Jessica, I was once skeptical of those numbers as well but as I have become more involved and aware of this issue, I have come to believe they are accurate.
First of all, there have been 3 separate studies on infant deaths as a result of circumcision. One in 1979, one in 1989 and one in 1999 and they all came up with a number between 229 and 230. The first by Robert Baker has been confirmed by a friend who contacted Baker. There has been no confirmation of the 1989 study but I have been in contact with Bollinger who did the 1999 study and have no doubts about it's veracity.
Just on this forum, we have had first hand reports of 3 deaths. One by the mother, one by the god mother of the boy and one by the co-worker of a mother. Considering the size and number of members of this forum, that's an exceedingly high number. Not a single one of them made the national media. Even Ryleigh McWillis' death didn't make headlines in the US even though it was widely reported in Canada. Every year, 40 - 100 boys die from their circumcision wounds in Africa. Very few of US citizens are aware this is going on but most everybody is aware of what goes on in Africa with FGM. It has gotten so bad for males in Africa that the governments are passing very restrictive laws controlling male circumcision. Few Americans have any inkling of this.
The medical profession controls their own and how information gets out. No governmental authority has control over them to any great extent and they carefully control the dissimenation of information about their members. When a boy dies from his circumcision wound, the medical malpractice insurers swoop in and quickly settle with the parents with confidentiality clauses to prevent the information from getting out to the media. Of course, no parent wants it publicly known that they have killed their child with a esoteric surgical procedure. No physician wants it known that he/she has killed a child with a surgical procedure that they deny is a surgical procedure at all and is portrayed as "A snip." Finally, the insurance companies don't want it known what they paid to settle a case because it would set a precedence for future cases, constantly racheting the settlement amounts up.
The way the medical profession reports these cases is a recipe for keeping the true toll hidden. If a child contracts an infection from his circumcision wound, it will be reported as a death from infection. If the child dies from blood loss due to his circumcision, it will be reported as death from exsanguation. If the child's heart stops beating during the procedure, it will be attributed to heart failure. In all of these cases, the cause of the problem is circumcision that caused the problem that caused the death. Part of this is an effort to be absolutely accurate in record keeping and part of it is an effort to avoid the embarassment of killing a child with what is a procedure that is considered so simple that anesthesia is not even used.
This is not the only issue that this is the case. I have a friend from high school who is a mortician. He told me that he got a body from one of the area hospitals with a cause of death that just didn't sound right to him and he called the hospital to get some clarification. It turned out that the patient died of an MRSA staph infection. When they get a body of this nature, they go to extreme lengths to protect themselves from contracting the infection. Imagine a full contamination suit-up where they are covered from head to toe. It turns out that this hospital has had a serious and continuing problem with MRSA infections and they were trying to cover this one up. Word had already gotten out to the public by the rumor mill and they were trying to cover it up. As a matter of fact, my friend tells me he gets 5 or 6 bodies a year as a result of MRSA infections and I have never heard a word of it either from personal contacts or from the local media. If they will cover that up, do you think they wouldn't cover up circumcision deaths? Of course they would!
The last figure I saw was that about 1.6 million boys are circumcised annually. While 200+ deaths a year seems extreme, it is not a high number when you consider the percentage is very small. The bad part is that every single one of the deaths are needless. When you consider a surgical procedure, you balance the risks of the procedure against the benefits. For instance, a hypospadias repair would probably have approximately the same risk of death as a circumcision. If the hypospadias is below the glans, the benefits are obvious but if it results in the urinary opening being slightly off the tip, there would be no benefit. With no benefit, does it make sense to risk death? Of course not and the same applies to circumcision. It's just with circumcision that no one outside the movement has any idea that their son could die from this simple procedure.
Just to sum it up, yes, now I do believe the numbers. I do believe the medical profession goes to extreme lengths to cover it up and I believe that if all parents knew the risk of death is real and substantial, most would forego the procedure.
Frank
: to stop any problem (tight foreskin) before it happens.
