The Circumcision Debate: Is it Normal or Barbaric?

I am an uncircumcised man. This has never bothered my wife, Nicole. Or so I thought. “It’s like your penis is wearing a turtleneck,” she’d sometimes say, benignly. As such, there was never any doubt in my mind that, should my wife and I ever produce a miniature me, he would also go uncircumcised. We would leave his little thing alone. No snip-snip, just like Daddy. Until, that is, the late-September day when we brought our newborn son home from the hospital. It was chilly, and the tightly wrapped baked potato of a boy felt warm in the crook of my arm. “We’re getting Dalton circumcised,” my wife said as she fastened the potato into his car seat. “What?” I said. “Since when does he need that?” “Ever since uncircumcised penises are weird.” She paused before adding, a little backpedally, “Except yours, of course. Yours is OK.”

U.S. Circumcision Rate Drops to Just 33%!

In a recent article published in The New York Times, Roni Caryn Rabin reported on the Centers for Disease Control's recent news that the U.S. circumcision rate had fallen significantly between 2006 and 2009. "A little-noted presentation by a federal health researcher last month at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna suggested that the rate had fallen precipitously — to fewer than half of all boys born in conventional hospitals from 2006 to 2009, from about two-thirds through the 1980s and ’90s," her article said.

Forty boys killed in botched circumcisions in South Africa

Botched circumcisions in South Africa killed 40 boys and put over 100 in the hospital this month, a health official said. The boys, who were taken into rural areas and circumcised as part of traditional rites of passage, died from gangrene, dehydration and pneumonia, said Sizwe Kupelo, health department spokesman for Eastern Cape province. Mr Kupelo said practitioners of the rite are often not trained to carry out the procedure and can circumcise up to 50 boys with the same knife without sterilising it in between. "In some cases boys were not circumcised but mutilated," he said. "They use herbs to clean, hence this thing becomes gangrenous and infected," he said. Mr Kupelo said that the tradition was being exploited by young men in the eastern region of the province, rather than elders who should carry out the procedure. Boys die every year from botched circumcisions by ill-trained traditional surgeons in rural areas. Last year in the Eastern Cape, 91 boys died from complications of circumcisions, 55 of them in June, when the winter initiation season is at its height.