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Originally Posted by Fyrestorm  I think in Europe, they were able to stop the practice because there were still doctors and fathers who were intact when the tide started to turn back. (and it was no longer covered by insurance there). They were not so entrenched in the it has to be better thinking since intact men were still around.
There was also no longer a financial incentive for it in Europe.
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Some newspapers in the US have unprofessionally reported that circumcision is "widely practiced in the West" or that "many in Europe are no longer choosing circumcision". Both statements are misleading, bordering on outright lies. So much for journalistic integrity.
The only country in Europe to experiment with infant circumcision was
England, and they peaked at only about 35% just before WWII. The fad didn't even catch on in the other parts of Britain (Scotland, Wales) and N Ireland. As such, infant circumcision was an affectation that found favor with only certain upper social classes. The US, Canada and Australia, being much less rigidly class-stratified societies (anyone could move up or down), also adopted circumcision, but without the class barriers it spread like wildfire.
No other European country has ever had an infant circumcision rate exceeding 10%. Some Eastern European countries in the Balkans have practiced circumcision on older boys and certain areas of West Germany near US military bases thought infant circumcision was a progressive idea in the first half of the 1960s, but it certainly never exceeded the single-digit percentages. Then fell back down to zero.
Since infant circ never really got above about 1/3 in the UK, it wasn't hard to go back to being an intact country with the advent of the NHS in 1948. If only the US had copied Britain again! With all the myths about disease and circumcision, sometimes I secretly wish someone had started a rumor in the 1930's, 40's or 50's that circumcised boys were more likely to contract polio. It's an infection, after all. Man, that would have set off a panic that would have stopped circumcision cold in its tracks. Folks were terrified of polio.
Many prominent British physicians were themselves intact and spoke out or wrote about the uselessness or damage of circumcision. This helped. In the structure of today's US medical profession, they would have been quickly stifled.
Once the US crossed the 50% threshold of infant circumcision, going back became more difficult. To add to the problem, after WWII there was a "perfect storm" of US-unique events to ensure that circumcision rates did not merely continue to climb; they shot up like a rocket. First, the IRS issued a controversial tax ruling that made widespread employee private health insurance very attractive to employers. Coupled with a wage freeze imposed by the federal government, it was a perfect way to evade the law's intent and provide untaxed income. As previously mentioned, Dr Spock's book Baby and Child Care appeared in 1946, the first year of the biggest baby boom in history -- and it clearly recommended circumcision, with a threat that skipping it might mean a boy would not feel "regular". And if you were contrarian enough to skip it, then you'd have to painfully pull back your son's foreskin every day in the bath, causing even more trauma to both mother and child.
In 1970, shortly before the AAP's first statement on circumcision clarifying that it was unnecessary, Dr David Reuben published "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex: But Were Afraid to Ask." This popular and titillating but ghastly book pretended to be liberating, but was actually filled with reactionary attitudes and tons of misinformation; so much so, that it was banned in the Netherlands. It made the option of noncircumcision sound extremely irresponsible and
just not normal. It emphasized that cancer of the penis was
exclusive to uncircumcised men and curable only by total penile amputation. (Both completely untrue.) Shortly thereafter Masters & Johnson, who had made themselves famous with their investigation into female sexual arousal, declared that circumcision did not diminish sexual sensitivity or response at all.
No other country had this constant onslaught against foreskins to contend with. It was relentless for a period of about 30 years. The few voices with a different message were completely drowned out (for example, Joseph
Lewis's book "In the Name of Humanity" in 1949 - now back in print - and Air Force Capt. Noel Preston's
brilliant article debunking the penile cancer myth in 1970, "Whither the Foreskin?") amid the race to make circumcision universal in the US. While it was clearly a social custom, its proponents continued to seek medical cover.
One extremely odd, but heavily documented, reason for the US's interest in circumcision was the Cold War. Living in an era long after it was gone, the US continued to believe that our "allies" -- mostly other English-speaking countries -- remain invested in infant circumcision. It was easy to catch communist spies: they had foreskins. There are literally hundreds of articles, books, films and other resources dealing with the issue of Americans being able to "out" spies by their circumcision status. Sometimes this was as simple as finding out that a Russian spy had perfected English and taken the identity of an American or Canadian who died in infancy or childhood. Medical records showed neonatal circumcision, but the spy would be intact or have an easily detectable adult circ. The Pentagon, CIA and NSA all came to believe that our practice of infant circumcision was a legitimate matter of national security. The agencies even sent recruiters to college campuses looking for intact male students (increasingly rare) to become US spies abroad.
Huge bodies of water separate the USA from the areas of the world that continued to get along just fine without infant circumcision -- Europe, South America, northern Asia. This isolationism also led Americans to believe that circumcision was commonplace and allowed the practice to thrive. I remember that high school friends of mine -- and their parents -- absolutely refused to believe that other first-world countries didn't practice RIC.
More accessible travel and now the internet have really opened a hornet's nest on the issue of circumcision. But it will take much more to change the US's profile, because no country in history has ceased circumcision on debate alone. It takes the influence of the medical profession and economic pressure.
