What is the medical justification for infant circumcision?

The risk of infections of the urinary tract is very slightly less, that's all. Circumcision is a strictly cultural and religious thing.

It hurts, you know. Will teach the little boy an important lesson ...

Maybe I should have said that a little more explicitly.

Doctors in anglophone countries started circumcision in the mid 19th century to prevent boys from masturbating, which was supposed to cause epilepsy, tuberculosis, madness and what not.

I once met a guy who had that done after he was an adult. Unfortunately he was a traveling salesman who visited the place where I was working as a teenager only one time while he was still in the healing stage. It would be helpful to know if any of the folks who have undergone the procedure after having become "of age" have described how much pleasure is lost after the procedure.

There have also been studies that show that infants feel pain and their brains are permanently rewired after extremely painful incidents such that they feel pain more intensely more than they otherwise would permanently thereafter. Perhaps this explains the evidence that "women can handle pain better than men". It's commonly attributed to having to bear children but I wonder about that.

Would someone pass me another Codeine tablet please. It pains me to think about it.

Does it strike anybody as odd that this story is even picked up by the press when much more painful and disfiguring and dangerous and barbarous genital mutilations are carried out on millions of girls? And reduction of sexual pleasure is not the result of an accident, it is the whole point of clitorectomy.

Of course you're right, SallyQ. But then any cultural or religious based genital mutilation has the same objective.

BTW, did anyone notive the coloring of the graphics? Looks like a traffic light. Red: only up 20% circumcision - beware. Yellow: 20-80% circumcision - so so. Green: more than 80% circumcision - go ahead, don't stop!

My father used to suffer from phimosis as a young man, a condition where the foreskin can't be fully retracted, which can be quite painful, as I'm told. Some time he just grabbed a razor blade, made a small slit, disinfected the little wound and that was that.

A friend of mine had the same ailment (or realised he had it when he was about 12 year old). They made a circumsion in the hospital, and afterwards he had to spend about two weeks in a bathtub full of disinfectant. I think he never quite recovered from it.

Ah, well, guess I'm just lucky it never happened to me, but in doubt I'd rather have taken to the razor meself when neccesary ...

Same objective, Peter? Is the objective of circumcision to prevent male orgasms? If so, why not just whack off the whole glans and be done with it? That's what a clitorectomy does.

If the Church had yet caught on to artificial insemination as the real pleasure-free way of making babies, they'd be wacking off "the whole glans" by the million, I'm sure.

Yes, you're right, a circumcision is not the same as a clitorectomy, but the intention behind it is the same.

Judging from the comments on this post, at least from the men, it's obvious what our favorite subject is.

"Whacking off", SusieQ? I'm hoping the double entendre was unintentional.

"Judging from the comments on this post, at least from the men, it's obvious what our favorite subject is."

We are just worried, Buck, deeply worried ... ;-)