Ethical and factual issues with Circumcision: A Parent's Choice
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The Healthy Children website is owned and controlled by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which is a medical trade association and not any kind of "academy". Medical trade associations advance and promote the business, financial, and legal interests of its physician members. The AAP uses the Healthy Children Website to promote additional business for its pediatrician members. Parents should always remember that doctors make money from doing circumcision and do not make money when circumcision is not done. This creates substantial bias in information about circumcision provided by doctors.
Contents
Ethical Issue
Violation of boy's right to Autonomy
When we visit Circumcision: A Parent's Choice,[1] we are immediately confronted with a violation of medical ethics in the very title of the article. The title suggests that parents should act as a surrogate to grant surrogate consent for non-therapeutic infant circumcision, which has no medical indication as boys are not born with a diseased penis. The AAP's own Committee on Bioethics limits the use of surrogate consent to diagnosis and treatment of disease when necessary to maintain health.[2] This is immediately seen as a shocking disregard for well established pediatric medical ethics, since it is a violation of any infant boy's right to autonomy.
The Committee on Bioethics (1995) elaborated:
Such providers have legal and ethical duties to their child patients to render competent medical care based on what the patient needs, not what someone else expresses. Although impasses regarding the interests of minors and the expressed wishes of their parents or guardians are rare, the pediatrician's responsibilities to his or her patient exist independent of parental desires or proxy consent.[2]
The Committee on Bioethics (2016) said:
Physicians have both a moral obligation and a legal responsibility to question and, if necessary, to contest both the surrogate’s and the patient’s medical decisions if they put the patient at significant risk of serious harm.[3]
Other ethical violations
Ethics of non-therapeutic child circumcision explains how circumcision of boys violates all cardinal and secondary principles of medical ethics.
Factual review
Circumcision: A Parent's Choice does not provide citations for its claims, however this review will provide citations.
Reasons why parents may choose circumcision
Reasons why parents may not choose circumcision
See also
References
- ↑
(3 February 2025). Circumcision: A Parent's Choice
, Healthy Children. Retrieved 12 July 2025. - ↑ a b
AAP Committee on Bioethics. Informed Consent, Parental Permission, and Assent in Pediatric Practice. Pediatrics. February 1995; 95(2): 314-7. PMID. Retrieved 12 July 2025.
- ↑ Katz Al, Macauley RC, Mercurio MR, Moon MR, Okun AL, Opel DJ, Statter MB. Informed Consent in Decision-Making in Pediatric Practice. Pediatrics. August 2016; 138(2): e20161484. PMID. DOI. Retrieved 12 July 2025.
