MYTH: Modern circumcision is cleaner.
Initially, keeping circumcised boys clean is actually harder than keeping intact ones clean. And when they get older, intact males only need a source of water and a few seconds now and then. In a culture where we shower more than once a month, intact boys and men find that hygiene is no problem.
However, people believe intact hygiene is more difficult because they still think the extremely harmful practice of forced retraction is necessary. With correct information, cleaning an intact baby is as easy as wiping a finger. Even the American Academy of Pediatrics says, “Most boys will be able to retract their foreskins by the time they are 5 years old, yet others will not be able to until the teen years.... But foreskin retraction should never be forced. Until the foreskin fully separates, do not try to pull it back. Forcing the foreskin to retract before it is ready can cause severe pain, bleeding, and tears in the skin.” Simply “clean what is seen.”
With correct information, cleaning an intact baby boy is as easy as wiping a finger.
Besides, if we really want to assume our children will be too stupid to wash themselves, there are plenty of hard-to-clean parts we could amputate for this “reason.” However, the only other case in the world where doctors commonly remove babies' body parts for hygienic “reasons” is female genital mutilation.
MYTH: He’d just have to get cut later.
Other Western countries (including the Christians within them) do not cut their baby boys, and grown men in other countries do not need to be circumcised later. One source reports that in Finland, for instance, a healthy country with an average life expectancy of 81 and one of the highest happiness rankings in the world, the rate of infant circumcision is 0%; the rate of adult circumcision has been estimated at 0.0006%. Other countries that do not routinely modify God's careful design have similar statistics.
The stories about “needing it later” that float around in the USA are the result of harmful treatment of intact young children by doctors and parents, always due to ignorance of a simple fact that was once common knowledge: the average age of natural foreskin retraction is 10.5 years old (i.e. for half of boys, it's even later). Retraction should never be forced before natural retraction occurs. The American Academy of Pediatrics agrees. In other words, the "problems" can be easily prevented by doing nothing.
Unfortunately, due to the loss of natural anatomical knowledge in the USA, forced retraction still occurs thousands of times per year. This is entirely preventable.
By protecting our boys from this, we as parents can prevent all the "problems" that are rumored to be inherent to God's design. These problems actually arise from not respecting His design properly.
