It’s time to demand an end to the amputation of baby boys’ foreskins–indeed, the mutilation of their penises–in every hospital and NICU in the United States. (Sign Intact America’s petition here.)
Here’s what happened. Cole was born March 31 with congenital heart disease requiring that surgeons implant a cardiac stent into his tiny body; this was the first of what was to be several future procedures.
Cole recovered from the surgery and began to thrive. After more than two weeks in the hospital’s NICU, Cole was set to be discharged on April 16. But around 10 pm on April 14, the hospital called the boy’s father, Timothy Groth, to ask if he and his wife wanted to proceed with a circumcision. Groth said yes, and an hour later, at 11 pm, when baby Cole should have been sleeping peacefully, a nurse practitioner—whose role presumably was to help fragile NICU babies to get well—cut the boy’s genitals. Cole hemorrhaged through the night, coming close to death. He survived, but suffered severe damage to his kidneys, liver, neurological system, and intestines.
Why was the hospital so determined to circumcise baby Cole before he left the hospital? Why did it choose to perform a circumcision in the middle of the night? There are no sure answers, but these actions begin to make sense when you realize that circumcision is a $6-billion-per-year business.
Hospitals make money from circumcision fees, longer hospital stays, and, in some cases—especially in academic medical centers—by selling valuable foreskins to biological and cosmetic companies. Medical equipment makers profit from selling circumcision supplies and devices to hospitals and practitioners. Doctors in our fee-for-service medical system charge for every procedure they perform, whether that procedure is necessary or not. Finally, pediatric urologists make money correcting the circumcisers’ mistakes; around 12% of all pediatric surgeries are done to correct complications from circumcision.
No baby boy should ever be circumcised. Circumcision is medically unnecessary, and no medical society, including the Academy of American Pediatrics (AAP), recommends it. Removing healthy foreskin tissue is a useless cosmetic procedure that destroys the most sensitive part of a baby boy’s genitals. The United States stands alone in the Global West, as well as non-Muslim Asian and Pacific countries, in its profit-driven predilection for removing baby boys’ normal foreskins.
Every day in the United States, doctors and nurses actively solicit parents to have their sons circumcised. An Intact America survey shows hospital staff ask new mothers eight times, on average, during their hospital stay if they want their sons to be circumcised, even when the mother has already said no.
Worse, the same doctors and nurses who pressure mothers to circumcise do not tell the whole truth about circumcision. They don’t tell parents that foreskin is a natural and vital part of the male genitalia that protects a boy’s penis during childhood and enhances sexual pleasure later in his life. Few doctors tell parents that circumcision is painful and traumatic, and that some babies scream so hard they develop hernias, or vomit and go into shock, or that some even die. Hospital staff do not explain that babies sometimes severely hemorrhage or acquire severe and life-threatening infections, as baby Cole did, and that even an “uncomplicated” circumcision will require the new parents to perform wound care on their baby’s injured genitals.
Instead, staff members sell the procedure by telling new parents that circumcision is no big deal and there’s little risk involved. But the AAP admits that the risks of circumcision have never been studied systematically. How does it make sense that intensive care doctors and nurses, charged with caring for very sick babies, actually put these babies at unnecessary risk? As if that were not enough, I have heard from parents of NICU patients that circumcisions are often carried out within earshot of all present. How does it make sense that in a space supposedly dedicated to healing, babies are assaulted at all hours, where their shrieks can be heard by staff members, other sick children, and their parents?
Finally, it is scandalous that parents are asked under pressure to sign cursory “informed” consent forms that neglect to mention that the real risks of circumcision are unknown. And it is disgraceful that parents are asked to make a decision that is not theirs to make—it is the baby who will feel the pain, experience the trauma, and lose a vital part of his whole, natural penis.
Sign our petition and let us demand that hospitals stop performing and soliciting parents to sign off on “routine” circumcisions for their little boys. Let us demand that health insurers, which deny coverage for other medically unnecessary procedures, stop covering circumcisions. Let us demand that state governments stop Medicaid payments for needless medical intervention on healthy babies.
Every baby boy born has a right to keep his natural, intact penis. We must protect our boys by ending “routine” circumcision in the United States.
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