Circumcision in Infancy

TO THE EDITOR:

Doctors never raised the fuss when routine tonsillectomy was phased out that circumcisers do today as circumcision is being phased out. The reform of medical practice has never before generated such emotionalism. When the ever-changing medical excuses are strippedaway, one is left questioning the motives of circumcisers.

M. L. Dresner, in his editorial Circumcision in Infancy, mistakenly claims that controversy over circumcision has been raging for centuries.¹ American doctors did not start experimenting with posthectomy until the 1870s, when it was used as a method of desensitizing and denuding the penis in order to make masturbation theoretically impossible.² Routine circumcision of infants became widespread in the United States only after World War II. Dresner's implication that intact males are dissatisfied, disease-ridden, indolent failures who with there were only some way the end of the penis could be cut off is nothing less than hate speech. Dresner's military experiences reveal nothing about human anatomy but say much about the control that military doctors exercised over the lives, minds, and sexual organs of their enlisted subordinates.

Circumcision always poses serious life-threatening and life-long health risks for males. The complication rate may appear low, but the potential for the complications to be tragic is high. It is not that deaths due to circumcision are rare: it is that they are rarely reported in medical journals. It is puzzling that Dresner should be more concerned with a spurious 1.4% risk of urinary tract infection (UTI), easily curable with antibiotics, than with a 1.5% risk of significant and irreparable complications.^3,4 Wiswell's UTI data have been disproved.^5,6 Controlled studies show that circumcised men are more at risk for some sexually transmitted diseases.^7-9 The myth that the intact penis is more difficult to keep clean is a preposterous scare tactic invented by circumcisers. It is irrational to circumcise babies because some parents have a sexual attraction for the surgically denuded penises with which they are familiar. Whose penis is it, anyway? It is the child who must live with the consequences of the surgery. Ethically, only he can make the decision to undergo nontherapeutic penile reduction surgery to become more attractive to acrotomophiliacs.

The central importance Dresner places on his having ordered his own sons to be circumcised is beside the point. Parents from the era of mass circumcision must be taught to accept normal human reproductive anatomy. In the absence of immediate, life-threatening, clinically verifiable medical indications, parents and doctors have no right to remove body parts from children. There is a human right to an intact body. American males deserve the right to control their own reproductive organs. American males deserve the right to refuse treatment or to seek alternative treatment. Forcing circumcision on a male when he is too young to refuse is a violation of human

Paul M. Fleiss, M.D.
1824 North Hillhurst Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90027

Frederick Hodges
Wellcome Unit for History of Medicine, Oxford University, UK

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