Infant circumcision never should have become an industry, let alone a billion-dollar one. Senseless genital cutting of healthy children out of perceived religious obligation is bad enough, but senseless genital cutting for profit and parental preference is despicable. Barbaric.

Today marks lucky 13 years on this platform! 2013 –> today #MyXAnniversary

The replies to this Facebook post. There’s hope! facebook.com/share/p/1EjpLMV…

My friend has been diagnosed with breast cancer. He’s intact and has never had any foreskin issue in all his 92 years of life. Certainly not penile cancer. Then again, we all know that penile cancer is rarer than breast cancer in males. It is never a reason to circumcise preëmptively.

Today the USA is 250 years old (depending on what date you measure from). For the first half of that time, infant circumcision was almost entirely not practiced and no one was saying it was needed for health or any other reason. At the halfway point, about 1901, American clergy and doctors started pushing for newborn boys to be circumcised at birth in the maternity ward. For a while it was a status symbol that showed your family was well off enough to afford to have babies in a hospital. As infant circumcision gained momentum, new justifications were introduced that would have been laughed at 100 years earlier. It reached 50% by 1933, 70% by 1950 and 90% by 1960. Real-world benefits have been hard to prove. No one credibly claims AA or could ever prove — that West Coast boys (mostly intact) are less healthy and happy than rust belt and coal belt boys (90% circumcised). So, inevitably, the US circumcision rate has been declining for the past 3 decades, despite financial incentives and subsidies. And like in Australia, which began abandoning circumcision 2 generations ago (10% cut now) and has seen only improvements in male and overall health, The USA will be better off once infant circumcision returns to the history books. English settlers arrived in North America in 1607. Indigenous Americans didn’t circumcise and neither did the new arrivals. It would be almost 300 years before the hysteria of boys touching their intact penises would kick off the stupidest, most damaging fad in American history. It’s time to end circumcision — now.

The United States for 100 years has found itself in a Kafkaesque situation regarding infant circumcision. Other advanced countries have abandoned routine circumcision when their medical profession stopped soliciting it and basically said it was useless and probably harmful. But we can’t do that in the USA because any criticism of circumcision is taken as a swipe against those who practice it, be they Jewish, Muslim or just plain stubborn American. We had a realistic opportunity in the early 1970s to extricate ourselves from near-universal routine infant circumcision (RIC) and join the UK and other countries that had started to back off of cutting boys. The American Academy of Pediatrics opined in 1971 that there are no medical indications for circumcision at birth. So direct and clear. The US Surgeon General should have taken that opportunity to direct Medicaid, through which all 50 states automatically paid for neonatal circumcision, to cease coverage. It wasn’t until California dropped it 11 years later that the ball started rolling. Medicaid delisting circumcision that doesn’t have a diagnosis would have saved a TON of federal and state money over the past 55 years, and encouraged health insurance companies to do the same. Why didn’t this happen? It wasn’t because of a “Jewish lobby”. It was because of well-meaning, misguided people assuming that portraying circumcision as unnecessary and/or harmful would offend certain groups. In other words, the truth might hurt. Well, screw that. That kind of thinking led to millions of boys losing functional parts of their penis, with attendant complications — sometimes serious. Just like there was a reluctance to badmouth smoking in the 1950s, for fear of offending smokers and tobacco companies. But the US Surgeon General tackled that one and over several decades laws got passed that curtailed smoking and held tobacco companies accountable. It took balls, but public health trumped smokers’ rights. Circumcision of healthy boys is a preventable public health crisis, too. Infant circumcision is a multi-billion dollar industry, between surgical fees, materials fees, facilities fees, medical costs to diagnose and repair tens of thousands of botched *needless* circumcisions every year, and the burgeoning industry of trafficking in valuable severed infant foreskins for medical and cosmetic u$e. Stop sacrificing children’s rights and health to protect adults’ feelings. Stop worrying about admitting the emperor is naked and not wearing finery he can’t see. Stop wasting millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars on a fad based on myths. Don’t blame it on the Jews. Just act. Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and other countries all unshackled their general population from infant circumcision with zero interference from religious groups. They’re not the bogeyman, yet they live rent free in Americans’ heads. I understand trying to be sensitive. But don’t make penises less sensory in doing so. Wake up and be smart about children, body autonomy, dollars and health.

