by Katie Mcgreal

Created on: September 17, 2010   Last Updated: September 19, 2010

Many people have been under the illusion that circumcision is a bad thing. You are doing something irreversible to someone who, in most cases, doesn’t have a say in the matter. But recent scientific studies have shown that there are huge benefits to having your son circumcised.

Circumcision gives you 100% protection from cancer of the penis and it can help protect women from cancer of the cervix as the human papilloma virus which causes this cancer thrives on and under the foreskin, without the foreskin there is no where for the virus to go. Also, according to the British Medical Journal in May 2000, men who are circumcised are 8 times less likely to contract HIV and in November of that year the BBC did a documentary on two Ugandan tribes across the valley from one another. One tribe practiced circumcision and had very little HIV/AIDS and the other did not circumcise and HIV/AIDS was more common. There is 10 times less chance of infants getting urinary tract infections if they are circumcised and balanitis, which is a swelling of the glands, which can be quiet unpleasant can be prevented by circumcision. 

But is there another side to circumcision that we don’t hear much about? Circumcision in the US is very common. So common, in fact, that since the Victorian era most boys born in the US are circumcised. This is the only country in the industrialised world to practice circumcision across the board. In Europe circumcision is mainly practiced among Arabs and Jews for religious purposes. In Australia circumcision is mainly practiced by a limited number of Aboriginal nations in the north and west of the country. By the Cold War era 90% of males in the US were circumcised. According to Deborah S Ollivier on http://www.noharmm.org/circamerica.htm it was just ‘something you did’. So what is done with the foreskins taken off all these little boys? According to Paul M Fleiss, MD in Mothering Magazine in 1997 ‘the marketing of purloined baby foreskins is a multi-million-dollar-a-year industry’.

Foreskins can be used to make fibroblasts, which are then used to grow new skin used on burn victims, to make insulin and in cosmetic products. One such company to used foreskins is the California based cosmetic company Skinmedica. This company makes anti-aging products, cleansers, toners and more and was promoted by Oprah Winfrey. According to Dr Fitzpatrick who created the company, the use of foreskins ‘was simply a choice of convenience’. All of these foreskins are used and sold without the permission of the parents of the child.

There is a huge debate at the moment about the ethnicity of this practice. According to Summer Minor, a featured parenting contributor at associatedcontent.com circumcision is a common surgery and if the foreskins are not used for something then they will just be thrown out, why should they be wasted? But on the other hand, is it right to use this skin without the owners’ permission? 

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