“Male circumcision is a highly significant, lifetime intervention. It is the gift that keeps on giving. It makes sense to put extraordinary resources into it.”
Who would you guess recently offered this paean to foreskin fleecing? A rabbi? An imam? Nope. Try U.S. AIDS coordinator Eric Goosby at a health convention last month for top officials from 80 countries.
This smacks down the logic of a German regional court that has banned religious circumcision, calling the practice a “serious and irreversible interference in the integrity of the human body.” As the AFP reported at the time, Goosby was reflecting a scientific consensus that has been cemented over the last seven years:
Studies show that circumcision can dramatically reduce HIV infections. One study in South Africa last year found new infections fell by 76 percent after a circumcision programme was launched in a township.
In 2006, trials in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa found foreskin removal more than halved men’s risk of HIV infection. Longer-term analysis has found the benefit to be even greater than thought, with a risk reduction of around 60 percent. Those original trials, as the New York Times reported upon their publication, were so effective that they
were stopped early by the National Institutes of Health, which was paying for them, because it was apparent that circumcision reduced a man’s risk of contracting AIDS from heterosexual sex by about half. It would have been unethical to continue without offering circumcision to all 8,000 men in the trials, federal health officials said.
Unethical not to circumcise the men.
But that scientific consensus reveals more than just the follies of this German court; it also exposes the deeply problematic aims of American advocacy groups which seek to outlaw circumcision for the entire United States. If, as global health organizations and years of research suggest, circumcision can have major positive health benefits—particularly for poor minorities who often don’t have access to safe sex instruction and are most at-risk for HIV infection—it is absurd to ban the practice. It’s one thing to abstain from a potentially medically beneficial procedure due to personal convictions; it’s quite another to enforce those convictions coercively on others.
Of course, none of the above research means we should start mandating circumcision. There are many reasons a person might legitimately choose to forgo circumcising their child, from wishing to wait for the child to be fully grown and make the decision for themselves, to being swayed by the (quite inconclusive) research on whether the procedure decreases sexual pleasure. Nor do such scientific findings mean we should avoid criticizing and attempting to reform unnecessary and potentially dangerous elements of religious circumcision rites. But they do tell us that safely administered circumcision can be a public good and is an important option that should be open to all parents who wish to grant their child its benefits.
Ultimately, those who seek to ban circumcision as the essential equivalent of child abuse—from this German court to activists who recently attempted to bar the practice in San Francisco—are doing so in the face of tremendous scientific evidence to the contrary. Their claims are at odds with countless studies, not to mention global health policy. The burden of proof, then, is upon these activists to defend their disregard for this science, not on the majority of Americans who choose to circumcise their children and take advantage of its documented benefits.
