That Unspeakable Topic

Ok, now that we've all gotten our feet wet with the "Cloth" post.... let's jump right in, head-first, to a big topic: Routine Infant Circumcision. We're just going to call it circumcision for short, but in the interest of defining our terms, what I am talking about here is the routine elective plastic surgery that is still performed on 32% of infant males in the U.S. It is an amputation of the prepuce organ of the male penis. Just so we're clear.

And just to be even clearer, to lay out all my cards on the table from the get-go, I will tell you right now that I am adamantly, completely, and wholeheartedly against this practice. And I feel like I have some street cred here on both sides of this topic. I chose to circumcise my first born. I've made that choice. And at the exact same moment the procedure started, I know without a doubt I'd made a terrible mistake. Unfortunately, it was too late to change my mind. That was an emotional reaction on my part which was a direct result of seeing first hand my child's emotional reaction to this decision I made for him. I realize that emotional reactions are not usually very legitimate reasons for making big decisions. If they were, we would never do anything which upset our child but which was ultimately good for them. We make decisions all the time to inflict discomfort on our kids for their ultimate well-being. That just goes along with parenthood.

I realize that some of you reading this have also chosen to circumcise your sons. You might be totally happy with your choice. You might be offended that I am now speaking of that same action as a terrible mistake. And I want you to know that I am not condemning you for your choice. I am telling you that at one point in my life I also made that choice. I also felt it was a good choice. And now I feel differently and I want to tell you why, if you care to read this. I am not attacking you. You will not find me calling you names here or condemning you. We all make the choices we make because we love our children and we want the best for them. What I want to do is to give you some more information and tell you why I think from here out, you should keep your future sons intact. This post is long, but I truly hope you will read it all.

Ok, back to immediately post-circumcision. By this time I had an instinct that things were pretty stinky in Dodge, and I was so completely traumatized by my child's reaction, that I decided to investigate further. Now, this was in 1993 when the circumcision rate in the US was still very high, though lower where I lived on the West Coast. In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics had come out with a statement in 1989 claiming that circumcision had "potential benefits" and because of that statement, the circumcision rate was on the rise. source I do actually remember that that was the stance at the time. I remember I questioned this practice inwardly and my husband and I talked about it quite a bit. I think if we'd had the opportunity to talk to an intactivist (someone who is an activist against circumcision) who could really explain things to us, we would have opted out. But we didn't have that available to us and then there was this official statement that there were (ambiguous) "benefits." When we asked our pediatrician about it, she was not committed one way or the other and she said it was up to us, though she didn't feel there were any real benefits. (That was actually a pretty renegade stance at the time.)

So when we'd run out of time (or so we thought) and we had to make the decision (I was actually at the one week appointment; I was questioning right up to the end), I opted for it. I was really shooting in the dark because I didn't feel I had solid reasons for or against, but some family history, in the end, is what swayed me. And a lot of assumptions. Assumptions are no way to make a non-reversible decision, just in case you were wondering. Interestingly, no one suggested to me that I could wait, learn more, and make the decision later. (Seems obvious, I know, but it was my first child and I just didn't think about that. It seemed like a decision one made in the first week at the latest.) And NO ONE suggested that this might be a decision my son might want some say in. For some reason we tend to think of our babies as babies only and we sometimes forget they will grow into men who might have opinions about things like their penises. Do you know any guys who have opinions about their penises? Yeah...I thought so. Me too.

There really isn't any way to discuss this without upsetting someone, so can we please agree to temporarily shelve our own feelings on the matter and just talk about the practice itself and the reasons NOT to do it? Because, there really are no reasons TO do it. There really aren't. There is absolutely no medical reason to justify routine infant circumcision, and plenty of reasons not to do it. If you are a Christ follower (and I am), there are no religious reasons to do it and plenty of religious reasons NOT to do it. And if you are making the decision based on emotional reactions, well, we've already talked about how that is a bad idea.

There is waaaaay more information than I am going to even attempt to cover here. You can get a wealth of information at the Peaceful Parenting blog (this blogger is a Christian, too), so I'm just going to hit the high points.

