<Circumcision booklet slammed by sexual health expert
“A serious disservice to parents”

BOOK REVIEW
Brian Morris, In favour of circumcision. University of New South Wales Press, 1999 (Paperback, 104 pp, $16.95)

Reviewed by Basil Donovan
Director, Sydney Sexual Health Centre

The author (Morris) is an eminent molecular geneticist, but not a clinician, though a layperson could be forgiven for failing to discern the latter fact from the author’s biographical details. He gives himself away with his first clinical anecdote, received via email correspondence to the author’s pro-circumcision website:

A concerned father: “We have a boy of two years and four months with balanitis and retraction problems (not confirmed). Right now it is 3 am, and my son is crying as he has done since yesterday. We are waiting until we can take him to his paediatrician. … I feel bad at not having my baby circumcised when newborn. … What can be done to relieve the pain until the doctor sees him? (Today is a holiday in my country.)”

A clinician would have advised this distressed father that we don’t forcibly retract two-year-old foreskins. The lay readers of this book should also have been told this, but they were not. Moreover, balanitis is rarely so painful – this child should be directed to an emergency department to have more sinister pathology excluded. Indeed, a number of the author’s email correspondents seemed to have more serious problems above the belt than below it.

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I have no strong feelings about the medical indications for male circumcision either way. It is a culturally entrenched practice with mainly murky evidence to inform the debate. This sort of document adds to the murk and amounts to a serious disservice to parents.

Basil Donovan is Director of the Sydney Sexual Health Centre and Clinical Professor in the School of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of Sydney.>

http://www.historyofcircumcision.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=64&Itemid=50

'Prove God exists, and you have a case. Till then it befits us to behave like rational and compassionate human beings. '

Dare I say JonJ supports butchering children in the womb. Very compassionate! Oh thats right we will use science to redefine a child.

Sometimes the consequences of circumcision are beyond comprehension:

http://www.straitstimes.com/breaking-news/se-asia/story/indonesian-mother-kills-son-over-small-penis-police-20130228