Neonatal circumcision associated with altered adult socio-affective processing
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
It would also have been interesting to see data from another group who were circumcised after infancy, at different ages, to see if it was the infant trauma itself or the constant exposure of the glans that had an impact.
It's also an odd sample set to choose only those men who were willing to accept $4 in exchange for more than half an hour of their time through the Mechanical Turk program.
Nevertheless, I find it hard to believe that someone circumcised as an infant would be traumatized in any way by this, because they would never know what they have lost, like someone who has been born deaf or without the sense of smell.
Regarding the pain of the procedure, even if it could be somehow remembered, there seems to be no way how it could affect development, because many children may experience even more painful accidents from which they can recover perfectly without any long-term consequences.
As you say, there may be only some indirect correlation, e.g. caused by the differences between the parents who would choose to circumcise their sons and the parents who would make the opposite choice.
If a child falls off his bunk bed and needs staples in his head, there's no relational harm from the incident. If anything, a caring parental response makes the child feel safer, knowing someone will intervene on their behalf to take care of them when dangerous things happen.
I think the problem with this sort of surgery is you will one day find out that somebody did this to you, that somebody took something from you that you can never get back.
It's a trauma that I'm sure most people get over but some don't.
I think this connection is so far-reaching that you could never truly resolve the confounding variables.
Frankly, I don't really care about the results anyway! As you neatly put it, we already know that infant circumcision is barbaric. That's enough!
They would have a point. Circumcision can be indicator for causal reason associate with circumcision.
there's a step called "Metzitzah B'Peh" (oral suction). Plenty of chance to get an infection.
IMNSHO, you should go to jail for this.
Circumcision has been ongoing for thousands of years. Even now there are millions of men if not tens of millions of men who were circumcised as infants.
On a population basis, it doesn't seem to cause a whole lot of problems with mental processing as circumcised men are well-represented as entrepreneurs, comedians, actors, lawyers, doctors, and pretty much every other profession.
every day we have the chance to observe thousands of thousands of circumcised men and we have been doing this for thousands of men, and so far, nobody has noticed any emotional issues with them.
it's not fallacious, its simply saying that we've (informally) looked at a lot of data and found nothing. I.e. evidence of absence
Interestingly. The crowd that is *most* in favor of male genital mutilation has some overlap with the crowd that has problems with full grown adults consenting to a medical gender transition.
The lack of consent (it is a newborn after all) is far more disturbing to me than the procedure itself. I wish I wasn’t mitigated for goofy religious reasons.
I was born in Ireland, my wife was born in the US. We had our eldest son in San Francisco a few years ago (he’s in elementary school). My wife gave birth at UCSF, a world class hospital in a liberal city, in the land of personal freedom.
We did not want our son circumcised but hospital staff couldn’t seem to comprehend this. Six separate people attempted to schedule a circumcision, one saying (condescendingly) “well, you know it is safer that we do it now than you waiting for later”. One person asked us twice, the second time asking if we had changed our mind.
Either they were on some kind of commission for extra services, or they genuinely couldn’t grok that we didn’t want our son cut. It was a very strange experience.
So yes, hospital staffers are heavily incentivized to promote it.
But yes, I agree with the other commenters that the only real reason it continues is it's a billable service from the hospitals, so easy low risk of complication procedure they can tack onto the bill.
”phimosis: A condition in which tight foreskin can't be pulled back over the head of the penis. Tight foreskin is normal in an uncircumcised child. It often goes away over time with regular, gentle retraction."
At least they slightly acknowledge the benefits of neonatal circumcision:
> "The present research is framed within the context of developmental and socio-affective psychology. Therefore, questions about whether neonatal circumcision.... is associated with therapeutic benefit (e.g., reduction in sexually transmitted and urinary tract infections as well as penile cancer.... fall outside the scope of this research.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/circumcision/abo...
I'm not dogmatic on the subject, which seems rare among those inclined to speak on it at all. But I do agree that the cited benefits don't seem to justify the intervention.
It’s poplar to go in on curcumcision. Haven’t numerous studies shown that they reduce sti risk and are medical standard practice for African countries with aids epidemics?
Circumcision is popular for the exact same reasons that FGM is popular: it's popular. If everyone you know did it, then what reason do you have to not do it? Can you explain that reason to those people? Of course not, you are too young to even know what is going on!
This is a failure of medical professionalism. When we allow unhealthy practices to be perpetuated by circular narratives, popularity of those narratives increases.
We are more afraid of cutting words than cutting people.
Source? The CDC has a very thoroughly reviewed set of literature and studies that support up to a 50% reduction in STI transmission.
It turns out if you redefine the mechanics of docking to the point where nobody can recognize themselves or their role in the exchange of personnel, nobody can negotiate the Fucking Protocol.
Yes, but mostly for heterosexual men. And a large number of studies show that there is no association with sti risks for most common STIs. And some meta studies show that there's probably not a strong enough reason to justify circumcision.
The relatively small number of HIV infections you prevent in the West [0] is probably not a justifiable reason to encourage circumcision, especially when there are other ways to prevent infection.
[0] 22% of infection among heterosexual individuals through intercourse, which is very heavily biased towards women—it ends up being only a few percent of total infections, and the reduced risk would only prevent maybe half of those. We're talking about a maximum of a few hundred infections in the US per year.
Yes.
This can't be right...one of those correlation is not causation situations?
I hesitate to take the side of Brian J. "B.J." Morris (a contentious individual, to be polite) but here we are.
US surgery rates have been declining since the 60s as autism diagnoses increase. Half the population in Israel, the Middle East and southeast Asia should be autistic by now.
I don't see where they looked at how many intact kids were diagnosed with autism, only that there's a "positive association" with circumcision, which means little. We fell for that logic once already with the HIV prevention claims. Fool us twice and we...can't get circumcised again?
This is interesting though:
> Circumcised infants display increased pain responses during subsequent vaccination, suggesting that behavioral effects of the surgery can last, at a minimum, up to 4–6 months
And this:
> Finally, one recent study has found that neonatal male circumcision and prematurity were associated with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), providing support for the allostatic load hypothesis (i.e., the result of cumulative perinatal painful, stressful, or traumatic events) as an explanation for SIDS (Elhaik, 2018).
Circumcision, vaccinations, autism, SIDS all mentioned in the same context...
Girls don't get clipped but everybody gets vaccines. Most other cultures that snip boys tend to wait until puberty. They also inconsistently vaccinate and don't have mysterious infant death syndromes.
Maybe there's something to avoiding causing infants pain.
No one that was circumcised at birth made that decision themselves. Calling someone that is circumcised “mutilated” or “barbaric” is just as bad, in my mind, as making fun of any other disability that a person was born with.
Just think of the person that you are calling mutilated. They had no choice in the matter.
I'm thinking of myself. I was medically mutilated as an infant. The circumcision was wholly unnecessary. It's why I chose to NOT have my son circumcised.
The most glaring omission is that they didnt account for possible confounding due to religious/political beliefs. To be fair, they acknowledge that this is a limitation, but I'd bet that this is possibly the main driving factor behind any differences in personality between the two groups.
We know for a fact that religious/conservative populations are markedly different across a variety of character traits, and they are also significantly likely to circumcise their child.
Any study that doesnt account for this is invalid IMO.