Circumcision - the best thing for your son?

There are many facets as to why circumcision is still adhered to along the east coast U.S.A. (it's not really found elsewhere in the world anymore). Here's what I've collected as reasons:

1) Religious requirements for fundamental Christians and Jews/Judaism.

2) Considered healthy because of years of poor explanation blindly followed by many.

3) Aesthetics

Now the irony of the entire situation is that, primarily, health issues arise as the first explanation. There are more common and more subtle reasons to the madness, however. First, look at it from Judaism's viewpoint: God had at one point told Abraham to circumcise his sons as a mark of the people of YHWH. He did, and did so to himself (adult) and sons (adult). Not a fun thing to do to yourself, cut off that foreskin...ouch! As a male and as a circumcised unbotched male, I find this somewhat unappealing. So the jews have ample reason to believe this, because they believe the covenant of Abraham is unaltered andthe messiah has yet to come and receive His people.

Fundamental Christians, however, see it much differently. They don't hold to any covenant standpoint in theology, they hold primarily to a dispensational. Why on earth, then, do they religiously hold that circumcision still is a marking of God on His people? The covenant Christians hold that Christ's mark is in baptism, and a few groups of the Fundies do as well, albeit few and far between. I grew up fundie and I learned that because God commanded Abraham, it must be healthy, and therefore it must be adhered to as a scritpural commandment to follow Christ.

This is simply not true.

First, circumcision is not the same today as it was in Abraham's day. The procedure now is over the top and excessive, removing far more fold than necessary. In 1442, the church issued papal ruling that forbid circumcision of its members. The Renaissance was an era where no men were circumcised at all, it was completely nonexistent. There is thus this gap in European culture that spans the ancient Roman Empire to roughly 1500 years later, where the procedure is then picked up again.

Why is this alarming? Because if a procedure is unpracticed for 1500, can you imagine that it would resemble the same exact practice one and a half millennia later? Try this with a carriage: allow a culture to go without horse drawn vehicles of any sort and then show thema picture 1500 years later and expect them to replicate it. Simply not going to happen. The same thing has happened with the practice of removing the foreskin.

The practice of circumcision thus ended physically and began spiritually in the Bible from the point of the new covenant on. In parallel with the lack of the practice after 1442, it did not pick up again until the very very late 19th century, because the foreskin was considered a vital part of male maculinity.

Now arise the health concerns.

Since 1950: (excerpt from Wikipedia, up to date information)In 1949, a lack of consensus in the medical community as to whether circumcision carried with it any notable health benefit motivated the United Kingdom's newly-formed National Health Service to remove routine infant circumcision from its list of covered services. One reason may have been Douglas Gairdner's famous study, The fate of the foreskin, which revealed that for the years 1942-1947, about 16 children per year in England and Wales had died because of circumcision, a rate of about 1 per 6000 circumcisions. [15] Since then, circumcision has been an out-of-pocket cost to parents, and the proportion of newborns circumcised in the hospital has fallen to less than one percent.

Similar trends have operated in Canada, (where public medical insurance is universal, and where private insurance does not replicate services already paid from the public purse) Individual provincial heath insurance plans began delisting non-therapeutic circumcision in the 1980s. Manitoba was the final province to delist non-therapeutic circumcision which occurred in 2005 [16]. The infant circumcision rate in Canada has fallen from roughly half in the 1970s to its present value of 11%, albeit with strong regional variations.

In South Korea, circumcision was largely unknown before the establishment of the United States trusteeship in 1945 and the spread of American influence. More than 90% of South Korean high school boys are now circumcised, but the average age of circumcision is 12 years, which makes South Korea a unique case [17].

In some South African ethnic groups, circumcision has roots in several belief systems, and is performed most of the time on teenage boys:

"...The young men in the eastern Cape belong to the Xhosa ethnic group for whom circumcision is considered part of the passage into manhood... A law was recently introduced requiring initiation schools to be licensed and only allowing circumcisions to be performed on youths aged 18 and older. But Eastern Cape provincial Health Department spokesman Sizwe Kupelo told Reuters news agency that boys as young as 11 had died. Each year thousands of young men go into the bush alone, without water, to attend initiation schools. Many do not survive the ordeal..." [18].

Prior to 1989, the American Academy of Pediatrics had a long-standing opinion that medical indications for routine circumcision were lacking. This stance, according to the AMA, was reversed in 1989, following new evidence of reduction in risk of urinary tract infection. [17] A study in 1987 found that the prominent reasons for parents choosing circumcision were "concerns about the attitudes of peers and their sons' self concept in the future," rather than medical concerns.[19] A 1999 study reported that reasons for circumcision included "ease of hygiene (67 percent), ease of infant circumcision compared with adult circumcision (63 percent), medical benefit (41 percent), and father circumcised (37 percent)." The authors commented that "Medical benefits were cited more frequently in this study than in past studies, although medical issues remain secondary to hygience and convenience."[20] A 2001 study reported that "The most important reason to circumcise or not circumcise the child was health reasons."[18] A 2005 study speculated that increased recognition of the potential benefits may be responsible for an observed increase in the rate of neonatal circumcision in the USA between 1988 and 2000.[21] In a 2001 survey, 86.6% of parents felt respected by their medical provider, and parents who did not circumcise "felt less respected by their medical provider".[18]

In the United States, statistics (1999) collected by the National Center for Health Statistics show that the overall rate of neonatal circumcision had remained near 65% since data collection began in 1979 [22]. However, strong regional differences in the circumcision rates have developed during this time. While more than 80% of newborn boys are circumcised in the Midwest and South, circumcision rates have declined to about 37% in the West in 1999. [23]. This has been attributed in part to increasing births among Latin Americans, who usually do not circumcise [24].

________

So, now it is entirely in the "interests" of the parents to decide for their children. There is no health benefit, the aesthetic benefit is an entirely mental affair, and the religious significance applies only to the jews.

What now?

Don't get your sons circumcised. If you're an east-coast American male, it's probable you are circumcised. If you're female, you're more than likely under the conviction that it's a healthy endevor for your son. As a couple, you're even more convinced because you'd never have a son not have what you have. Amazingly America is the only nation in the world with circumcisions amounting to over 50% of the male population. In Europe and Australia, the numbers are under 14%.

Take the stand. My brother had a botched circumcision that required that he undergo the operation once again, a failure that to this day my mother has not forgotten. I know I won't be allowing the doctors to cut my son's extension. The scariest part is the possibility for the individual to contract HIV from the operation itself, which is the most alarming possibility of them all.

In review:

1- the new covenant of Christ determines that circumcision is NOT a good thing,

2- Baptism replaces circumcision as a mark of the messiah's people

3- the health benefits are zero

4- the health risks (in Europe) are about 1 in 6000 cases, about 16 per year in England

5- The aesthetics are a very postmodern viewpoint. It was considered unmasculine to be circumcised in Europe and America up until 1949.

There are other reasons, but the health benefits have been proven false time and again. Do you want to be a part of something as useless and potentially harmful as circumcision? Take the stand and don't circumcise your sons.

--TK