First, you need to remember that the state of lacking a foreskin is itself a medical problem, even if there were no complications, regardless of how pleasant or unpleasant the procedure itself was. Circumcising to prevent medical problems means you're inflicting a medical problem to prevent medical problems. Plus most of the medical problems you're trying to prevent are less permanent. If you need to know more about why the lack of a foreskin is a bad thing, google "sex as nature intended it" for a great explanation (it has sexually explicit images, so I don't think I'm allowed to post it here directly).
Also, the previous two or three generations had so few intact men that knowledge of the correct way to care for an intact penis. Lots of people think you need to force the foreskin back and clean under it vigorously with soap, but that's like forcing back your fingernails or eyelids and soaping under them. That practice is actually really likely to cause infections and other health problems (in addition to being painful). So when you hear "my friend's friend's former roommate's sister-in-law's brother had a horrible penis-related health problem!!!" you don't know how he was cared for as a child, but if he grew up in America, chances are his penis was harmed by his parents, doctors, and caregivers. If you spend twenty seconds educating yourself on proper penis care, all of those risks become non-applicable to your own child.
Thirdly, even if you could see into the future and know he's going to have a medical need to be circumcised someday, that's still no reason to do it when he's a baby. If circumcision is going to happen, the later the better. Here are some reasons:
1. When male babies are born, their foreskin is fused to glans of the penis, and this becomes fully retractable over time (at an average age of 10 years). Forceful retraction is by itself painful and unhealthy, but circumcising an individual whose foreskin is not yet naturally retractable requires forceful retraction. The older the patient is, the more likely he is to be naturally retractable, therefore avoiding this problem.
2. Wearing a diaper after being recently circumcised means you have an open wound sitting in a pool of urine and feces. Most teens and adults don't wear diapers, so they can avoid this problem.
3. A doctor who is circumcising a baby has no way of knowing how big that baby's penis is going to be, and there isn't a clear line between foreskin and not-foreskin, so there is no way to know how much is "safe" to cut off. Many men who were circ'd as babies have overly tight skin on their penis that make it painful to get an erection. Sometimes the penis stretches down skin from above the penis, causing it to be abnormally hairy. Sometimes the skin is tighter on one side, forcing the penis to curve. Recently some doctors have started doing "loose" circ's on babies to avoid these problems, but that comes with its own problems, such as what's left of the retracted foreskin trying to re-adhere to the glans. Once a patient is fully grown, they won't have this problem.
4. For safety reasons, there's a limit to how much anesthesia can be used on a baby, plus some doctors don't care if babies are in pain and therefore won't use anesthesia or won't wait for it to kick in, especially if the parents aren't present. If a baby passes out from pain or goes into shock, the nurses will tell the parents he slept through the procedure and was only crying because it's cold in the room. Adults, teens, and older children can get better anesthesia during the procedure and more respect from the doctor. Further, they have access to better pain relief during the recovery period. Even if the child is too young to be trusted with his own pain meds, at least he can tell his parents when he's in pain, take meds at their discretion, and describe what is or isn't helpful.
The reason people think it's better to circ babies is because they don't believe babies feel pain (hah!) or they don't
care that babies feel pain. In the latter case, they figure it's okay because adults don't remember anything that happened to them as newborns, but by that logic, it's okay to violently abuse anyone under the age of two. In no other situation is it considered okay to inflict pain on someone just because they don't remember it. Even when you don't have a mental movie of an event, you still keep the knowledge, opinions, and feelings you gained from that event. Two years from now, you're probably not going to remember what you had for lunch tomorrow, but you still want it to be tasty, don't you?
The only real advantage to being circ'd younger is that the patient needs to avoid sex for a couple of weeks after the procedure. But when the alternative is a little baby recovering from a surgery with no pain relief, excuse me if I don't feel much pity for the poor grown-up who has to abstain from sex for a few weeks.
Also, surgeries to repair botched circs are more common
Quote:
Originally Posted by
tinyblackdot
I guess my concern is that i came to this thread looking for information and it seems like every other post is something about an infected penis, or UTI, or Dr saying a child needs a surgery. So to me its all good to say that circ isn't necessary, but it looks like (according to the posts on this forum at least) that there seem to be a few complications that go along with it. If not why are there so many posts about it?
People post their concerns here because they know people aren't going to tell them to circ their kid for no good reason. Likewise, looking at the Gentle Discipline board may tempt you to conclude that GD makes kids into unruly violent selfish little monsters and therefore you need to beat your own kids with PCV pipes to save them from this horrible fate. Or looking at the breastfeeding sections and concluding that you need to give your infant daughter a masectomy.
Go read those topics and not just the title, and you'll find that people usually discover that their concern is not due to a foreskin-related health problem. In many cases, it's not a health problem at all. In other cases, it's a health problem not related to foreskins such as UTI or diaper rash. Then go read a forum full of parents who circumcised their kid.