circumcision - what gives?

Great Debates
41

From ambushed’s post:

These data deserve to be ridiculed. One in 600 ? I beg to differ.

The Danish epidemiologist Morten Frisch published a study: “Falling incidence of penis cancer in an uncircumcised population”.

http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/cancer/frisch/

The current lifetime risk for a Dane to contract penile cancer is 1 in 1964. Current US risk: 1 in 1437. Danish circumcision rate: 1,6%. Something does not compute.

If you’re arguing the case for prophylactic surgery per se, wouldn’t it make sense to tackle more serious risks first ?
Just about any medical risk imaginable has a higher occurrence rate than penile cancer.

S. Norman

42

Speaking strictly as a parent who had to decide if his then-unborn son should be circumcised or not (the missus didn’t have an opinion one way or the other), I’ll just share that my reasoning was “if he’s born with it, it can’t be that bad.”

43

I agree, and I apologize. Being ganged up on sometimes regrettably brings that out in me.

In my defense, however, all of the anti-circumcision “arguments” I’ve read here I have seen scores (if not hundreds) of times from REAL crackpot zealots on anti-scientific sites such as CIRP. For the anti-circumcision lobby, it’s all about political emotion and anti-science and quasi-religious activism. To me, that’s the very definition of a zealot. That’s exactly why they are so similar to Creationists.

So when people like sewalk cite CIRP and other crakpots, they’ve earned the epithet “unscientific zealot”!

Nevertheless, there is the chance that the people here came up with those CIRP-like arguments independently, and I apologize for reacting as if they were the zealots themselves. They just didn’t know any better.

To quote Robert Park: "It’s a mistake to underestimate the human capacity for self-delusion.

We’ve seen quite a bit of self-delusion from the anti-circumcision lobbyists here!

44

That last post by rjung pretty much hits the nail on the head (ouch, that could be an eye-watering pun in this context). Ambushed goes on about scientific evidence but I dont think scientific evidence really has much to do with this debate.

My OP didnt concern the scientific pros and cons since we all agree that no medical harm is done by circumcision. There may or may not be some minimal benefits of it, the jury is still out, but any benefits are not sufficient to warrant the procedure.

My point is this:

  • You shouldnt cut ANYTHING off your body unless you really have to. Nails and hair are not comparable to healthy, living skin.

  • In the absence of compelling medical evidence that it is urgent that we remove our foreskins then our default position should be NOT to do it

  • If I had a son, I would not allow him to be circumcised for any reason other than medical necessity

  • If my doctor was pushing for me to circumcise my son and he had no medical justification for this, I would make a complaint about him to the General Medical Council. Anyone wishing to circumcise my son without medical justification would have to do it over my dead body… and they would have to pry my sons foreskin out of my cold, dead hand.

45

I just have to say that the next topic down the page after this was “To Tip or Not to Tip”, and I just about burst a gut laughing. Okay, carry on.

46

I’m just wondering: Since you feel that circumcision is “mutilating” the body, do you feel the same for body piercings, tattoos, and implantations (You know, those decorative beads that go under the skin, and how some people have metal connections grafted to their skulls so they can have metal spikes on their head…) into the body? (I’m not trying to make any kind of point with this, I’m just wondering).

I’m not against parents deciding whether to have their children circumcised or not. After all, it is the parents’ prerogative to make every decision for their children until they’re of the legal age of consent. They choose what religion (if any) the child will be raised with, they choose what words they’re allowed to say, they choose what they will eat, they choose what school they attend, and they can even choose to have their son’s or daughter’s ears pierced. So what’s any different about the parents making a choice one way or another about cirumcision?

47

And do you think it would be just fine for a parent to put, say, a large and coulorfull tatoo on their kid’s chest, without the consent of the child? IIRC, it’s illegal to do any cosmetic procedure like that -except- for circumcision, without the child’s permision (But I could be wrong about that).

Just because the parent’s have the authority to make a decision, doesn’t make it right.

48

Then again, what possible medical benefits might a big tattoo possibly have? If a big colorful tattoo potentially lowered the risk of getting skin cancer or some such in my son, then hell yeah, I would get him one. I would just make sure it looks good.

49

Why not?

50

What, you’ve never heard of bad parents before?

Now, it’s a much more extreme example, but it is an example of how parent’s decisions aren’t always good ones; Imagine a child has apendicitis. He’s going to die if he doesn’t get surgery. But his parents won’t let him have the surgery, because using medical science is against their religious beliefs (I forget what it was called…). Does that make it right? If you want to make it even -worse-, imagine if the kid were to know all that was going on, and that surgery would cure him, and pleaded with the parents to have the surgery done, just so the pain would stop, and them -still- refusing.

As for the medical risks/benefits, all that’s really been posted has been somewhat questionable pro/con arguments from rather biased sites on both sides. From what I’ve seen, the medical benefits or risks from one side or the other are rather questionable, to the point that it seems the effect is rather negligable. The only thing that seems obviously for-sure is that you have to wash it if you’re not circumcised (Hygene? What’s that??).

But… The pro-circumcision quotes the risk of death that can be eliminated by circumcision at roughly 0.1 per 100,000. Hardly seems like a significant risk, ESPECIALLY since someone pointed out a few posts back that that risk is eliminated by proper hygene.

So, imagine this completely hypothetical situation; Say that by putting a neon-colored tatto at least 6 inches square (By the time they grow up, that is) on the buttocks of your child, you can reduce their risk of dying from hemaroids from 0.5 per 100,000 (As according to CDC stats) to 0.4 per 100,000, the same reduction we’re dealing with here. And just to make it compare equally, imagine that the same reduction can be achieved simply by wiping every time they go to the bathroom.

Obviously, this isn’t an exactly point-for-point comparision, but it seems to me that for medical risks/benefits, we’re haggling over really miniscule things here…