Circumstraint

This is an emotional issue for me.  When I was in training, we did lot’s of circumcisions.  We gave careful instructions to parents about how much bleeding to expect.  But the highly absorbent diapers that had just just come on the market hid the amount of bleeding one boy had.  His parents brought in him back to the ER in shock a few days later.  He had almost bled to death.  He was a hemophiliac – no family history.  Sometimes this occurs as a new mutation. He survived but his ghost hovered above every subsequent case I performed.  I had to ask myself this, “Exactly why are we doing this?”

Children are very malleable.  Evolution has programmed them to pay very close attention to the cues in the environment that tell them what the world is like and how to be successful in it.  By birth, scientists now understand, we have already been “programmed” for things like famine resistance, anxiety threshold and various preferences ( music, flavors, etc.) 

Imagine the experience of being strapped to a table, injected with chemicals and left with a raw wound on one of the most neurologically sensitive parts of your body.   Even with perfect anesthesia which is itself painful to produce, there is undoubtedly pain with urination for a few days.  Think about trust issues to a young being trying to figure out if their universe is safe

The medical justifications for circumcision are thin.  Preventing penile cancer, the last scientific justification, has melted away since the HPV vaccine has become routine for boys.  Rates dropped to around 30% in most states by 2010.  That is still too many. We should stop doing circumcision except where it is a religious freedom issue. 

Materials:  I acquired the Circumstraint device from my old medical practice when they were acquired.  It is the same device I used in the few circumcisions I performed after training.  The ghost genitalia were part of the packaging from some big box store purchase that whispered “keep me” and I always obey such impulses if space permits.