My Top 10 Medical Reasons You Should NOT Circumcise Your Son:

1. If ain't broke, don't fix it. An intact penis is perfectly functional. Just leave it alone. The foreskin is not "extra skin."
2. Circumcision is extremely painful. It is literally like peeling off your fingernail and anesthetics can't adequately numb the pain of the procedure in an infant. Urine burns the exposed glans every time the infant pees and the diaper (and even air) cause discomfort for quite a while as it heals. The pain experienced can cause the child to slip into a shocked state (usually perceived as sleeping), scream uncontrollably, and shake. The stress hormones released during this time and the days that follow have been shown to have long term effects on the infant's brain and overall development. 
3. Circumcision turns what is designed to be an internal organ into an external organ. The tissue of the glans is like vaginal or mouth tissue, it's meant to stay moist and protected. Exposing it to air keratinizes the tissue (which is desensitization and further damage). The foreskin is normal and protective, removing it starts a progression of dysfunction that worsens over the lifetime.
4. No governing medical body or association recommends it. All of the "studies" that have attempted to prove benefits of circumcision have been discredited.
5. More than just the foreskin is removed. There are several functional parts of the intact penis that when lost, significantly impact the function of the penis for that person's lifetime (remember your little baby will spend most of his life as a man, not a baby). Learn more about the ringed band and the frenulum, for starters. These are tissues that once removed, cannot be regenerated.
6. Circumcised men experience less sexual sensation, and more sexual dysfunction. Intact males and their partners experience greater sexual pleasure than circumcised males and their partners. In fact, one study showed that intact men have four times the sexual sensitivity of the penis compared to circumcised men. There are many other benefits that both men and and their partners benefit from later in life.
7. There are no benefits and there are significant risks to the procedure to the infant male including: certain loss of function (risk: 100%), pain and trauma (risk: 100%), problems with breastfeeding, excessive bleeding (only 1 ounce of blood loss in an infant is a hemorrhage and only 2.3 ounces of blood loss leads to death. see here for more information), deformation, loss of the penis, infection, surgical mistake (including loss of the glas or the entire penis), and even death. Yes, babies DIE every year from routine infant circumcision that is COMPLETELY elective.
8. Risks to the adult male who was circumcised as an infant(beyond the certain losses): curvature of the penis, impotence, erectile dysfunction, tight and painful erections, tearing and bleeding at the scar sight, and more (this is not an exhaustive list). 
9. Removing the infant foreskin causes a loss of about 20 thousand nerve endings and up to ONE THIRD of the full length of the adult male penis. Shocking? Yes, it's true, penises grow along with the rest of the baby. A circumcised man's penis is a third shorter than it would be if it had been left intact
10. How would you like to have your clitoris removed at birth? No? Ok then, how about we leave our baby boys' foreskins alone, too. It's not reversible. You can't call a "Mulligan." Female circumcision (in it's various forms) was legal in the U.S. until 1996. 1996! And yet most of us would never ever consider surgically altering our daughter's genitals at birth. We consider them healthy and good as they are. Don't our boys deserve the same? 

If you want more information on the medical reasons to leave your baby intact, you can visit any of the following sites:
NOCIRC
Circumcision Resource Center
Doctors Opposing Circumcision
Circumcision Information and Resource Pages
Peaceful Parenting - Are You Fully Informed?

Ok, let's shift gears. If you are Christ follower, you have undoubtedly heard that Jesus was Jewish and that all Jewish boys are circumcised on the 8th day according the Jewish law. You've been told that circumcision is a sign of the covenant between Abraham and God and that circumcision sets the Jews apart from the Gentiles. Well, this is one area where a little information is a very dangerous thing. While all that is true, would it surprise you to learn that God doesn't like circumcision? That He does not desire for your child to be circumcised? It's true! Circumcising your child does not please God. How can I be so sure? Jesus said so Himself TWICE, and scripture is very clear about this.

First we need to understand covenant and sacrifice. A covenant is a very serious enterprise. It is a promise, but not just any promise, it is a legal and social contract with listed agreements. It involves (among other things) exchanging names (and so taking someone and their reputation into your family), a commitment to defend that person as you would your own family, it is binding until death, and it involves a sacrifice. Ancient covenant ceremonies including dividing a qualifying animal in two, stem to stern, and laying that animal out with a pathway between the halves. You can imagine that this was a very bloody endeavor. A path was created between the halves and the two individuals who were entering into the covenant relationship (marriage is a form of this type of relationship)  would pass between the two halves of the sacrifices animal, sealing their covenant one to the other.

In the Abrahamic covenant, only God passed through the sacrificial animal. This was a one-sided covenant, whereby God made a promise to Abraham and his descendants (Genesis ch 15). The sign of the covenant was to be a cut on the flesh of every male descendant of Abraham. The cut was to be a sacrifice, drawing a drop of blood from the male. The cut was to be on the penis because by that organ come the future generations. It was intended to be a very solemn reminder of the seriousness of the covenant. (Genesis 17) It was meant to be a sort of baby dedication by the parents and a sign to the child (man) of who he was and from whence he came. It was a physical sign. We also, in the Christian Era, have a physical sign of willingly submitting in obedience to God, it's called baptism.

Circumcision was to be done on the 8th day. We now know that the infant's blood changes on that day from infant blood to adult blood with adult clotting factors. There was also a provision that if a child died because of the circumcision, his brothers would be exempt from circumcision. Children have always died from circumcision. Not many, but how many is enough? If it is your child, one is too many.

