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'''Child Circumcision: An Elephant in the Hospital''' by [[Ryan McAllister]], {{PhD}}, Executive Director of [[NotJustSkin.org]] and others, is an educative video about [[MGM]].
One of NotJustSkin's primary missions is to educate the public about violations of [[informed consent]] or bodily integrity. In the U.S., [[MGM|male genital cutting]], more often called [[circumcision]], is commonly practiced even though parents rarely receive the information that would be required to give informed consent to any other procedure. Circumcision is the only procedure where a doctor can legally amputate part of a nonconsenting non-consenting child without any medical reason.
'''NOTE:''' This presentation includes some graphic slides necessary to present the procedure and anatomy being discussed.
[[Ryan McAllister]], {{PhD}}, is a parent, a biophysicist, an Assistant Professor of Physics and Oncology at {{UNI|Georgetown University|GU}}, and also a volunteer who supports parents and families. Over the last 10 years he has been studying the medicalization of childbirth in U.S. hospitals.
Today, most Americans think of circumcision as natural procedure for male babies. Neonatal circumcision is the most common operation carried out in the U.S. today. Nationally, rates are as high as 52%, down from a peak of 85% in the 1970s. But when compared to the rest of the English speaking world, America is unique. [[United Kingdom| Great Britain]], [[Canada]] and [[Australia]] have current rates of male circumcision at about 15%, whereas [[New Zealand]] is lower than 5%. In the [[United States| US]], the rate differs by regionally, with high rates of [[circumcision ]] in the white SouthMidwest, but low circumcision rates among babies of Hispanic origin. Most of the rest of the Western world has retained the abhorrence of male circumcision that has existed in Europe since the time of the ancient Greeks. (In 18th century England feared Jewish emancipation meant universal circumcision!). What happened in the US that made the procedure so popular?
There are a number of reasons that brought circumcision to prominence in America in the early 20th century.
# Stop [[masturbation]]! Advocates were aided by the puritanical moral sentiment of the day, as circumcision was promoted as a way to discourage [[masturbation]]. (Modern surveys have actually shown the opposite to be true.)
# Circumcision as a cure for maladies. In 1870, Dr. [[Lewis Albert Sayre|Lewis Sayre]] of New York (and vice president of the newly-formed American Medical Association), examined a boy who was unable to straighten his legs and whose condition had so far defied regular treatment. Upon noting that the boys genitals were inflamed, Sayre hypothesized that chronic irritation of the boys [[foreskin ]] had paralyzed his knees via reflex neurosis. Sayre [[circumcised]] the boy, and within a few weeks he recovered from his paralysis. After additional positive results, Sayre began to promote [[circumcision]] as an orthopedic remedy, and his prominence within the medical profession and the newly formed AMA allowed him to reach a wide audience. Over the next decades, the list of ailments reputed to be treatable through circumcision grew to include hernia, bladder infections, kidney stones, insomnia, rheumatism, epilepsy, asthma, erectile dysfunction, syphilis, insanity, and a handful of other syndromes.
# Hospitals. Compounded by cause no. 1, as hospitals proliferated in urban areas, more children were under the care of physicians in hospitals rather than with midwives in the home. Some historians have even theorized that circumcision became a class marker of those wealthy enough to afford a hospital birth.
# Easier Surgical Procedures. The discovery in 1885 of hypodermic cocaine as a local anaesthetic made it easier for doctors without expertise in the use of chloroform to perform minor surgeries. Several mechanically-aided circumcision techniques, forerunners of modern clamp-based circumcision methods, were first published in the medical literature of the 1890s, allowing surgeons to perform circumcisions more safely and successfully.
Circumcision was at a statistical height of about 75% of the country from 1950 to 1970. Today it is becoming less popular, partially because of high numbers of Hispanic immigrants, and growing opposition in the more progressive northeast and west (it remains overwhelmingly common in the South). Today, the major medical societies in the USA do not recommend routine elective non-therapeutic infant circumcision. This has long also been the case in the rest of the English -speaking world, which has never seen circumcision rates as high as the [[United States]].
{{SEEALSO}}