Child Circumcision:
An Elephant in the Hospital.
What is infant circumcision?
Why is the practice common
in U.S. hospitals and not in other countries?
What does it remove and how does
that affect the child?
Does scientific data suggest that circumcision has
benefits?
What are the potential complications?
How does it affect sexuality?
Is it a medical procedure or a social surgery?
If it's unnecessary surgery,
what about contemporary bioethics principles?
Circumcision was at a statistical height of about 75% of
the country from 1950 to 1970.
Today it is becoming less popular, partially
because of high numbers of Hispanic immigrants, and growing opposition in the
more progressive northeast and west (it remains overwhelmingly common in the
South).
Today, the major medical societies in the USA do not recommend routine
non-therapeutic infant circumcision.
This has long also been the case in the
rest of the English speaking world, which has never seen circumcision rates as
high as the United States.
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