Parents face so many difficult decisions when it comes to having a child: decisions about nursing, sleep patterns, discipline, teaching methods and, in the case of boys, whether or not to circumcise. In addition to being the most common surgery for males in the U.S., circumcision has been practiced in various cultures for centuries. Yet when it comes to the health and best interest of your newborn, is circumcision the way to go?
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The Foreskin is Bad for Your Health
- From Edgar J Schoen MD
By Edgar J. Schoen, MD - Clinical Professor of Pediatrics
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Hunting foreskins sure heats up your passions
Dr. Schoen,
The balance of evidence shows you are wrong. The overwhelming majority of your peers disagree with you. Human body parts are not optional. Your mission to demonize part of normal male genitalia has failed, and there is no turning back. No amount of bad poetry will change that. http://www.circumstitions.com/Schoens.html
- GenitalIntegrityPolicy August 7, 2008 4:53PM
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Side: No
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I am grateful to Dr Schoen...
I am grateful to Dr Schoen for giving me a 19th function of the foreskin for my list at http://www.circumstitions.com/Functions.html (although I think he may be mistaken about which causes what: hypospadias [sic] seems to be on a spectrum of conditions related to intersexuality, associated with faulty foreskin development but not caused by it.)
His analogy with the appendix and wisdom teeth is faulty. LIke the foreskin, they are not intrinsically bad for health, but may be under certain conditions, common for the teeth, rare for the appendix and foreskin.
Men are born without foreskins or hypospadias, indicating that if the foreskin were indeed harmful it would have been selected out of the gene-pool by now. (The appendix is embryologically associated with the rest of the digestive tract, so that is not possible for it, and our short jaw is too recent for that to be true of the wisdom teeth.)
- Hugh7 August 9, 2008 12:51AM
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Please...
So we should start removing the appendix out of newborns now since they are "bad for their health"? Wow.......
- NolansMama August 11, 2008 1:55PM
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Amputation is the cure
And yet Dr Shoen, you did not amputate those apendixes or wisdom teeth until they exhibited detriment to the individual. You could have but you did not, why? Could it be a minor issue of ethics? Ethics you are able to ignore with foreskins. Your cultural blndness is there for all to see, except of course yourself. I am glad you are happy with your circ, I hope you have had your apendix, earlobes, tonsiles, and all those other "useless, dangerous" body parts removed prophilactically too. While we are saving boys from themselves we should perform neonatal double mastectomies since male breast cancer is about 4X more common than penile cancer. We can all breath easier now as we get pierced, tattooed, paraglide, ride motorcycles, hangglide and partake of extreme sports that we won't die of penile cancer.
- Hanabi August 24, 2008 7:08PM
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