I was born without a foreskin. Despite this and despite the fact that my parents were totally unreligious, they had a ritual circumcision and the mohel insisted on drawing blood. My first son was circumcised at the recommendation of her Swiss doctor who had his own son circumcised (he wasn’t Jewish), but recommended a special clinic in Zurich for the purpose. So unless you consider Switzerland not in Western Europe, it is not true that there is no circumslcision in western Europe.
Our second son was like me and we didn’t have him circumcised. Think of it as evolution in action.
You made the claim. You provide the cites. And no, a blanket statement from AMA doesn’t (ahem) cut it.
ETA:
If that was directed to me:
I didn’t specify what part of Europe
and
I didn’t say it doesn’t happen, just that there’s a large amount of men that could possibly serve as a comparison.
And there are other people who resent it. One of my premises in life is that rights and liberties - including protections - exist for those who want and need them
You (and not only you) talk like the time when you were being circumcised and quite possibly suffering excruciating pain counts for nothing. Just because you don’t remember it now doesn’t mean that it’s OK that you suffered it at the time. You were equally human when you were a baby.
The foreskin is not just dead weight - it serves a function, including one contributing to sexual pleasure. And there are people who have had botched circumcisions with irreversible damage to their genitals - or who have even died from it.
There was an excellent study in South Africa showing that circumcised men were less likely to catch HIV.
I didn’t think that’s a compelling reason to get circumcised in most of the world, though.
But they will not be able to choose infant circumcision, which is enormously less traumatic than post-puberty circumcision. There are a lot of choices parents make for their kids. What’s your native language? Did you get infant vaccinations? Where did you go to school? What kind of food are you accustomed to eating?
I’m sorry, you mistook this for Factual Questions or Great Debates.
I have zero interest in playing No True Scotsman data gathering with you where you get to arbitrate what counts as “clear evidence” or what “cuts it”. You have the same access to Google that I do.
Also, the cancer prevention benefits of circumcision apply only to neonatal circumcision. Being circumcised later in life doesn’t offer the same benefits.
(FWIW, the rate of penile cancer in North America is around 0.56 per 100,000 and 0.92 in Europe, though there’s variance between regions (1.2 in the UK, 1.3 in Poland))
For what it’s worth, I was born before the current trend away from circumcision in the US, and I wasn’t. Mom figured that Dad was better able to decide that particular question, and Dad figured that if they didn’t, and I ever decided later in life that I wanted it, it could be done then.
And it never really made any difference to me. Most boys in the locker room would rather die than make any sort of comment about another guy’s penis, and I figure that by the time any woman sees it, she’s already made up her mind if she wants to have sex with a man. I might have noticed that it looked different from Dad’s, but then again, I also noticed many other ways that I looked different from him, and I suppose I eventually asked, at which point my parents explained. Being an uncircumcised male among the circumcised just wasn’t ever any sort of big deal.
Sure. Googling “circumcision hiv study” will give you lots of results, but here’s a recent one
It’s interesting in that it was a randomized prospective study (men were randomized to be circumcised immediately or in 12 months) where most of the studies are observational or non-randomized.
What function? We used to have a few posters who were one trick ponies on the subject of circumcision being wrong and evil. The best any of them could come up with is that without a foreskin, the head of the penis becomes slightly keratinized and somewhat less sensitive… Is that the function you are talking about? Or are you claiming something else?
I was circumcised at birth and neither of my parents were asked about it, the hospital just went and did it, same as my two brothers, all of us at different hospitals in different states. That was back in the 50’s.
My son was not circumcised and has not had any problems, socially or medically.
My partner is a doctor and she has shared some really shocking tales of entrenched habits of the medical profession - especially around childbirth protocols. There has been some progress there, but like most professional associations these days the AMA works hardest to protect the financial position of its membership over the best interests of their clients.
Ironically, you can find the same position being made about Europe (neonatal circumcision isn’t routinely performed because of the cost to the nationalized healthcare systems versus return on dollar for benefits)
** story my mom told me. I was too young to remember.
My dad wasn’t circumcised. He had problems with rashes and tenderness. It’s hard to clean inside the foreskin. It’s moist and a great environment for bacteria.
He finally got fed up, and was circumcised in his early thirties. As you can imagine, the recovery was extremely painful.
You could use that logic to justify giving parents a free hand in making any awful decisions they see fit and not doing anything about it. Just because parents do make all these decisions doesn’t mean they need to make all of them or should make all of them for their children. By your logic, parents should be allowed to have all their children’s teeth pulled in order to avoid cavities and possibly very dangerous oral infections later. Surely you don’t think parents should have such decision-making power?
You’re naming a decision here that needn’t be made because if it weren’t a cultural thing (in the USA due to medical quackery, in Jewish, Muslim and certain other communities due to religious mandates), no normal adult man would think to have his foreskin removed. In most European countries (I can speak from experience in the matter of the Czech Republic, where I live now), normal men do not see their foreskin as anything problematic and would not think to have it removed, nor to subject their sons to it. The proof is in the pudding. Foreskins are not a harmful part of the body. With normal hygiene, the average man will have no major issues with it.
What function? We used to have a few posters who were one trick ponies on the subject of circumcision being wrong and evil. The best any of them could come up with is that without a foreskin, the head of the penis becomes slightly keratinized and somewhat less sensitive… Is that the function you are talking about? Or are you claiming something else?
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The glans is soft tissue. When not erect, the foreskin protects the glans from abrasions and other injuries. It also actually serves a hygienic purpose, particularly in infants who are not yet toilet trained, protecting the glans from fecal matter.
The question of sexual pleasure with or without a foreskin is a matter of debate, but it does contain certain sensitive nerve endings.
I don’t have any memory of that experience… but I do remember the time when I smashed my finger in the car door when I was 4… it felt like the entire world had clamped down on my right ring finger and the pain shot up my arm and through my elbow (like when you bump your funny bone and your pinky hurts too…) I remember that feeling but I don’t hate the engineers at Mercedes Benz who designed the weird “peg hole door locks” on a 77’ 350 SEL over it.
I never saw either of my parents naked, even partially. (I had a thread about this a few years ago.)
I saw this item on amazon and it made me cringe… Even if a grown man has no conscious memory of the event, the fact that there was enough pain and need for recovery to benefit from protective underwear… Up til now, his penis has been a good-feeling thing-- now it hurts? How to make sense of that?
There are a lot of choices parents make for their kids. What’s your native language? Did you get infant vaccinations? Where did you go to school? What kind of food are you accustomed to eating?
Up til now, his penis has been a good-feeling thing-- now it hurts? How to make sense of that?