The first one does not. The second one does. Did you even read the one-line excerpt I posted?
Circumcision doesn’t do you a bit of good if you’re a “bottom” and your partner is HIV+ and not using a condom AFAIK.
Oh, and while others are praising evolution for giving them a foreskin, I wonder if they also praise it for giving them such things as wisdom teeth, the appendix, rectal hair, and toe nails.
You can’t be serious.
Are you really so out of touch with the rest of the world that you actually buy this load of tripe?
Yeah, we’d all be better off if we all used condoms all the time. We’d be better off if we didn’t smoke, drink in excess, use harmful drugs, ingest polutants and lot’s of other nasty things we do either by choice or lack there of. What’s your advice then, as a medical professional, stop behaving badly and all this will go away? That’s the sum total of your wisdom on a global scale. Just knock it off people!
Thanks. You got more of those rose coloured glasses for the rest of us living in the real world?
So if “we’re not going to know if they had any problems with it or not” why bring it up so underhandedly? If statistics don’t support your argument, does it make any sense to allude that there is a problem? Sounds a bit alarmist and disingenuous to me.
And the last time the AAP spoke on this matter officially was in 1986. Perhaps it’s time they revisited the issue now (20 years later) that more data has been collected on the subject. No?
“Most”? Only in some areas, and only by a small percent. In the West, less than 30% of males are circumcised neonatally. The country overall has been experiencing a decline in infant circumcision rates, and they now hover somewhere between 55-60%. More than in parts of Africa, I’m sure, but only slightly more than half of the boys in the US are cut. I don’t generally use wikipedia as a cite, but it’s a well-cited article, with statistics from many different sources.
Dammit! I want to be anti-elective-circumcision, but you idiots are really making it hard! You’re just not making any sense at all!
I can give you the view from one community who is eschewing routine infant circumcision - the Crunchy Granola Hippie Folks[sup]TM[/sup]. (ambushed, steam will start coming out of your ears in a minute. Bear with me.)“We” feel that the body is pretty damn cool and sacred and that unnecessary surgery, even minor surgery, shouldn’t be done without informed patient consent. This includes, for many of us, things like ear piercing of infants. The body has an innate wisdom and beauty that shouldn’t be fucked with for no reason. Since we don’t know what kind of long-term subconscious emotional trauma a baby boy might feel (and we don’t believe that babies feel no physical pain the way our mothers were taught), we feel it only ethical, for an elective procedure, to leave the boys intact and let them choose whether or not to be circumcised later in life. And yes, these are many of the same arguments you’ll get (along with a few more actually reasonable arguments about immunity life and the natural life-cycle of vaccinatable illnesses and modern sanitation) against routine child immunization.
Now, notice what’s missing here? What’s missing is ANY INFORMATION ABOUT POSSIBLE HEALTH BENEFITS TO ROUTINE CIRCUMCISION. It’s not even considered. If you bring it up, it will be dismissed with a wave of the hand and a bit about “Nature’s design” and how foreskins are “natural” (with the subtext of “superior”, of course) until I want to bash them over the head with a natural rock and drown them in natural hemlock tea. Naturally.
My own son was born when I was 18, and didn’t know anything from anything. I had him circumcized 'cause his father was, and that was that. My second child, born in '05, was a girl, so thank Og I didn’t have to wade through all the information to make a real decision this time.
Ha. That’s pretty funny. I had my sons circumcised after reading everything I could find about it. I think it’s a fine thing to do. It is not going to stop the spread of AIDS. Circumcision partisans are flailing about, saying that there are no risks (there are: see the AAP paper) and celebrating the fact that it provides (accoding to Helen’s Eidolon’s cite) a 30% reduction in the chances of contracting AIDS, although it’s not clear that there’s any causality. And that’s a 30% reduction of the risk of contracting HIV that already exists, which many people do not realize, is not 100%. A man only has to have unprotected sex with one extra partner to cancel out the benefit of circumcision. So shove it up your ass, k?
Heh, I suspect that all this emphasis on how “natural is better” is a product of the comfort and safety that not actually having much contact with the “natural” provides. 
It does seem to me though that for whatever reason foreskins attract more loony bin attention than (say) pediatric othodontia, which is a lot more invasive, painful and “unnatural” and is often done for purely cosmetic purposes and against the consent of children able to express consent (I sure as heck didn’t want to wear braces).
As for “longterm subconcious emotional trauma”, there people obviously haven’t had a teething baby. I do assure all and sundry that teething is at least three or four orders of magnitude more upsetting than circumcision, which is anyway undertaken under anaesthetic if done in a hospital. The thought that a baby is somehow gonna be mentally damaged for life by a procedure they hardly notice, when they seem to survive teething just fine, is beyond absurd. 