We Jews circumcised infant boys for 2500 years (not 4500) without justifying it on health grounds, of which there really are none. Actually, the whole world understood that until relatively recently in human history. The real disinformation/justification campaign came about in two ways. With the rise of germ theory, 19th century Jews themselves began to understand the dangers of penile surgery on newborns, and movements rose up to question or oppose infant circumcision as necessary in Jewish life. Judaism holds that as science evolves, so can the religion. And so, we see men like the founder of Reform Judaism and the founder of Zionism declining to circumcise their sons, along with hundreds of others. Around the same time, doctors trying to make a name for themselves in the UK and the USA began spouting what can only politely be described as as “snake oil” claims about the wonders of circumcision on children. Protestant clergy seized upon this strange turn of events and solidly backed the idea of chopping off the pleasurable parts of boys’ penises (while themselves remaining intact). Around 1900 these two odd and dangerous bedfellows decided they needed a better, more palatable message if they were going to convince most of British high society and Americans overall to consent to a maternity ward message that circumcision should be routine and a sign of good breeding. Jews initially scoffed at the idea of widespread health benefits of infant circumcision. For centuries the intervention had been understood to be a sacrifice in devotion and obedience to God. It needed nothing more. But under threat from factions within Judaism, some Jewish leaders and doctors jumped on the “Protestant/medical” bandwagon out of fear that opponents of circumcision would come after our sacred rite. They were correct. (I’m one who believes Judaism should evolve out of ritual penis cutting and UK/US Protestant clergy and doctors were self-serving bastards that foisted this scourge of circumcision on Western culture.) And thus started the full scale assault on the normal, intact male body in American and British Commonwealth life. It took the UK just 50 years to see just how pointless and insane the circumcision fad was and reverse course. Soon after the advent of the NHS in 1948, British doctors stopped advocating for circumcision and actively noted the role of foreskin and the harms & risks of cutting newborns. Other Commonwealth countries followed suit, like New Zealand, Australia and now Canada. It aided greatly that they all adopted single-payer national health coverage schemes. It’s worth noting that Jews did almost nothing to promote circumcision in the British Commonwealth countries or to try to stop its disfavor and decline. In the USA we still have a profit-driven, fee-for-service healthcare economy and doctors still solicit circumcision from virtually every new parent. Religious groups have decided that the USA is their greatest hope for showing the world that widescale circumcision is alive and well, but the truth is that it’s rotting from within. The breathless, ever-changing health claims simply don’t materialize in the real world, certainly not on the scale boldly asserted. The rise of human rights awareness, including for children and infants, and the undeniable fact that males are NOT designed flawed while females are designed perfect, will eventually allow reason to prevail. Routine and ritual genital cutting of healthy minors will be seen as an odd detour in human history, a mania that imploded under its own lies, greed and harms.

Funny how women with Type 1a FGM can still experience sexual pleasure, orgasm, and have children. So your argument is that if a body part still works after part of it is removed, then it wasn't mutilation? The ability to function does not prove that nothing was lost.

Yes, it’s unethical to cut foreskin off of healthy minors. Yes, infant circumcision has a shameful complication rate, often dangerous. But the foreskin itself is art; a marvel of engineering. Its design is unique in all the body and serves numerous purposes. It’s worth keeping.

Judaism does not promote circumcision. Some demented individuals do, but Judaism officially has no stance on what gentiles do in regard to penises. What Judaism does expect is to stay out of the way of Jewish practices. That’s why potential bans get people so worked up.

It’s usually Christians insinuating Jews (as a whole) want everyone circumcised. Why is that? I think it’s because Christianity is a proselytizing religion & people brought up in it think all religions work the same way. Fortunately, I wasn’t. Judaism doesn’t want your foreskin.

“Why do you like being circumcised?” Because when I’m naked girls can see all of my penis, including the permanently exposed head. Oh, yeah! “They never see all of your penis, my guy, because half your dickskin — the best half — was cut off and thrown away (or sold) at birth.”