The Case Against Circumcision: a classic article from 1997
1997 was a watershed year in the intactivist movement. In addition to this article, three landmark books were published that year: Circumcision: The Hidden Trauma: How an American Cultural Practice Affects Infants and Ultimately Us All and Questioning Circumcision: A Jewish Perspective by Ronald Goldman, and Circumcision Exposed: Rethinking a Medical and Cultural Tradition by Boyd.
Unfortunately this article is still all too pertinent, especially the part about the for-profit medical industry inventing new phony "reasons" for genital cutting on children to keep a lucrative racket going.
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The Case Against Circumcision
Paul M. Fleiss, MD https://www.mothersagainstcirc.org/fleiss.html
Paul M. Fleiss, MD, MPH, is assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of Southern California Medical Center. He is the author of numerous scientific articles published in leading national and international medical journals.
Published in Mothering: The Magazine of Natural Family Living, Winter 1997, pp. 36--45.
"Routine circumcision of babies in the United States did not begin until the Cold War era. Circumcision is almost unheard of in Europe, Southern America, and non-Muslim Asia. In fact, only 10 to 15 percent of men throughout the world are circumcised."
"The natural penis requires no special care. A child's foreskin, like his eyelids, is self-cleansing. Forcibly retracting a baby's foreskin can lead to irritation and infection. The best way to care for a child's intact penis is to leave it alone."
The Foreskin Is Necessary
Western countries have no tradition of circumcision. In antiquity, the expansion of the Greek and Roman Empires brought Westerners into contact with the peoples of the Middle East, some of whom marked their children with circumcision and other sexual mutilations. To protect these children, the Greeks and Romans passed laws forbidding circumcision.1 Over the centuries, the Catholic Church has passed many similar laws.2,3 The traditional Western response to circumcision has been revulsion and indignation.
Circumcision started in America during the masturbation hysteria of the Victorian Era, when a few American doctors circumcised boys to punish them for masturbating. Victorian doctors knew very well that circumcision denudes, desensitizes, and disables the penis. Nevertheless, they were soon claiming that circumcision cured epilepsy, convulsions, paralysis, elephantiasis, tuberculosis, eczema, bed-wetting, hip-joint disease, fecal incontinence, rectal prolapse, wet dreams, hernia, headaches, nervousness, hysteria, poor eyesight, idiocy, mental retardation, and insanity.4
In fact, no procedure in the history of medicine has been claimed to cure and prevent more diseases than circumcision. As late as the 1970s, leading American medical textbooks still advocated routine circumcision as a way to prevent masturbation.5 The antisexual motivations behind an operation that entails cutting off part of the penis are obvious.
The radical practice of routinely circumcising babies did not begin until the Cold War era. This institutionalization of what amounted to compulsory circumcision was part of the same movement that pathologized and medicalized birth and actively discouraged breastfeeding. Private-sector, corporate-run hospitals institutionalized routine circumcision without ever consulting the American people. There was no public debate or referendum. It was only in the 1970s that a series of lawsuits forced hospitals to obtain parental consent to perform this contraindicated but highly profitable surgery. Circumcisers responded by inventing new "medical" reasons for circumcision in an attempt to scare parents into consenting.
Today the reasons given for circumcision have been updated to play on contemporary fears and anxieties; but one day they, too, will be considered irrational. Now that such current excuses as the claim that this procedure prevents cancer and sexually transmitted diseases have been thoroughly discredited, circumcisers will undoubtedly invent new ones. But if circumcisers were really motivated by purely medical considerations, the procedure would have died out long ago, along with leeching, skull-drilling, and castration. The fact that it has not suggests that the compulsion to circumcise came first, the "reasons," later.
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