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Neonatal circumcision associated with altered adult socio-affective processing
- ThrowawayTestr 3y agoInfant circumcision is done without anesthetic, seems obvious subjecting a human to a lot of pain when he's only a few days old would cause some issues.
- jasonpeacock 3y agoFalse. Anesthetic is used during the procedure: https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/circumcision/about/pac-20393550 https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/circumcision/abo...
- throwanem 3y agoWhich provides no analgesia during recovery, and that a topical or local is used in neonates where general anesthesia is standard of care for circumcisions later in life raises significant questions of its own. I'm not dogmatic on the subject, which seems rare among those inclined to speak on it at all. But I do agree that the cited benefits don't seem to justify the intervention.
- at_a_remove 3y agoSort of false. It wasn't used much prior to 1982.
- krunck 3y agoIt's not a medical procedure. It's genital mutilation. Time to put an end to it.
- throwaway584319 3y agoIt was uncomfortable to explain to my fiance why parts of my penis were missing, she was horrified to learn that they do this to american baby boys and made me promise we won't do it to ours.
- toolslive 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brit_milah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brit_milah there's a step called "Metzitzah B'Peh" (oral suction). Plenty of chance to get an infection. IMNSHO, you should go to jail for this.
- Eumenes 3y agoJesus, why did I look this up? https://www.timesofisrael.com/4-ny-babies-get-herpes-from-jewish-circumcision-rite-in-past-6-months/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/4-ny-babies-get-herpes-from-je...
- GauntletWizard 3y agoYou know why animals lick their wounds?
- getcrunk 3y ago> one-third of males in the world are circumcised, primarily for cultural reasons. … the degree and magnitude of associated benefits and risks, remain contentious and hotly debated It’s poplar to go in on curcumcision. Haven’t numerous studies shown that they reduce sti risk and are medical standard practice for African countries with aids epidemics?
- adamwong246 3y agoA modest proposal: Why don't we just remove the child's genitals entirely? That ought to decrease their chances of catching an STI substantially.
- erulabs 3y agoNot sure why you’re being downvoted, this is perfect. Engineering for a single metric is catastrophic. It took social media to wake folks up to that but “let’s reduce STI metrics by cutting infants” really should have beaten it to the punch.
- adamwong246 3y agoLet's remove their teeth next, so they don't get cavities.
- masfuerte 3y agoThis used to be common practice in England in the 1950s. Not to babies, but to adults in early middle age. Once you'd lost a few teeth the dentist would recommend the removal of the rest and provide you with a nice set of dentures. All of my grandparents had dentures when I knew them.
- readthenotes1 3y agoGiven the articles topic, I thought you were going to go somewhere else with that
- Ekaros 3y ago
- DaveExeter 3y agoIt's shocking that this barbaric act, done specifically to take sexual pleasure away from victims and their partners [1], is still happening in the 21th century. [1]https://www.cirp.org/library/cultural/maimonides/ https://www.cirp.org/library/cultural/maimonides/
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago> A total of 744 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) participants completed an online survey using the TurkPrime interface between July and December 2017. Circumcision has been ongoing for thousands of years. Even now there are millions of men if not tens of millions of men who were circumcised as infants. On a population basis, it doesn't seem to cause a whole lot of problems with mental processing as circumcised men are well-represented as entrepreneurs, comedians, actors, lawyers, doctors, and pretty much every other profession.
- flextheruler 3y agoSo you’re claiming a lack of proof of harm is proof of safety? I’d recommend reading up on fallacious arguments.
- m_dupont 3y agoI think his point is more like the following: every day we have the chance to observe thousands of thousands of circumcised men and we have been doing this for thousands of men, and so far, nobody has noticed any emotional issues with them. it's not fallacious, its simply saying that we've (informally) looked at a lot of data and found nothing. I.e. evidence of absence
- jstarfish 3y ago[dead]
- smeej 3y agoI think infant circumcision is barbaric, but I'm still raising a lot of eyebrows over this study. Wouldn't the level of parental attunement generally be a huge factor? And wouldn't, for example, the parents of children in an era when 75% of boys were routinely circumcised, who opted their sons out also be more likely to be attuned to their children and skeptical of common practices? It would also have been interesting to see data from another group who were circumcised after infancy, at different ages, to see if it was the infant trauma itself or the constant exposure of the glans that had an impact. It's also an odd sample set to choose only those men who were willing to accept $4 in exchange for more than half an hour of their time through the Mechanical Turk program.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoIt's a very tricky thing to study. Maybe you could look at people who were circumcised then immediately adopted? Maybe twin studies? I think this connection is so far-reaching that you could never truly resolve the confounding variables. Frankly, I don't really care about the results anyway! As you neatly put it, we already know that infant circumcision is barbaric. That's enough!
