Infant Mutilation On The Decline In The United States

Study: Circumcision Rates Falling Fast In U.S.

"New research about a steep drop in circumcisions made headlines this past week. According to one federal researcher, circumcision rates in U.S. hospitals slid from 56 percent in 2006 to fewer than a third of boys born last year.
Doctors caution that those numbers aren't definitive — for instance, they don't include circumcisions not covered by insurance policies or circumcisions performed in religious settings.
But Dr. Douglas Diekema, a pediatrics bioethicist at the University of Washington, tells NPR's Audie Cornish there's no doubt about the overall trend.
"I think all of us agree there probably is a decrease in the number of circumcisions over time, and that's probably a result of a number of factors," Diekema says.
"About 10 years ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics came out with a policy statement that was fairly neutral on whether circumcisions should be recommended for newborns or not," says Diekema. "And that probably changed the way physicians were talking to their families."
In many states, Medicaid stopped covering the procedure as a result of that policy statement. And many insurance companies followed suit, meaning that more and more families might have decided to forgo circumcision just because of the expense."

The jewish ritual of circumcision

"In the case of tribal initiation, the learning is, "Now you are a grown-up inner circle member of a group that will love and protect you for the rest of your life. The gods, though invisible, are also here to help and protect you as are the dead, your ancestors." In the Jewish tradition of circumcision, the context story is about a covenant with God. But to an infant, stories are meaningless. This is the story used to help bury the real learning. In non-Jewish, American culture, the story of circumcision is "disease prevention and cleanliness." It used to be "masturbation prevention." (It is largely irrelevant that these stories have no basis in fact.)
The real learning is given by the experiential facts of the event. The parents, who the baby is genetically programmed to believe are there only to love and protect and serve him, hand him over to some other who then straps him down and tears and cuts the most sensitive part of his body, the part that is designed by nature to bring pleasure, and finally cuts a piece of that part off. The real lesson is, "What you want or don't want and how you feel is of absolutely no concern to anyone. Not only do we not care enough to even try to listen and understand you, but the more you protest the more we will disassociate from you and ignore you. The world is a terrifying and dangerous place."