I've got some bad news. Your baby girl might get cancer one day when she grows up, so we are gonna go ahead and do a mastectomy on her before we discharge you home from the hospital after birth to reduce her risk of breast cancer. Is that okay? I bet you just cringed, didn’t you?

Did you know though that circumcisions are often sold to parents as being something that could prevent various illnesses including cancer, but those things are very rare and often aren't issues until adulthood?

​Yet we are told we should permanently alter our baby boys at just a couple days of life. We should remove perfectly healthy tissue just in case. This blog in our series is going to look at some of the ethical issues that circumcision brings about, including this one. Let's go.

So it has been a heavy couple of days. We have talked about a topic that is just not fun to talk about. But today we're gonna talk about it a little bit more, and this time we're gonna talk about the ethical considerations of circumcision and the things that we need to be thinking about before we make this permanent decision for our baby boys.

​To get started, I just wanna do a quick recap of a few things that are gonna be important for us to have in the front of our minds today as we enter this discussion.

First, just remember that as a culture, we have pathologized—a normal part of the male anatomy. It's not even present on pictures and diagrams in pretty much every textbook. I mentioned yesterday that all but one of mine had no foreskin shown at all. The one where it was present, it was because there was something wrong with it.

There’s no real education on the purpose of the foreskin for pretty much anyone. Doctors are really only taught how to remove it. They're not taught about it much at all. They're also taught the wrong way to care for it, for the people who choose not to remove it.

So who gets to decide whether a baby has a circumcision?

As parents, we presumably get a hundred percent say in what treatments our kids get. I say presumably, because sometimes people try to impose on that a bit. If your baby is sick, do you give antibiotics or not? If there is something that needs surgery, do you do it or not?

Sometimes we can get pressured into doing treatments maybe we don't really wanna do under the guise of the government or the doctor knowing better. But in general, if you were to push those issues in court, the parent ultimately has the right to make decisions for the baby.

But what makes this particular situation different?

​Yes, the parent does get to decide, but this is mainly a cosmetic surgery. Would we remove other parts of a baby because we wanted them to look different? Would we dream of removing part of our girls’ genitals because we wanted them to look different? We wouldn’t dream of that—and yet it’s done every day in our country to baby boys without their informed consent.

Let’s talk about that—informed consent.

Informed consent by whom? The person who is being most impacted by this procedure. The person who's being almost entirely impacted can’t speak for themselves.

While this procedure is sold as being easier when the baby is a baby, it’s not time-sensitive. It can be held off until adulthood and allow the person to decide for themselves. But once it’s done as a baby, it’s done. There’s no going back.

So what if that person didn’t want it done? Then what? That person’s informed consent has been violated.

​That’s the first big ethical issue here—that the person being mainly impacted by this non-essential procedure has no say.

The second thing to think about ethically is the sexual consideration. And this is weird to think about—I know—it’s a baby. You don’t wanna think about your baby’s sexual future. But guess what? This baby has a sexual future.

One man, in his thirties, said he had gotten circumcised as an adult and that it was the greatest mistake of his life. He said that his sensation was reduced by around 70%, both in intensity and range.

​The foreskin is the most erogenous tissue on the male body, containing 10,000–12,000 nerve endings in just 12–15 square inches. When we cut that away, we take it all away.

We’re told that circumcision decreases the incidence of urinary tract infections. But men hardly ever get them—it’s about a 1% incidence rate. You know what reduces that even more? Exclusive breastfeeding.

We’re also told it reduces the risk of HIV. Yet the U.S. has both the highest rate of circumcision and one of the highest rates of HIV among developed nations.

Teaching boys the sanctity of their bodies, godly sexual values, and waiting for marriage is far more effective than surgery.

​We’re told it prevents cervical cancer in future partners—again, irrelevant. Why would we do surgery on a newborn boy for a potential future partner? And as for penile cancer, the risk is 1 in 100,000. Would we do mastectomies on baby girls to prevent breast cancer? Of course not.

Another reason parents give is, “I want him to look like Daddy.”

​Would we give a baby a nose job to look like Mom? Of course not. My son doesn’t need to look exactly like his dad to belong to him. That’s not what defines love or identity.