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Not a real comparison. A baby is given some sugar water and already lives in diapers. They don't even bleed after it's done, and you just put some jelly on the front of the diaper for the first few weeks. They experience no discernable discomfort.
An adult male has gone through puberty and has a life that doesn't involve sleeping through 18 hours of it and getting changed every couple of hours. The risk of infection is greater because you are an adult who doesn't get the luxury of having every single need met 24/7 and getting to rest through your entire recovery.
Exactly. Babies can’t consent to have their bodies altered. Unless it is medically necessary, it should not be performed.
That's not the criteria for making medical decisions for your child, though. You have a kid, you know this. We make decisions that might have lasting physical ramifications for them for years.
I believe in vaccines and vaccinated my kid, but if someone felt the risks of them were too high, we don't call it child abuse. And if someone delayed vaccinations, that's not child abuse either.
We can phrase things in extremes like abuse all day, but it doesn't make it true. Injecting babies with modified hepatitis c in the first 12 hours of their life sounds like assaulting a child unless you know those words just mean they got a vaccine.
I think the reason people don't give a shit about online circumcision protesting is because most of them are cringe sycophants, using the worst language possible to alter someone's opinion on the issue.
Watch a video of a circumcision and get back to me. If it’s not necessary, it shouldn’t be done. When my son was born, circumcision shouldn’t have even been an option. The “cringe sycophants” are the religious and miseducated nurses that asked me if I wanted it done.
I've seen it live. No video was needed. It's not a decision to be made in the room, though. We were asked at the 20-week appointment by our doctor. She went through the merits and downsides. She was also younger than my wife and I, so it's not just old-school doctors who ask or think there's merit. She didn't push either way, though.
We weren’t asked until after birth. I was prepared and it had been discussed. But I’m sure many are unprepared. That’s why I’m advocating on here. Know before you go. Don’t look back in hindsight and think “oh well.”
It’s a totally valid comparison.
Removing the foreskin has real ramifications for not only looks but sexual pleasure (which, by the way, was why it was popularised by puritan Christians in the US – the original point was to stop teenage boys from masturbating by making it less pleasurable).
Cutting off the foreskin at birth takes something from a man that he can’t really restore later, whereas doing nothing gives him the bodily autonomy to make that decision later. You can always remove it if you want, but once it’s gone, you can’t just grow it back.
A baby is at your mercy and has no choice in the matter.
No, you only have a short window to make it a nothing surgery vs. a week+ recovery time.
A baby will always be at their parents' mercy. And if a parent feels the medical benefits outweigh the risks, they get to make that choice.
Also, I don't get why people keep bringing up Kellog and his ilk. It's irrelevant. WHO and the CDC both cite benefits. That's relevant enough for a person today without pretending the reasoning has to be based on old information.
Again, cite sources?
Yes, I’m aware it’s a week of recovery time later. I made the decision not to circumcise my son after talking to my father who had the procedure in his teens after he developed a condition. He told me exactly what it was like. (My father is 88 and was born before circumcision was common.)
You can do almost anything to an infant and they won’t remember the trauma. Infants have been subjected to near-fatal child abuse, including having their femurs broken, and they don’t remember it. That doesn’t make it right.
Having your wisdom teeth removed takes at least a week of recovery and we do that in late teens or early twenties. There are lots of things that take a week to recover from, and having to have your foreskin removed because it’s causing issues is far, far more rare. That’s not a reason to take that choice away.
Like I said, they can always have that procedure later if they want to, but once it’s done, that choice is basically gone.
Also like I said, I’m not trying to make people feel bad for having done it when we didn’t really know better. I’m not shaming anyone. It’s just what we did until recently. Going forward, though, it’s not justified and we shouldn’t be advocating for it now that we know better.
eta: and Kellogg isn’t irrelevant. That’s exactly why the practice has been embedded in American culture, so when we’re talking about why we do it, he’s extremely relevant.
You are profoundly uninformed and clearly huffing copium to deal with the fact that you chose to mutilate your own newborn sons penis. Great work bro.
I trust the doctors over internet weirdos obsessed with kids penises.
Who's more obsessed, those who leave well enough alone or those who perform drastic, unnecessary, life-altering surgery as soon as a baby enters the world?
You seem pretty obsessed to me. You keep bringing it up.
Less than you have. And it takes zero action to not cut a babies dick. Whereas it takes a special kind of obsession to do so.
