Comment Re:male genital mutilation (Score 1) 928
So do condoms. Also, the one study that showed anti-HIV effects was found to have used cherry picked population samples.
You mean like the three randomized controlled trials in Africa with multiple thousands of men that all were stopped early because they showed such a dramatic benefit to the circumcised group? Meaning, 50% the infection rate of the control group? See, e.g., here. The results might not be as drastic outside of Africa, due to different transmission vectors for HIV, but circumcision is definitely an effective measure to cut HIV in some important cases.
What's always bothered me is that people insist on doing it to children. If it's so helpful, then parents would naturally wait until the child is old enough to choose for himself. I've always suspected that the reason it's done to children is that it's a part of culture, and that parents know that when the child gets old enough to choose for himself, their reaction will be "Oh, HELL no.".
Parents already make far more momentous decisions for their kids, which can be equally irreversible. They can leave the kid watching TV all day so they get bored by real life, feed them only junk food so they get diabetes, and send them to a terrible school where they don't get an education and end up stuck with a menial and low-paying job for the rest of their life. But circumcising them is somehow a crime against humanity.
Yeah, people only circumcise their kids for cultural reasons. People also only object to circumcision for cultural reasons. It causes no more demonstrable harm than a ten-year-old girl getting her ears pierced. Any possible harm anyone can come up with is speculative, and certainly doesn't significantly outweigh its possible benefits. But some people freak out about it because of their ideologies and biases.
