It occurs to me that especially now, when intact males are not a small minority but a sizable percentage of their generation, it would be interesting to see a large scale study of potential psychological differences between the circed and the intact. It would of course be challenging since there would be so many other variables to try to control for, including (to name a few) ethnicity (or perhaps I should say ancestral culture), regional culture, socioeconomic class, etc. And it would be complicated even more by the fact that in most cases parents who choose not to circ are likely to be different in their personalities and parenting styles from those who do circ in a variety of other ways.
Perhaps the best opportunity to look at this in a more randomised way (since it would be unethical to say the least to randomly circ a group of boys and randomly leave another control group intact--thus any study must be retrospective rather than prospective) would be to study boys who were covered by Medicaid at birth, in neighbouring communities divided by a state line, with the procedure covered on one state and not the other. For instance, Duluth, MN and Superior, WI* could be compared in longitudinal studies now that it has been several years since Minnesota stopped covering circ.
*I got my information from this story, which I assume is accurate about the states in question, though it is horrendously, disturbingly biased about circumcision itself:
http://www.emaxhealth.com/2/72/28977...procedure.html
Perhaps the best opportunity to look at this in a more randomised way (since it would be unethical to say the least to randomly circ a group of boys and randomly leave another control group intact--thus any study must be retrospective rather than prospective) would be to study boys who were covered by Medicaid at birth, in neighbouring communities divided by a state line, with the procedure covered on one state and not the other. For instance, Duluth, MN and Superior, WI* could be compared in longitudinal studies now that it has been several years since Minnesota stopped covering circ.
*I got my information from this story, which I assume is accurate about the states in question, though it is horrendously, disturbingly biased about circumcision itself:
http://www.emaxhealth.com/2/72/28977...procedure.html
