earth had undergone a barbaric ritual. That is just an ill intentioned way of explaining your thoughts. That is one of the reasons why this prohibition talk never goes anywhere: people demonize the procedure and tell horror stories as if they were the norm, but then somebody appears and easily disproves it.

The one thing in commom almost all boys that suffered with complications have: circumcisions conducted in non-clinical conditions. But, as with any surgical procedure, circumcision can result in those complications:

- the most common early (intra-operative) complications tend to be minor and treatable: pain, bleeding, swelling or inadequate skin removal;
- late (postoperative) complications include the formation of a skin bridge between the penile shaft and the glans, infection, urinary retention, meatal ulcer, impetigo, fistulas loss of penile sensitivity, sexual dysfunction and oedema of the glans penis.
- severe complications are extremaly rare;
- deaths are beyong rare.

Circumcision is a simple procedure and complications are rare, but most of them could be avoided if the surgery is done in a clinical environment and by a qualified medical staff. That is what I hope and would fight for when it comes to circumcision: every person, baby or adult, should have this procedure in a decent hospital with a good medical staff. This procedure should not be allowed in unsafe environments.

I'm glad we agree that ritual religious circumcision is barbaric. The PDF you linked, by the way, has this to say about ritual circumcision: "Most circumcisions performed by traditional circumcisers are carried out with no anaesthesia."

You said, "But don't tell a story as if every circumcised boy on Earth had undergone a barbaric ritual."

I'm genuinely confused. Please read my last two posts; we were talking about religious circumcision. Pretty much every sentence I wrote was specifically about religious circumcision. That's why, in those posts, I pointed out that the infants are un-anaesthetized when it's a religious surgery. To me that is a crucial detail for people to know.

So let's talk about non-religious circumcision then. American Routine Infant Circumcision (RIC) is what I'm most familiar with. Honestly, I have no idea what you consider acceptable sources, and more than likely you probably assume I'm a tin-foil-hat-wearing extremist by this point, so to avoid accusations of bias, I'm going to quote from a website that any American parent might pull up, if they even bother to research the procedure at all, which many (negligently) don't. It's a website that is very clearly tolerant of Routine American Circumcision (RIC) and I'm going to highlight some parts that jump out at me. Circumcision (for Parents) - Nemours KidsHealth.

One of the hardest parts of the decision to circumcise is accepting that the procedure can be painful. In the past, it wasn't common to provide pain relief. But the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends it and studies show that infants undergoing circumcision benefit from anesthesia, so most doctors now use it. But because this is a fairly new standard of care, it's important to ask your doctor ahead of time what, if any, pain relief your son will receive.

Two main types of local anesthetic are used to make the operation less painful for a baby:

1. a topical cream (a cream put on the penis) that requires at least 20 to 40 minutes to take its full effect
2. an injectable anesthetic that requires less time to take effect and may provide a slightly longer period of anesthesia

In addition to anesthesia, acetaminophen is sometimes given. This helps reduce discomfort during the procedure and for several hours afterward. Giving a pacifier dipped in sugar water and swaddling a baby also can help reduce stress and discomfort."​

​

"In the past, it wasn't common to provide pain relief."

They're talking about my generation, me. I was more than likely not given any pain relief. Pain relief only began around the time I was born, so I hear.

This is what more than likely happened to me. I was strapped down to a board called a circumstraint, which is a board with a depression in the shape of an infant. The straps on the board were tightened around me to hold down my four limbs, because -- of course -- without them, I would be flailing and jeopardizing the delicate surgery being performed on me, because I was going to be fully conscious for it.

