Circumcision is excruciatingly painful for a baby. Analgesia does not eliminate the pain of the amputation; the harm and pain persist long after any anesthesia has worn off. In addition, researchers observed a strong reaction to pain by circumcised babies undergoing vaccinations at four- and six-months and equated this reaction with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Circumcision encodes the brain with pain and trauma, disrupts the maternal/infant bond, interferes with normal breastfeeding and sleep patterns, and undermines the baby’s first developmental task of establishing trust. Circumcision, for the baby, is a primal wound.
The pain may not be remembered consciously, but the body and the psyche will never forget the traumatic experience. Those who remember or who have recovered circumcision memories in therapy describe the excruciating pain and terror associated with the experience.
While providing pain relief to infants who must undergo therapeutic circumcision is ethical, even if all pain was eliminated from non-therapeutic circumcision, we would still oppose the forced, non-therapeutic circumcision of non-consenting minors on the grounds of human rights.
Whether or not infants feel pain has been an issue over the years. In 1656, Felix Wurtz, in The Children’s Book, asserted the idea that the less mature the infant, the greater degree of pain experienced. An infant’s pain was considered very real in the mid-19th century. In 1898, in his book, Therapeutics of Infancy and Childhood, A. Jacobi cautioned against chloroform, which produces shallow respirations, and ether, which has a detrimental effect on kidneys and lungs. He was aware of the need for analgesia in the newborn and the difficulty accomplishing it successfully.
This understanding was lost when Charles Darwin, in his 1872 book, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animal, claimed that children’s physical responses to pain reflected sensory or emotional reactions to pain, but were just reflex actions, reinforced by habit. Even up to the 1980s, physicians performed surgery, including open-heart surgery, on infants without anesthesia. But, we now know that Wurtz was correct. Babies do feel and experience pain.
During the 1980s, Anand and Hickey monitored pain responses of babies undergoing circumcision and, in their landmark 1987 New England Journal of Medicine article, “Pain and Its Effects in the Human Neonate and Fetus,” concluded that infants feel as much—or more—pain as adults. It took another twelve years for the American Academy of Pediatrics to recommend analgesia for babies undergoing circumcision. Still, today, more than 50% of babies are circumcised without pain relief.
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