We are scared for life by teething pain. There would be peace in the Middle east if not for the fact that most everybody involved suffers from personality defects due to traumatic teething. A person can have many scars from many different tramas.
Yeah! Just ask any Scientologist! They’ll be happy to tell you such things (oh, and stay away from DC-9s).
Between the Theatens, teething and not getting a BB gun for Christmas when I was nine it is amazing that I can get out of bed in the morning.
Sigh. 60%. 30% of uncircumsised men (in the first study) had HIV - nothing to do with transmission rates.
Oh, shit! Please tell me you at least had a pony! :eek:
The vast, overwhelming preponderance of the medical evidence even in South Africa is that circumcision will save millions of lives. The number of complications of circumcision surgery are so tiny in comparison that it’s quite stupid to even compare them.
Every time you take a shower or a bath you’re taking a potentially hazardous action. What an intelligent person – apparently quite unlike you – will do is evaluate the relative risks and choose the lowest risk option. And that is by far to undergo circumcision because virtually NO ONE will use a condom every single time and the smartest thing you can do is have a built-in, always-on safety backup.
Bullshit. It is the ones who can and have read the scientific findings that are advocating circumcision, and the idiots who are desperately plugging their ears and practice anti-scientific denial.
Insult me all you wish, but what I wrote is a thoroughly well-established psychological fact. There is absolutely NO rational reason in the world to have such bizarre, mentally unstable angst about a trivial amount of missing, useless flesh. It not only must be psychopathological, it is. It’s a sickness, and a deeply pathetic one. Want compelling evidence? See: Extra Skin? Let Me Have It! - m4mw - 29
You are among the most ignorant, anti-rational, anti-scientific, illiterate morons I’ve ever encountered (hell, you can’t even spell!) If you took the time to investigate the issue in as much depth as I have, you would know damned well that the overhwelming preponderance of the scientific medical evidence has come down strongly in favor of routine neonatal circumcision. The AAP is merely the victim of intense political pressure from deluded, mentally unbalanced zealots who are driven by emotion and post-modern political theory and their lust for sucking uncut cocks, like cirp. The desire to have more uncut men on the market for them to blow is the most likely reason most people join cirp and similar anti-science crackpot groups.
And if you claim that you’ve worn a condom every single time you’ve had sex, you’re a patheic liar as well as a fool.
That’s not consistent with what I’ve read from any source. HIV is substantially more easily transmitted by an HIV+ partner if they are uncut, and substantially less easily transmitted by an HIV+ partner who is circumcised. In fact, that’s exactly why circumcision is so remarkably beneficial.
Unbeknownst to me, my partner of 10 years was HIV+ the whole time I was with him yet I never contracted HIV or any other STD from him (or anyone else) even though we didn’t always use condoms. There’s no convincing way to explain that except by the counter-transmission effects of circumcision.
He died of AIDS.
No problem at all; there was no steam or, as saoirse had it, no spittle either. How could I object to such a well-written, friendly defense?
But you stole my thunder (such as it was) when you wisely and wittily wrote:
If you hadn’t have written that, I might well have come out with my favorite, all-time O Henry poem:
What stupid asshattery! First of all, I doubt you actually wrote what you meant to write. What if that one extra partner didn’t have HIV or any other STDs? What a maroon!
But more importantly, as I wrote to Tuckerfan above, HIV is substantially more easily transmitted by an HIV+ partner if they are uncut, and substantially less easily transmitted by an HIV+ partner who is circumcised. That’s a LIFE LONG BENEFIT FOR EVERY SINGLE SEXUAL ENCOUNTER, whether your partner is HIV+ or not.
“Your reasoned and accurate analogies go a great distance towards proving you are not an raving fanatic on this issue.”
I can’t prove anything, but I’ve read a fair amount of the anti-circ movement’s emotionally-driven propaganda and have met a fair number of these people and all this points IMO mainly to the hypothesis that these are primarily gay men who so fervently desire uncut male partners that they are desperate to increase the supply of them. Naturally, they seldom reveal that as their primary motivation, even though I’ve heard enough of them admit this outright. No, they almost always try to hide their sexual motivation behind bogus pseudo- and anti-science, EXACTLY like crop-circle enthusiasts and those who claim they’ve been abducted by UFOs. They exhibit essentially the same kind of self-delusional belief systems.
There were no analogies there. Just an opinion based on the number of people who have died and will die from their politically biased lack of medically sound recommendations.