What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Circumcision by Paul M. Fleiss & Frederick M. Hodges

Author:Paul M. Fleiss & Frederick M. Hodges [FLEISS, PAUL M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HEA000000
ISBN: 9780759527515
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2002-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Are There Medical Benefits to Routine Circumcision?

I believe the time has come to acknowledge that the practice of routine neonatal circumcision rests on the absurd premise that the only mammal in creation born in a condition that requires immediate surgical correction is the human male. If the penile foreskin is not merely nonfunctional but a biological disadvantage so severe as to justify its immediate surgical ablation, then, surely, it might have atrophied by now.1

Thomas Szasz, M.D.

Would your son be healthier if part of his penis were cut off? Are there really any benefits to circumcision? If so, what could these benefits be? What possible benefits could be so important, overwhelming, and compelling that they could justify subjecting a child to desensitizing, denuding, and disfiguring penile reduction surgery without his permission or consent? Are these benefits important enough that you would be willing to put your child at significant risk of a serious surgical accident to his penis?

If you were to consult a standard medical textbook, published in the last five years, about the supposed medical benefits of infant circumcision, you would get one answer. If you looked at a textbook from thirty years ago, the answer would be different again. If you looked at a medical textbook from the 1950s, you would get a different answer still. Finally, if you looked at a textbook from the 1890s, you would find that the alleged medical benefits of circumcision are even more different.

As we’ve seen, in the 1960s and 1970s, when the campaign for systematic, compulsory circumcision was already institutionalized in most U.S. hospital complexes, circumcisers were still telling parents that routine circumcision was medically necessary—even mandatory!—to stop masturbation, convulsions, nervousness, night terrors, epilepsy, and other entrenched bits of quackery left over from the nineteenth century.2 Consequently, most of the adult circumcised Americans alive today were circumcised for these ludicrous “medical” reasons rather than for any of the so-called medical benefits that are being peddled today. History, however, proves that even these new benefits will be seen as quackery by future generations of doctors.

The strange fact is that the promoters of infant circumcision keep changing the list of supposed “benefits.” As soon as one “benefit” is disproved, they invent another one to take its place. There is no other surgery in all of medicine like this. Imagine if doctors were still trying to find justifications for other common nineteenth-century surgical horrors such as bloodletting, trepanning (drilling holes in the skull), clitoridectomy, castration, routine snipping of the frenulum that holds the tongue to the floor of the mouth, or amputation of the uvula. This is precisely the strange situation we are in with circumcision.

Circumcision is unique for the tremendous number of benefits that circumcisers have ascribed to it and for the intensity of the drive to come up with new rationale for an old compulsion. This fact alone should put intelligent Americans like you on guard. When I was in school, I was taught that the more reasons offered to justify something, the less likely it is that any of them are true.

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