The Circumcision Debate: Is the Procedure Necessary?

Public health officials announced this week that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention might advise circumcision for all baby boys in the U.S. as protection against sexually transmitted diseases. The formal recommendation will be released later this year, but hints at its contents have already inflamed critics of the procedure, who say it is unnecessary and forces surgery on boys without their consent.

"The child's genitals are healthy at the moment of surgery," one blogger wrote. "American culture gets it wrong on what should be permitted on healthy children who do not need medical intervention and can't consent to cosmetic surgery." Others, like Hanna Rosin, blogging at The Atlantic, argued that the reaction is mostly emotional: "The procedure is only 'controversial' because people have emotional, psychological and religious reactions to it. Scientifically speaking, it's not remotely controversial."

The long-burning controversy over circumcision is not, as Rosin points out, scientific. Objections based on human rights, necessity, sexual function, or "the simply bizarre notion of recommending preventative surgery to all Americans," do not debate the science. It doesn't inhibit sexual function for most men, has a negligible complication rate, and has measurable health benefits. It has reduced HIV infection by 50 percent in Africa without side effects or backlash.

But circumcision's impassioned opponents have a bit of a point, as well. The World Health Organization estimates that 75 percent of American men are circumcised already, and circumcision has been shown to have no effect on HIV infection among gay men, who have the highest rate of infection in the U.S. And the infection rate in the country as a whole is negligible: "Something along the lines of a third of a percentage point of our population has HIV," another anti-circumcision blogger commented. "The simple fact, obscured by people with good intentions, is that AIDS and HIV are extremely rare in the United States, and the average American has very little to fear."

While both sides have reasonable arguments, the vehement debate is indisputably an overreaction. Some bloggers have behaved as if the CDC recommendation will lead to forced circumcision. "Expect to see a campaign to push new parents into circumcising their male children in the name of AIDS prevention," Ed Morrissey wrote on the conservative blog Hot Air. The simple fact is that the CDC gives advice; it does not make health policy. Everyone will still be free to keep their child's foreskin if they please.