I always get so tired of hearing and reading how uncircumcised men are dirty and give their partners all sorts of diseases. This is simply UNtrue. And these myths always seem to be perpetuated by the medical community – those who stand to gain financially off of performing circumcision surgery.

While I don’t know the status of all my friends, I will say I have a good friend whose boyfriend has herpes. He is circumcised.
I can’t honestly believe if having a foreskin caused all sorts of ailments that the majority of the world would still have happy and healthy penises. And if cutting off part of a penis is the best medical intervention for preventing HIV, will someone please tell me why the USA has such a high incidence of the virus (especially since most men in the US are circumcised)?

Cut your babies or keep them natural, makes no difference to me, but stop making intact men out to be harbors of all things sexually transmitted. They are not!
Tracy B.

Although this can legitimately be listed as one of the things we parents do to our children without their consent, IMO it is not on the same level as vaccination. The benefits of vaccines are well-established. The benefits of circumcision are minute and only possibility (penile cancer is not very common, and conscientious sex will go much farther in preventing HIV). Vaccines were developed to ward off disease. Circumcision in the US is related to a desire to prohibit masturbation.

And while it is also quite true that adult circumcision is a much bigger deal, I would argue that means that RIC should be a much bigger deal than it is. If it hurts a grown man, it’s going to hurt a newborn boy; the chief difference is in the person’s ability to express the pain. After all, newborns can only cry in order to communicate, so how can you know it’s not the circumcision causing it? (And I’ve successfully nursed my babies into calm after they’ve hurt themselves, so you cannot infer it must have been hunger that caused the cry.)

To me this drives home the point that circumcision is unethical. If a teenager or adult would refuse this surgical procedure, what right do we have to force it on the same individual before they have the capacity to refuse it?

However I’d say that most males these days begin sexual activity well before adulthood…and would really not consider a circumcism as an option prior to having sex.

This AFAIK only applies to HIV transmission.

News flash: An adult male can get circumcised too (i.e, when he and not his parents decide that it’s in his best interests).

It’s simply not “neonatal or nothing.”