Cutting through the Nonsense
By Laird Harrison
I don't know what I thought circumcision would be like. A haircut? Trimming toenails? The fact is that it hurts. I could hear it in my son's scream when he felt himself cut. My gut tightened as his tiny hand clenched around my finger. And I'm amazed now that I didn't expect that.
That knot inside me relaxed a little when the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended this month that babies being circumcised should get painkillers. The academy is the most influential group of children's doctors in the country; people who write books about childcare defer to the academy on questions as trivial as "When can you give a baby fruit juice?" So the chances are good that a lot more newborns are going to get anesthesia from now on.
But the academy refrained from answering the really big circumcision question: Should a healthy boy be circumcised? Millions of parents spend millions of hours debating this issue. It bedeviled my wife and me so much that we ended up circumcising one of our sons and not the other. And even the academy's taskforce on circumcision, after two years of poring over crates full of scientific reports, essentially couldn't make up its collective mind. "Existing scientific evidence demonstrates potential medical benefits of newborn male circumcision," the academy wrote. "However, these data are not sufficient to recommend routine neonatal circumcision....Parents should determine what's in the interest of the child."
The ethnic and the scientific
Wishy-washy as it sounds, I think that's a wise position. I spent days mucking around in the scientific literature on circumcision until I realized that some questions just can't be answered in the laboratory. To satisfy the normal rigors of scientific research, you would have to randomly select babies to be either circumcised or not circumcised, then follow them for several years to see which group was healthier. Obviously, no sane parent would consent to such an experiment.
So researchers are left trying to answer the question by comparing people whose parents (or doctors) chose to circumcise them to those with their foreskins intact. But that leaves too many variables unaccounted for. For example, educated people, until recently, were more likely to have their kids circumcised than uneducated ones. Whites are more likely to be circumcised than blacks, Midwesterners more than Californians, and of course, Jews more than Christians. And all of these social, geographic, and genetic factors influence a child's health.
"It is legitimate for parents to take into account cultural, religious and ethnic traditions, in addition to the medical factors, when making this decision," the academy wrote. And that's where I disagree. I think the ethnic factors are the only ones worth taking into account.
Binding the tribe
Let's assume for a moment that you could design a truly scientific experiment and prove that removing a boy's foreskin reduces his risk of a serious disease, such as cancer of the penis. It still wouldn't make any more sense to remove a boy's foreskin at birth than it would to remove his breast tissue (breast cancer in men is about common as penis cancer), his tonsils, or his appendix.
Why do we discriminate against the foreskin in this way? Why is circumcision the only surgery commonly done without anesthesia? Why are only a tiny fraction of European boys circumcised while more than a half of American males go under the knife? And why have advocates changed their minds about what circumcision is supposed to prevent, from masturbation in the 19th century to sexually transmitted disease in the 1940s to urinary tract infections today? The reason, I think, is that circumcision is not a medical procedure and it never has been.
Even when performed by white-coated doctors in antiseptic hospital rooms, circumcision is a ritual. Like scarring, branding, tattooing and piercing, it sets members of one group apart from another. It binds the tribe.
Getting our own answers
My wife is Jewish. I'm...well, let's say ethnically Christian. But more important, I was circumcised at birth. My father was circumcised, and his father before him. So when Rachele wanted our son, Dashiell, circumcised, I went along with it. And because I believed then as now that the procedure served only a religious function, I insisted that we hold a bris, the traditional Jewish ceremony, performed by a mohel, in our living room, with a bagel brunch.
While Rachele ducked into the kitchen, I watched the mohel slice away a little bit of my son. That was five years ago, and it's true that Dashiell has no conscious memory of that pain, no sense of loss. He doesn't miss what he never knew he had. But I miss it. I miss it because as soon as the blade bit into him I knew I had transgressed. I knew that it was wrong to take away a healthy, living piece of a human being's body all against his will. I knew that I would never let that happen to another son of mine.
Every tribe looks to its priests to approve its rituals; we look to our scientists. But the panel we anointed to authorize this particular rite has modestly abstained. We have to look beyond them to whatever or whoever creates the human conscience. Over the years, together and separately, like any couple, Rachele and I have turned to that authority with any question that really matters. Our sons will always bear the record of the one time we got different answers.
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