Circumcision: Pros and Cons

Opinions on the benefits of circumcision have vacillated over the last fifty years. Circumcision involves removing the foreskin from the penis and is not a major surgical procedure. Dr Joe Kosterich talks about the pros and cons of circumcision, and reasons to have a circumcision.

There are some topics in medicine that have gotten people passionate and excited over the years – where you get camps for people who are for it or against it. One of the topics is, of course, circumcision.

Around 50 years ago circumcision was virtually routine – all male babies were circumcised, meaning the foreskin was removed from the penis, soon after birth. It then went into decline and in the 1980s it was almost regarded as something that should never be done. There were people arguing that it was almost a form of child abuse. The pendulum had swung from one extreme to the other. Over the years, there have continued to be people who have had their baby boys circumcised and sometimes that’s for religious reasons, but for health reasons it had gone from being something that was regarded as good to something that was regarded as not good, almost bad.

Since the 1980s one thing that has changed has been the advent of HIV, or AIDS, and more recently there have been studies, which have been suggesting that being circumcised may be protective against HIV. Again, it’s never quite as simple as that but we’re finding that the pendulum is starting to swing a little bit and maybe back towards the middle.

So what are the pros and cons? People will be arguing passionately about this and ultimately it will come back to a parental decision as to what they feel they want to do. Sometimes there are religious considerations, sometimes there are family considerations, but essentially circumcision is a fairly minor procedure. It’s not a major operation; it’s generally done on baby boys at around the age of a week and it’s done under local anaesthetic. It is not a major procedure but it is a procedure, and necessarily there is a small cut and trauma involved.

If one wants to get it done, there are some doctors who still do this. It’s, as I say, a fairly simple procedure. Equally, it’s a fairly simple thing not to do. If one doesn’t, then again, there are no major problems with that either. There are some things that you may need to manage and it is possible for infection to get in under the foreskin. That can be treated and it means a trip to your doctor. If the foreskin doesn’t start to retract, and that means start to pull back a little bit, then sometimes circumcision needs to be done later in life. It isn’t something that would be contemplated before the age of around six or seven, as nature will take its cause and the foreskin will retract. If it doesn’t then you may need to see your doctor and that may involve possibly a trip to the surgeon. And if the foreskin isn’t retracting, it can be done as an operation.

In adult life, there may be times when males may need to be circumcised. Usually, again, that’s due to recurrent infections under the foreskin. It’s not a common thing so those sorts of things are not reasons to do routine circumcision.

To sum up, circumcision is something that has excited passions, possibly more in the medical community than in the public community. It’s a fairly simple procedure; it’s something where individual parents will need to make decisions as to what they want to do for their boy. The pendulum has swung from almost routinely doing to routinely not. We may start to see the pendulum swinging slightly back a little bit. There’s probably no right or wrong way to go; it really comes back to what is best for your child and which way you want to proceed.

More information

For more information about circumcision, including the procedure and making the decision to circumcise, see Circumcision.