Saving Them the Pain of a Later Circumcision

Photo by Aesop

When it comes to the topic of circumcision, an argument often touted is that the parent wants to save the child from the pain of a possible circumcision later on in life. They then follow this by the fact that they know someone who had to have a circumcision as an adult. They just want to save their child that pain. The logic of that makes me want to scream.

Let’s assume that they actually do know of a person (maybe even two) who did legitimately need a circumcision as an adult, despite the fact that medical evidence shows that circumcisions, except in extremely rare cases, are not done for legitimate medical reasons – i.e. a medical community pushing circumcisions due to lack of knowledge. What about the hundreds of men they know who did not need to be circumcised? Why base a decision on something that happened to such a small group?

Back to the assumption that the person’s son might actually need the procedure sometime later in life, having it done now isn’t saving your child from any pain. In fact, it is causing more pain. An adult male who makes the decision to be circumcised has access to adequate pain medication, which can be altered if he deems that it is not working well enough. An adult male’s foreskin is not still attached to the glans of his penis, unlike an infant’s, which must be ripped away from the glans. An adult male is not sitting in a diaper with urine and feces next to his open wound, increasing chances of infection and pain. And then, of course, is the fact that more children die from complications of circumcision than from either SIDS or car accidents.

Circumcising an infant child does not save him from pain. Will he remember having the procedure done as an infant? Probably not, but that doesn’t lessen the pain any. Given that logic, should we also remove our daughters’ mammary cells as infants to prevent them the memory of a possible mastectomy? Should we surgically remove all appendixes at birth?