[QUOTE=Valteron]
1.. HIV prevention: If circumcision is only 50% effective in preventing HIV, then all it would serve to do is give a false sense of security that actually could lead to LESS use of safe sex and MORE danger of infection. Everyone, circumcised or not, should be practising safe sex.
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Farbeit from me as a woman to get in an argument with men about the value of circumcision, but allow me to point out that this isn’t accurate. First, the finding was not that “circumcision is 50% effective in preventing HIV,” but that circumcision cut the rate of infection by 50%. Second, yes, the study groups were rather small, but the findings were so overwhelming and unequivocal that the trials were actually halted on the grounds that it was unethical to not allow the control group (uncircumcised) to be circumcised if they chose. One of many cites. Third, it is faulty reasoning to argue that because one method prevents X optimally, all other methods to prevent X should be disallowed – even if the optimal prevention is less likely to be used. This is the same reason people argue kids should not be taught about safe sex (because really they shouldn’t be having sex at all), and the same reason people argue that girls should not be immunized against HPV, even though it can cause cancer (because, again, they should be practicing safe sex or not having sex at all). It’s also the rationale used by the Catholic Church to justify not providing condoms in Africa – that there will be MORE sex if people can have safe sex, so you shouldn’t make safe sex an option. You, similarly, are arguing against SAFER sex, in the faint hope that people will opt for safe sex if the only other option is dangerous sex.
But that doesn’t appear to be true. To date, the only options have be safe sex or dangerous sex, and yet the fact is that most African men, and a great many American men, do not practice safe sex as it is. Denying them the option of reducing their HIV risk by 50% is not going to make them more likely to practice safe sex if they’re not practicing safe sex in the first place. This is a way to make unsafe sex SAFER; it’s not an argument against also doing other things to make sex safer still.
All that being said, I agree with the majority of others who say that nine is either too old or too young to be circumcising. Now that the boy is old enough to know and remember what’s going on, he should have the right to decide for himself if he believes it’s in his best interest to have this or any other non-essential surgery done. I know I probably would have been rather traumatized by any surgery done on my girly bits at that age.
- Circumcision makes you “cleaner”. Have you people never heard of soap and water? It is true that areas of the human body where skin covers skin allow for bacterial growth, and unpleasant odours. So it is with armpits, your butt crack and the fork of your legs. That is why I make a point of washing those areas well every day. Or would you prefer to cut off my arms at the shoulder to allow my armpits to breathe freely and remain clean. How about amputating my buttocks so that I no longer have an ass crack?
Over 150 years ago in the Victorian era, some doctors would even approve of castration of boys who refused to stop masturbating, fully convinced that they were helping to save the lives of these young patients, who, they had learned in medical school, could be made insane and fatlly ill by this vice.
Whenever religion joins medicine in attacking human sexual pleasure, alarm bells go off in my head.
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Now-a-days, circumcision is less common than it used to be, so this probably isn’t as much of a problem for kids these days.