If you don’t eat pork or shrimp because God commanded the Israelites not to, then this post is not for you. (But this book might be.)

If you do eat pork and are planning to have children and are planning to circumcise your sons, please consider the option of not circumcising them.

I do not enjoy this topic at all but I wanted to make this information available because some close friends of mine talked to me about circumcision before my oldest son was born. I’m so happy they did because it didn’t occurr to me I had the option of not circumcising him. Oddly enough, even though I tend to question anything and everything, I assumed my whole life that that was the thing to do and didn’t think about it.

So, here are what seem to be the most common reasons among Christians for circumcising baby boys.

• The Bible says to circumcise.
  Biblically, the command to circumcise is as obsolete as the command not to eat shrimp or pork. If you don’t think it’s obsolete, then that’s a whole different topic.
• Even if the covenantal aspect no longer applies, if God commanded it, it must be better/healthier than not circumcising.
  OK. Except it seems most people who say this still eat all the unclean food of the Old Testament, too. If they avoid eating all the unclean food of the Old Testament for health reasons, then I buy the circumcising, too. And we can throw away those inconvenient parts of the Bible that tell us those laws don’t apply anymore.
• It’s cleaner.
  This is a common myth and one that is very, very easy to disprove. In Europe and Japan, where people do not circumcise, infections and UTIs are not a problem. And if smegma is the problem, remember that it builds up in both uncircumcised males and uncircumcised females. (Smegma also builds up in piercings, such as pierced ears.) If cleanliness is the purpose for circumcision, then infant girls should have labiectomies. It’s “cleaner.” Or maybe parents should teach their children how to clean themselves (and cut and file their fingernails and toenails; and brush their teeth; and how to wipe themselves; because so many men have irresponsible parents who didn’t teach them how to do those things … but I’m getting sidetracked).
• It’s “safer.”
  According to some studies, circumcision can make it harder to transmit STDs. According to other studies, it makes no difference. Nobody knows because the studies are funded often by opposite camps. Either way, it shouldn’t matter because by God’s grace your son will a one-woman man.
• He needs to look like his father.
  I doubt there are many fathers and sons out there comparing parts to see if they look the same. God created people with a practically infinite amount of variation. Like hands, noses, arms and legs, private parts come in a myriad of shapes and sizes. Circumcised or not, chances are they won’t “match” very well anyway.
• We had no choice about circumcising the baby because his older brothers are circumcised.
  Why? Why is there this need to make sure private parts in the family are cut to match? I don’t understand this reasoning.
• Circumcision as a baby will save the pain and trouble of having to be circumcised later in life.
  I keep hearing this one over and over. It seems to be an American thing. There are not hordes of European and Asian adult males finding themselves needing a circumcision because they were not circumcised as babies. The chances of a circumcision becoming necessary later in life are so low it makes as much sense to perform mastectomies on babies to prevent breast cancer later in life. The rates of breast cancer among girls is much, much higher than the rates of penile cancer among boys after all. Parents of uncircumcised boys in the US are sometimes told by doctors unfamiliar with the care of uncircumcised boys that circumcision is necessary. This is almost always not at all true. Find a doctor who knows how to care for uncircumcised boys and you will get a non-surgical solution to the problem (phimosis, scarring, etc.). The statistics vary from country to country and from study to study, but the number of men who absolutely need circumcision later in life is extremely low, somewhere around 6 per 100,000. Putting a newborn through that kind of trauma for those kinds of odds does not make sense.

I have a lot more information I can send you by e-mail. If you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer them. I have read way more on this topic than I like but with three boys, I really wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing so I’ve read an exhaustive, exhausting amount.

Disclaimer: In case it’s not obvious, I do not believe that circumcision is always or necessarily wrong. But they are completely unnecessary now for over 99% of the population. Plus, there are different ways of circumcising. The way that it is usually performed in modern America can be harmful not just to baby boys but to married women as well.