Some people believe in doctors, the CDC, the World Health Organization, and countless other institutions, and some people don't. You're the latter, and the last 4 years taught me that people in your camp are wrong about too many things, but also that you need to be told you are wrong before you get emboldened by your recklessness and idiocy.
It also showed me that you're depraved sycophants that are almost always projecting some weird perv shit.
There's more to science literacy than you are capable of, apparently. Otherwise, you know that there's a biological purpose foreskin serves and the choice to remove it is weighed against risk factors that are very low and able to be mitigated.
Grow up, wash your dick, and use a condom. Get a circumcision if you want when you're an adult. It's not that hard for the vast majority of the world and history. You aren't "right", you're just an asshole. Talking about genital mutilation in terms of camps, get over yourself.
I read just fine. You just can't accept that lots of people disagree with you. The person calling a medical procedure done in a hospital mutilation is obviously lying. You lie and exaggerate because telling the truth would mean you don't get to look down on people from the internet.
Our bodies having parts doesn't make them inherently useful or purposeful or superior to life without. We still have tail bones, we grow teeth that don't fit it our mouths, babies have razor-sharp nails that they slash their faces with, and we get auto-immune diseases. Our bodies are a minefield, constantly finding new and inspired ways to die or fail in spectacular fashion.
Repeated childhood infections that can be reduced to zero are hard to measure as people whose children suffer from repeated infections arr loath to self report for risk of being investigated for negligence.
The advice to wash your dick is a sure sign that you weren't heavily involved in raising a child. Getting them to brush their damn teeth, wash their hands, and just generally not be gross is hard enough without necessitating a genital check as well.
If that can be achieved with a common and safe procedure that has extra perks and downsides that are largely assumed instead of proven, all the better.
You think it's really important to perform an unnecessary procedure. That's fine for you, but it doesn't make it necessary. It's a cultural practice.
Circumcision isn't mutilation in and of itself, but performing an unnecessary surgery on somebody without consent is.
The advice to wash your dick is a sure sign that you weren't heavily involved in raising a child. Getting them to brush their damn teeth, wash their hands, and just generally not be gross is hard enough without necessitating a genital check as well.
My kids do all of those things. You're just bad at parenting, which explains a lot, actually.
Imagine cutting off a part of your child because you aren't capable of getting them to clean it.
The advice to wash your dick is a sure sign that you weren't heavily involved in raising a child.
That’s quite an arrogant statement.
My son is 25, and happy with my decision not to have him circumcised. I know because I asked him based on this discussion.
He never once got any sort of infection, because I taught him basic hygiene.
Our bodies having parts doesn't make them inherently useful or purposeful or superior to life without. We still have tail bones
The foreskin is not a vestigial trait. It’s a 100% relevant and useful organ today. (eta: I know about vestigial traits because I have one: Darwin’s tubercle. I’d also not have appreciated having my ears docked at birth.)
Ask anyone who has a foreskin. That’s a profoundly ignorant comparison.
we grow teeth that don't fit it our mouths
That’s an adaptive trait that serves us quite well, because our hominid ancestors fed their young the most high-energy fruits, which also increased the risk of cavities in our young. Being able to shed and replace juvenile teeth meant we were able to commence adulthood without the risk of starving. Our wisdom teeth weren’t a problem until very, very recently, because the evolution of our bodies haven’t had time to catch up with our modern diet. That’s nothing like the foreskin, where our sexual activity has not changed in millions of years. You should learn some paleo-anthropology before making comparisons like that.
and we get auto-immune diseases.
I have very severe autoimmune disease. Many recent studies point to environmental causes, which are recent and our evolution cannot account for.
None of that has anything whatever to do with the continued and relevant importance of the foreskin to sexual pleasure.
I am a mother who decided not to circumcise my child (who is now 25 and is happy to have his foreskin), a decision I made after talking to my father who had to have his removed in his teens after developing a rare condition. I know more about this topic than many people, and certainly more than you.
The reasons this procedure is commonly done in the US are questionable at best. We have learned better, and this archaic practice should not be advocated any longer.
If you had it done to you and/or had it done to your child, I’m not here to shame you. Until recently, it’s just what we did, but going forward, we should do better for our children and our species based on what we’ve learned. And we shouldn’t be a dick when presented with information that goes against our cultural norms (pun intended).
e: link to my 4 month old comment about my vestigial trait. I had to scroll through nearly a thousand comments to find it, whew.