10 Reasons To Leave Your Son Intact

1) You son spent 9 month growing and developing into the amazing little bundle that he is when born.  He didn’t accidentally grow a part that needs surgically removed during that time.

2) The foreskin of babies and young children is adhered to the glans (head) of the penis.  It grows this way to protect the glans.  Because of this, it does not require any special cleaning or extra work.  Simply wipe it off as you would a finger.

3) No major medical organization in the U.S. recommend routine infant circumcision.  Therefore, most insurance companies have quit paying for it because it is considered cosmetic surgery.

4) The foreskin has a distinct function in a grown man’s sexual life.  More information on this here.

5) Circumcision carries many risks.  They include surgical complications (too much bleeding or infection), removing too much skin, needing additional surgery, buried penis, decreased sexual function, and many more.

6) Adequate pain relief is rarely used.  No one would imagine cutting off a piece of very sensitive skin off of an adult while simply having them suck on sugar water.  This is not ok to do to babies either.  Numbing cream, nerve blocks, and pain relief for at least 48 hours after the procedure should be requirements.  Sadly, they are not.  Beyond that, all those pain relievers carry inherent risks to such a small infant.

7) The rate of circumcision is now below 50% nationwide (higher in some areas and lower in others).  So the argument that you don’t want your son to look different in the locker room has lost its effect.

8) It’s your son’s body and his choice to make.  Circumcision is something that can be done at a later date, it doesn’t have to be done on a newborn baby.  If you son decides for himself as an adult that he wants it done, then he can choose to do so.

9) Most people can’t even sit through a video of the procedure being done to a baby.  Why then can we choose to do so to our own children unnecessarily?

10) Most of the world’s boys are intact.  (Note, I never refer to it as uncircumcised.  If you have breasts, you are not unmasectomied.)  They have healthy, functioning foreskins and are not racing to join America in its circumcising tradition.

Still debating whether or not to circumcise your son?  Here‘s a great tool to walk through some of the common arguments.

Additional Resources:

Doctors Opposing Circumcision Policy Statement

Circumcision: Information for Parents from Canadian Health Authorities

Penn and Teller on Circumcision (Warning: If you’ve never seen a Penn and Teller episode, be prepared that you won’t want your kids in the room!)

About Elizabeth

Elizabeth enjoys life as a wife and stay-at-home mom to her two daughters, 3-year-old Evelyn and 1-year-old Annabelle. She is passionate about home birth, breastfeeding, cloth diapering, attachment parenting, alternative medicine, crafting, and healthy eating. She and her husband are in the process of a local trans-racial adoption.
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4 Responses to 10 Reasons To Leave Your Son Intact

  1. Emily says:

    A friend of mine passed this blog along to me. I haven’t followed your blog, but my friend passed this particular blog post along to me, because I can say that circumcision saved my son’s life. I can assume that you haven’t heard that very often. My husband and I went back and forth regarding leaving my son “intacted” or not. I called our insurance provider and learned that the procedure was covered, which was one sticking point for us. To make the story short, we had our son circumcised the morning of our scheduled discharge date. Everything went according to plan, until this circumcision didn’t stop bleeding. I noticed you mentioned too much bleeding as a complication, but this clued doctors into a possibly more serious problem. The next day my son was diagnosed with hemophilia-the inability to clot. Because my son had been born vaginally the doctors recommended that a head CT scan be done to rule out a possible brain bleed. My son had a brain bleed and if we had not had him circumcised and we went home several days later our son would not have woken up from either a nap or the night because the bleeding was blocking the passage where spinal fluid drains from the brain. We would have no way of nothing that he had hemophilia without the circumcision-most families have a family history of the disorder, but our case, and 30% of cases are, was a random genetic mutation.
    I understand that our situation is rare, but without circumcision my beautiful, healthy baby boy would not be here today. Nothing on any of your sites mentioned that circumcision is one of the key ways families discover their son’s hemophilia.
    Everyone is entitled to their our opinions and their decisions, but I thought it might to good to hear an upside to circumcision.

  2. dani says:

    Thanks for sharing all this – I am always looking for more information about this. We plan on leaving our future sons intact, no question about it.

  3. Elizabeth says:

    I am so sorry that your son has hemophilia. I’m sure that was very difficult to learn about, but thankfully you did at such a young age.

    I think it helps to look at this from outside the cultural norm in the US that circumcision is normal though. If it were not, and babies were dying of undiagnosed hemophilia, no one would recommend that we start performing cosmetic surgery on newborn boys to discover if they had it. Using this logic, should we also remove a female’s foreskin to see if she has hemophilia? It just doesn’t make sense when you look at it that way.

  4. Shelby Maxwell says:

    I could be wrong, as I haven’t had a PKU performed on my children, but couldn’t hemophilia be determined that way as well?