I'll quote your PDF now:

"In paediatric circumcision, the foreskin may be fused to the glans penis, especially in infancy, and it is then necessary to separate these prior to circumcision by gently stretching the opening of the foreskin with artery forceps. Once the foreskin has been dilated, the foreskin is slowly retracted and separated from the glans penis by gently running a blunt probe around the glans until the corona is exposed and the circumcision procedure can be carried out (Figure 4)."​

The key word is fused. It is supposed to stay fused for years. Your article says nothing about how painful it would be to have fused body parts separated. We all know how ultra-sensitive the head of a penis is. Imagine how sensitive it must be at that age, at a time, developmentally, when it's NOT ready to retract. That's the problem with literature like what you provided. There are lies of omission. Clinical writing just has to be clinical to meet its objective; it doesn't have to give emotionally relevant information.

Then they used this device on me (from Wikipedia - Gomco Claim). Again, I'm feeling everything. I'm feeling my densely innervated foreskin being crushed for five minutes. And with it goes my extremely innervated frenulum, which was completely removed in my case.

After retracting the foreskin, the Gomco bell is placed over the glans at the level of the corona and the foreskin is replaced into the anatomic (natural) position. The yoke is then placed over the bell, trapping the foreskin between the bell and the yoke. The clamp is tightened, crushing the foreskin between the bell and the base plate, and left in place for 5 minutes. The crushed blood vessels provide hemostasis. The flared bottom of the bell fits tightly against the hole of the base plate, so the foreskin may be cut away with a scalpel from above the base plate with no risk of injuring the glans.
​

And for the next few days my only "relief" is vaseline. The wound is exposed to feces and urine with the exception of whatever protection is afforded by the vaseline. Diaper changes are painful. And I'm just an newborn. All I do at that age is "feel" and react. Given what I know about myself as an adult, having a pretty low tolerance for pain, surely I felt days of post-surgical pain. AT that age, I couldn't strategically distract myself, unlike an adult. I couldn't even consciously communicate my predicament at all.

I don't know whether this bothered you at all (I hope it did, and please have a heart, it bothers me), but I think I know what you'd like to say now -- that was then, this is now. To this day, medical professionals in the US are under no actual obligation to provide pain relief. Nothing says they legally must.

So back to paragraph that I marked up with boldface. What are the numbing treatments it suggests?

topical cream

Like Emla? Still in use, but shown in its effectiveness to be only somewhere in between the ultra-high pain of a no-anaesthesia circumcision and the zero-pain scenario of simply not being circumcised. This is one of the studies I was talking about earlier, that showed that infants cried harder at subsequent vaccination. Turns out topical cream is not enough.

DEFINE_ME

injectable anesthetic

This one is one my list to research more, and I don't have a lot to say about it yet. All I'll say about that is that if I were a parent, I wouldn't sign my newborn to be jabbed with a needle in that sensitive area.

​

In addition to anesthesia, acetaminophen is sometimes given. This helps reduce discomfort during the procedure and for several hours afterward.

The same website goes on to say "It usually takes between 7 to 10 days for a penis to heal." So, what's being done for pain from day 2-7? Nothing that I'm aware of. That poor infant is suffering post-surgical pain. Does the American healthcare system care? I guess not. Out of sight out of mind.

So, in summary, this is what goes on in America. I live in the region of the country with the highest rates of infant circumcision.

I am not expecting to impress with my links or anything, I'm trying to say that even if circumcision is done "properly", in a hospital, by professionals, what have you, my country has still NOT figured that it needs to do everything it can minimize pain. In this sense, yeah, the US Medical System dabbles in barbarism too, even in the best of cases.

And even if America did find it in their hearts to do this more "humanely" we're still back to square one. Whose body is this? Whose penis? I had a body part removed torturously, at a very young age, and I'll never experience that body part. I wasn't asked, they didn't get my consent. My crying and my screaming would have been an indication of non-consent to anyone with a halfway functioning moral compass, but that too was ignored. Whether you think I'm just bitter and sensationalist is for you to decide, but I have tried to deal with facts and common sense in this post.

 

[9759931]

@Frozen Heart: I'm sure you don't actually want to read all of that, so I'll just end the whole debate right now. I believe that circumcision is a human rights violation if done without consent. It seems that you don't. We'll just go our separate ways I guess. Best wishes.