Mark Lyndon

I too have wondered what on earth Paul was thinking. It didn’t make any sense to me the first time I read it, and it still doesn’t.

Why is that only the USA seems to find medical needs for circumcisions at a later age though? The rate is 1 in 150 in the UK. It just looks like they’re trying to find reasons to do it. The other possibility is that parents used to be told to retract their sons’ foreskins, and this itself causes problems.

It’s actually less painful to be circumcised when you’re older – you can use general anaesthetic, and you don’t have to separate the foreskin (in Scotland, hospitals will perform circumcision for Muslims, but the child must be at least six months old, so that general anaesthetic can be used). In most countries, 99% of Christian males are intact, and 99% of them have no problems. If there is a problem and they need to be circumcised, then it’s easier to have it done later on anyway.

drops in male circumcision:
USA: from 90% to 56%
Canada: from 47% to 14%
UK: from 35% to about 3% (