[am stepping back from this thread now as it’s getting a bit distant from the original post and I don’t wish to derail it]
Quite horrifying, I agree. But scale is notable here: 6 times as many men are circumcised, so if the quality of life lost was 0.5% then the total lost utility is the same between the two groups.
And given that some number of circumcisions go wrong, leading to loss of sensation, pain during sex, rarely partial or total amputation and other forms of suffering (“the constant discomfort of a genital injury creates a covenant of pain,” writes one individual with PTSD from the suffering from his botched circumcision), 0.5% overall seems really not hard to fathom.
The benefits are minor (your comments elsewhere about better sexual performance are not supported by the literature), and not justified by the harms. This position has broad agreement from public health bodies. The UK’s National Health Service, and many other like it, made the decision decades ago to stop funding neonatal circumcisions for this exact reason.
circumcision is probably legal nearly everywhere because these effects are small.
This just seems like post-hoc rationalisation (‘it can’t be bad because it’s legal’). I could just as easily say that laws on circumcision are thirty years behind laws on FGM.
More likely is that the practice plays a prominent role in Abrahamic religions and attempts by countries to outlaw it (there have been a few) fall foul of laws around freedom of religion. Several such examples here, see e.g. Iceland and Denmark.
[am stepping back from this thread now as it’s getting a bit distant from the original post and I don’t wish to derail it]
Quite horrifying, I agree. But scale is notable here: 6 times as many men are circumcised, so if the quality of life lost was 0.5% then the total lost utility is the same between the two groups.
And given that some number of circumcisions go wrong, leading to loss of sensation, pain during sex, rarely partial or total amputation and other forms of suffering (“the constant discomfort of a genital injury creates a covenant of pain,” writes one individual with PTSD from the suffering from his botched circumcision), 0.5% overall seems really not hard to fathom.
The benefits are minor (your comments elsewhere about better sexual performance are not supported by the literature), and not justified by the harms. This position has broad agreement from public health bodies. The UK’s National Health Service, and many other like it, made the decision decades ago to stop funding neonatal circumcisions for this exact reason.
This just seems like post-hoc rationalisation (‘it can’t be bad because it’s legal’). I could just as easily say that laws on circumcision are thirty years behind laws on FGM.
More likely is that the practice plays a prominent role in Abrahamic religions and attempts by countries to outlaw it (there have been a few) fall foul of laws around freedom of religion. Several such examples here, see e.g. Iceland and Denmark.