So circumcision is a sacrifice. What is a sacrifice? It's giving up something of value, to take a loss, or to permit injury for the sake of something else. If it didn't have value, it wouldn't be much of a sacrifice, would it? God did not create male children with a defect that needs to be corrected. No, when God created Adam and Eve, they were declared, along with all of Creation to be "very good." God cannot call what is imperfect "good." And "very good" entails that Creation was whole or complete, and without defect. God didn't create males imperfectly.

Circumcision is sacrifice of what is whole in the flesh to gain spiritual wholeness. Only it doesn't. Circumcision is part of God's law for his people, what we as Christ followers call the "Old Covenant." The Old Covenant was incomplete. It didn't do the job. The purpose of the Old Covenant was not to bring salvation to the people, but to help them recognize their need for salvation. Sacrificing an animal can never compensate God for the sins of man, it only serves as a reminder, and continuing to offer them was an act of obedience.....of obedient sacrifice. For obvious reasons, actual people could not be sacrificed, so the sign was a sacrificial cutting of the most sensitive area of the body, the one that leads to the future generations.

For hundreds of years, circumcision removed much less of the organ than is removed today. It wasn't until the Jewish men were bathing and competing with the Greeks that it was decided more needed to be removed to make the difference between the Jews and Gentiles more readily evident. And it wasn't until post World War II that circumcision became en vogue for non-Jews in the U.S., and the reason? To prevent masturbation. (Aside from whether or not such a thing should be prevented in the first place, this plan did not work)

But I digress...Yes, Jesus was circumcised. (Luke 2:21) He was circumcised to fulfill the law. He was meant to be the last and complete sacrifice, once and for all. Jesus' first sacrifice was that of his circumcision. It was not an honor, it was a sacrifice. And of course, his sacrifice was completed at his death, ending the need of any further sacrifice forever. (Hebrews 10, Matthew 5:17)

God, in fact, desires mercy and not sacrifice. The prophet Hosea tells us this in Hosea 6:6. The Psalmist David tells us this in Psalms 40:6. Jesus, Himself, tells us this in Matthew. In fact, he says it TWICE, in Matthew 9:13, and again in Matthew 12:7. Jesus was our ultimate perfect sacrifice, once and for all. Why would we, as His faithful followers cheapen his sacrifice by continuing to cut our babies?

Paul calls those who circumcise "mutilators of the flesh" in his letters to the Philippians. In chapter 3 Paul is speaking of circumcision directly. He is denouncing the evils of physical circumcision in light of the perfect sacrifice of Jesus the Christ. It's all over the books of Acts, Hebrews, and Philipians. In Romans 2:25 we read that circumcision has value if you keep the whole law but if you break the law you will become as though you had not been circumcised. The whole point of Christ's sacrifice is that no one but God Himself (in Christ) can keep the law! Romans 3:23 reads "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." The law does not bring salvation! It only serves to point us to our need for a Savior! Galatians 5:2 tells us that if we let ourselves be circumcised then Christ is of no value to us!

Circumcising our sons burdens them with the yoke of the law. Jesus came to set us free from the law! It's just that simple. This said by the woman who circumcised her child. Thankfully, our LORD is a God of redemption. He redeems terrible things for His glory. In watching my son's terror at his circumcision, I was awakened. I found resources I didn't know existed previously. I learned. I made different choices the next time. And now I share this with you. I already know of several little boys who have been kept whole because I have shared the story of my mistake. Our LORD is also a God of second chances and third chances, etc... And my second and third sons were kept whole, as God intended.

When my boys got older there were questions. And we answered them. No big deal. And I will tell you this, it is not my intact sons who feel like the odd men out. It is the cut one. My intact boys are so grateful to be left intact. My son who was cut had a lot of questions. I had to apologize to him. And he was gracious to forgive me.

If you are pregnant now, please know that with a 68% intact rate nationwide in the U.S. (and rising) , the intact male is in the vast majority. In the rest of the world, he is definitely in the majority. On the West Coast, there is an even higher percentage of intact boys than in the rest of the U.S.

God doesn't want us to harm our children. We can explain to them why the look different. Heck, even all cut or all intact penises will look different! And if they are upset by this (or if you even think they might be) this is not a problem that necessitates amputation of a functional, beneficial part of their body! No, this is a problem to be solved through education and compassion. "I desire mercy and not sacrifice." Ah yes, mercy. Choose mercy. Please keep your boys intact.

Ok. Comment away....but keep it civil.
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If you would like to order more information, there is an organization called Saving Penises which has put together very nice information packets which they will send to you for the cost of production and postage. For the low low price of $13 you can order your own. I happen to have one so if you live by me, you can borrow mine (as long as you promise to bring it back). :)