- nabla9 3y agoI bet every Jewish comedian will reach for "The causal link is a Jewish mother tearing through self-esteem like a grizzly bear tears trough a tree" type joke. They would have a point. Circumcision can be indicator for causal reason associate with circumcision.
- adrian_b 3y agoAs a non-circumcised man, I am completely certain that circumcision is completely stupid and abusive, because the skin that is removed is one of the most sensitive parts of the body and losing it would be as bad as losing any other senses. Nevertheless, I find it hard to believe that someone circumcised as an infant would be traumatized in any way by this, because they would never know what they have lost, like someone who has been born deaf or without the sense of smell. Regarding the pain of the procedure, even if it could be somehow remembered, there seems to be no way how it could affect development, because many children may experience even more painful accidents from which they can recover perfectly without any long-term consequences. As you say, there may be only some indirect correlation, e.g. caused by the differences between the parents who would choose to circumcise their sons and the parents who would make the opposite choice.
- jstarfish 3y ago> Previous preliminary research has reported an association between circumcision and alexithymia (i.e., dysfunctions in emotion recognition, social attachment, and interpersonal relations) in adults (Bollinger and Van Howe, 2011). More recently, two large-sample studies suggested a positive correlation between circumcision and autism spectrum disorder (ASD; Bauer and Kriebel, 2013; Frisch and Simonsen, 2015a). Although the causal implications of this research has been questioned (Morris et al., 2012; Morris and Wiswell, 2015), these studies suggest that early-circumcision might have an impact on adult psychosocial functioning. This can't be right...one of those correlation is not causation situations? I hesitate to take the side of Brian J. "B.J." Morris (a contentious individual, to be polite) but here we are. US surgery rates have been declining since the 60s as autism diagnoses increase. Half the population in Israel, the Middle East and southeast Asia should be autistic by now. I don't see where they looked at how many intact kids were diagnosed with autism, only that there's a "positive association" with circumcision, which means little. We fell for that logic once already with the HIV prevention claims. Fool us twice and we...can't get circumcised again? This is interesting though: > Circumcised infants display increased pain responses during subsequent vaccination, suggesting that behavioral effects of the surgery can last, at a minimum, up to 4–6 months And this: > Finally, one recent study has found that neonatal male circumcision and prematurity were associated with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), providing support for the allostatic load hypothesis (i.e., the result of cumulative perinatal painful, stressful, or traumatic events) as an explanation for SIDS (Elhaik, 2018). Circumcision, vaccinations, autism, SIDS all mentioned in the same context... Girls don't get clipped but everybody gets vaccines. Most other cultures that snip boys tend to wait until puberty. They also inconsistently vaccinate and don't have mysterious infant death syndromes. Maybe there's something to avoiding causing infants pain.
- DaveExeter 3y ago[flagged]
- jstarfish 3y agoI'm aware, but that's not a legal or post-natal operation for them in most of the world. The paper and my inference are about infant trauma.
- pipes 3y agoIs it the norm for new born males in the USA to be circumcised? Genuine question. I've always had this impression from movies etc.
- joecool1029 3y agoYes, it's somewhat declined but it's done in the majority of US hospitals: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/circumcision_2013/circumcision_2013.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/circumcision_2013/circu...
- ddol 3y agoYes. I was born in Ireland, my wife was born in the US. We had our eldest son in San Francisco a few years ago (he’s in elementary school). My wife gave birth at UCSF, a world class hospital in a liberal city, in the land of personal freedom. We did not want our son circumcised but hospital staff couldn’t seem to comprehend this. Six separate people attempted to schedule a circumcision, one saying (condescendingly) “well, you know it is safer that we do it now than you waiting for later”. One person asked us twice, the second time asking if we had changed our mind. Either they were on some kind of commission for extra services, or they genuinely couldn’t grok that we didn’t want our son cut. It was a very strange experience.
- DaveExeter 3y agoIt brings in $millions to hospitals, who get paid to do it and then sell the amputated forskins! So yes, hospital staffers are heavily incentivized to promote it.
- UncleOxidant 3y agoI thought maybe it wasn't done much anymore even here in the US, but was recently talking to our neighbor (who is not in anyway Jewish) and he mentioned that they just had their son circumcised at ~1Year old. I almost asked "why?" but held my tongue.
- jstarfish 3y agoPhimosis still exists, and does affect a minority of boys. It's the official medical reason to do it.
