Circumcision. The act of altering male or female genitalia from it's natural state. I'd be willing to bet it's something you never really put much thought in to, isn't it?
In the US, 56% of newborn boys leave the hospital circumcised. An eight year old study, conducted over four years, found that 79% of American men were circumcised. Approximately 90%+ of American men born in the 70's and 80's were circumcised.
It's difficult to get accurate numbers for intact vs. altered boys because most studies only take in to consideration newborns circumcised before they leave the hospital. It's reported that if more data was considered, the number would likely be somewhere near 70% of newborns are circumcised. It's becoming more common in the US for more circumcisions to take place at the Pediatricians office at the child's one week check up so the number can be easily misleading. It's also hard to get an accurate grasp of the numbers because the data varies so much depending on what part of the country you are looking at.
These numbers disturb the hell out of me. Is it because so many boys are circumcised each year? Nope. It because I know if circumcision was introduced today that people would freak out? Nope.
It's because I know that the majority of parents let their newborn baby boys be circumcised without so much as giving it a second though. Because it's just what you do. Right?
Personally, I think there is no quicker way to show your ignorance level then letting a person, qualified or not, hack away at your new squishy baby without doing any research beforehand. Sure, each parent is allowed to make whatever decision they think is best for their child but to not research it first and just assume that it's okay to have a piece of your child's body cut away because everyone else is doing it is absolute insanity.
I was a wild nineteen year old single mother that didn't know the first thing about babies and even I knew I didn't want someone cutting a piece of my son's penis off without me checking it out first. If I had the sense and time to do so, couldn't anyone else? I immediately became interested in being an activist in educating people on circumcision.
Here are the facts folks...
As I said before, if someone were to introduce circumcision today we would freak out! We would call them barbaric and lock them away. Have you ever seen a video of a baby being circumcised? If you have a little boy or are expecting one, you should. You're going to need to know what to expect right? I can guarantee you that if more people knew what in the hell was going on in that room, they would have no parts of it. Circumcision is a way to be lazy. Give your child a proper bath regularly and teach them good hygiene and you'll have no problems. It's not rocket science, kids. Not to mention, the part of the penis they remove has the most nerve endings in it. Your kid deserves to have the best sex he can have later, right?
They restrain the child because they fight so much. Only recently did they start using any analgesic pain reliever at all and not every doctor does because the fools think infants don't have the same pain response we do. They give them a pacifier dipped in sugar to distract them instead! OH GOODY! Listen to a baby being circumcised without any Lidocaine and you'll call bullshit, too. Then they force the foreskin back (something you aren't supposed to do until the child is much older), tearing it away from the penis. They use a tool that reminds me of a Leatherman. It's clamped and once it finally stops bleeding, they cut it off. All of that and the child has no emotional scarring from it at all! Can you believe it??? Yeah, me either. Makes you want to line up and wait your turn to be hacked at, doesn't it? I like my theory of you can take it away but you can't put it back. If my son wants to be circumcised when he's old enough to make that decision, he can have at it. In the mean time, I'll continue to do what I think is best for him. Besides... he'll hate me for enough things when he gets older. I'm cool with him not hating me for having a piece of his penis cut off. By the way, he's seven. He told me thanks for not doing that the other day. :)
At the end of the day, regardless of how it might sound, I'm 100% for parents doing what they think is best for them and their children. If they do their research and decide to go ahead with it then fine. Education is a priceless tool and if more people would just pay attention to what is going on around them, we'd all be better off. Even when it comes to the cutting of genitals.
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