Typical liberal. The solution to any perceived problem is to involve the government.
There's a flip side to getting the government involved, one that you may approve of.
Very few US parents have paid directly for their infant's circumcision for the past 65 years or so. It's either covered under the family's health insurance plan, included in their HMO, or paid for by the government. The last one is a biggie -- currently about 40% of all newborn circumcisions in the US are done under Medicaid, up from about 28% a decade ago. Thus, circumcision is easy money for the medical profession and just about invisible to the parents. Someone else handles the bill and they get handed a baby already "fixed".
I'm sure some well-intentioned individuals decided to make routine circumcision just about the only exception to Medicaid's "necessity" mandate, but it's consumed hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars since about the time I was born. The free market's a wonderful thing in some areas, but health care isn't always one of them. However, in this case the market isn't even allowed to work on the issue because supply and demand are distorted by subsidies and artificial incentives.
On the one hand are many who say infant circumcision is a "personal" issue (though who the "person" is here is sometimes misunderstood) or that it is a health issue, despite no study ever showing cut boys grow up healthier than intact boys. In reality, US circumcision has been primarily an economic issue and secondarily a sociologic issue. Evidence abounds that when parents bear the full cost of the surgery, the rate of election plummets. Ditto when the locker room argument diminishes, as it has started to do in this day of no more public showers and widespread neurosis about nudity.
The US went freaky for circumcision in the Cold War era when people envisioned clean-cut American boys (and Commonwealth boys from proper families) vs uncircumcised socialists and communists. The US identified dozens of spies by circumcision status and the ongoing enthusiasm for the procedure spawned numerous health beliefs to back up what was already happening, and has left traces still today. Medicaid started in the mid-60s when Cold War sentiment was still high, and this may have also justified all states immediately covering routine circumcision of male infants. It certainly wasn't the medical profession; the American Academy of Pediatrics first pronouncement on the subject in 1971 said unmistakably that there were no valid medical indications for circumcision in the neonatal period.
Now the world's turned on its head, you can't identify an ally by his circumcision status and the whole issue's getting reëxamined. Americans don't take well to directed change, and rightly so. Everywhere else this fad has been allowed to lapse on its own through attrition when the economics of universal health coverage no longer supported circumcision's mass application. In effect, for many decades in the US we've
all been paying to keep the circumcision machine going, whether through our insurance premiums, our tax dollars, or both.
Uncle Sam needs to get out of the business of paying to have healthy, normal infants circumcised. That's the "turning to the government" that I endorse. Increasing evidence suggests that in jurisdictions that drop IMC coverage (California first in 1982, now 18 states) private insurance and HMO plans follow suit. Last year Medicaid spent over $100 million of federal and state funds to circumcise 400,000 perfectly healthy baby boys and to treat complications therefrom. The history of getting into this mess is increasingly clear; getting out of it is the question. Personally, I don't think far-reaching legislation is particularly effective at smoothly achieving that goal. As an economist, I'd rather see the issue in its unsubsidized economic state and then decide whether there's still something to deal with.
its the year 2013 and its still practiced. im not even Jewish and im circumcised and very resentful about it.
i love my penis but to know it could have been bigger really disturbs me.
At least one study, by a condom manufacturer, showed that intact men had longer penises on average. And I've definitely seem some sausages that looked like they wanted to burst out of the constraints of their cut skin, and plenty that could only achieve a comfortable erection by pulling up scrotal tissue. But you don't really know whether your particular circumcision changed your size parameters.
Anyway, there are lots of ways of getting involved to change the status quo if you don't like it. Google it. Want to make a big difference? Work to ensure Obamacare doesn't automatically cover it.