- joecool1029 3y agoTrue but that would be a procedure ordered up in response to the condition. We're talking about a majority of neonates getting cut without that underlying condition.
- webnrrd2k 3y agoI didn't know what phimosis was, so I looked it up. For others: ”phimosis: A condition in which tight foreskin can't be pulled back over the head of the penis. Tight foreskin is normal in an uncircumcised child. It often goes away over time with regular, gentle retraction."
- joecool1029 3y agoIt's mostly driven by inertia started with US moral panic and not related to any sort of Jewish pushed or trying to be agenda (the procedure was incorrectly believed to be a masturbation deterrent). A good paper on the topic: https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1089&context=etd https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1... But yes, I agree with the other commenters that the only real reason it continues is it's a billable service from the hospitals, so easy low risk of complication procedure they can tack onto the bill.
- adamwong246 3y agoIt's remarkable to me that this persists. Who are these ghouls that look at a newborn infant and say with straight face, "Lets cut a piece of his penis off"?
- rkfjrjrkfnrkd 3y ago[flagged]
- hereme888 3y agoSure, not a medical procedure. It's really a religious ritual. I only support it when the baby was born to the "tribe" that performs it during infancy (the Jews, some Christians, etc). After all, who are we to tell a culture about their customs, especially for a very safe procedure. At least they slightly acknowledge the benefits of neonatal circumcision: > "The present research is framed within the context of developmental and socio-affective psychology. Therefore, questions about whether neonatal circumcision.... is associated with therapeutic benefit (e.g., reduction in sexually transmitted and urinary tract infections as well as penile cancer.... fall outside the scope of this research.
- rkfjrjrkfnrkd 3y ago[flagged]
- hightrix 3y agoI hate to be tone police, but can we please temper language around this procedure? No one that was circumcised at birth made that decision themselves. Calling someone that is circumcised “mutilated” or “barbaric” is just as bad, in my mind, as making fun of any other disability that a person was born with. Just think of the person that you are calling mutilated. They had no choice in the matter.
- Y_Y 3y agoWell that's just poor reading comprehension, the procedure is barbaric but that doesn't automatically apply to the baby.
- PuissantSheep 3y ago> Just think of the person that you are calling mutilated. I'm thinking of myself. I was medically mutilated as an infant. The circumcision was wholly unnecessary. It's why I chose to NOT have my son circumcised.
- jjulius 3y agoFWIW, I was circumcised. I have no problem referring to the procedure as "mutilation" and "barbaric", and I also don't feel as though I am "mutilated" or "barbaric" for having been circumcised, nor do I feel that others view me, or others like me, as such when they refer to the procedure using said language.
- schnable 3y agoIf you don't feel mutilated, then why do you think the procedure is mutilation?
- jjulius 3y agoOP was suggesting that calling it "mutilation" is making fun of the circumcised individual in a derogatory manner. To my point, I am perfectly comfortable referring to my having been circumcised as a "mutilation" without my feeling "mutilated" in a derogatory sense. I don't mind others referring to the process as mutilation because it doesn't make me feel "mutilated" or "barbaric" when they do so.
- PuissantSheep 3y agoCorrelation ("association") is not causation. Change my mind.
- danjc 3y agoA sample of a few hundred seems intuitively to be orders of magnitude too small to assert such a vastly indirect correlation.
- m_dupont 3y agoMorality of the procedure aside, this is a very low quality study. The most glaring omission is that they didnt account for possible confounding due to religious/political beliefs. To be fair, they acknowledge that this is a limitation, but I'd bet that this is possibly the main driving factor behind any differences in personality between the two groups. We know for a fact that religious/conservative populations are markedly different across a variety of character traits, and they are also significantly likely to circumcise their child. Any study that doesnt account for this is invalid IMO.
- valianteffort 3y agoReligion aside I think a majority of American men and a significant portion of South Korean men are circumcised. These are the two largest populations last I checked. Neither do so for religious reasons but more likely by doctors pushing junk science and peer pressure. The foreskin I believe are sold in many hospitals to pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies, so there is perverse incentive.
- whatindaheck 3y agoInteresting study for sure but it feels very preliminary. As someone who deals with trauma from childhood, asking “how far back can it go” is a very interesting question. Interestingly. The crowd that is *most* in favor of male genital mutilation has some overlap with the crowd that has problems with full grown adults consenting to a medical gender transition. The lack of consent (it is a newborn after all) is far more disturbing to me than the procedure itself. I wish I wasn’t mitigated for goofy religious reasons.