One in 500 Newborn Boys Experience Acute Complications From Circumcision

Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2013-11-28 20:17

Article here. Excerpt:

'Doctors in America are usually circumcised or married to men who are circumcised. They have little experience with normal, intact, healthy penises. They also are often ill informed about the risks of the procedure.

“What did they do to you?” a Scandinavian woman asked an American man while they were making love. She was upset that part of his penis had been amputated. Taking off the foreskin deprives the penis of both length and width. The foreskin protects the glans of the penis, keeping it moist and sensitive. A circumcised penis has a head that has hardened (“keratinized” is the medical word for this). She couldn’t believe it when her American lover told her that circumcision was considered normal in the United States.
...
So it is no wonder that Maggie Rhode, an African American mom from Memphis, Tennessee, thought she was bringing her 3-month-old son in for a safe operation in August. The circumcision at Christ Community Health Center, the doctors told her, would take only 20 minutes.

Instead it lasted three hours. Not only did the doctors botch the circumcision, they handed Rhode her son, who was screaming in pain, without telling her that anything had gone wrong.

“After I went home and I discovered that my son’s penis was not there, I immediately froze, like, oh my God,” Rhode, who is speaking publicly about what happened to Baby Ashton, told My Fox Memphis. Ashton went to the doctor with healthy genitalia, now he has a partial penis. He urinates through a hole in his penis and screams in agony, his mom said.

Complications from circumcision, though rarely this extreme, are more common than parents realize.

One in 500 boys will experience acute complications from circumcision, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, and that is probably a conservative estimate.
...
An infant in Sacramento, California, Brayden Tyler Frazier, died after complications from a circumcision in March 2013.

The year before another infant died after contracting herpes from a Rabbi who sucked on his penis as part of a religious rite.

My friend’s son’s penis has adhesions due to a botched circumcision. They irritate him and cause ongoing bleeding. Five years old, he cries when he gets an erection.

I found out a close family member suffered a circumcision complication that has embarrassed him his entire life.

“[C]omplications of circumcision do represent a significant percentage of cases seen by pediatric urologists,” reports this article in the Scientific World Journal. “Often they require surgical correction that results in a significant cost to the health care system.”'

Like0 Dislike0

Comments

As much as the media needs to report the botched circumcision story to help spread the word of the danger of circumcision, I wish they would not disclose the identity of the baby boy (they've disclosed his name, city and mother's name). Not only did the baby boy not consent to the operation, but he has not consented to be ID'd in this way and for this purpose.

His mother has not thought this through, but it should be media's responsibility to know better.

Like0 Dislike0
Submitted by Kris on Fri, 2013-11-29 02:44

Acute complications break your heart, but EVERY circumcision alters sex dramatically in presumably unintended ways that the cutters (if they have any capacity for compassion and empathy) must not understand.

The part of the foreskin that's commonly amputated is the most nerve-rich part; not just in number of nerve endings, but also in their specialized quality (they're called Meisner's Corpuscles) for sensing light-touch stimuli. Circumcision is akin blinding someone in one eye for how it reduces the capacity for sensation.

The foreskin protects the suppleness of the glans and the inner skin (for cut men inner skin is any surviving surface between the glans and the circumcision scar). These surfaces are not actually epidermis with follicles like ordinary skin, they are mucosa like the inside of the lips or the eyelids. Circumcision is akin removing eyelids, allowing the eyes to crust over.

The normal slack skin tube including the foreskin affords an exquisite frictionless rolling and gliding mode of stimulation. With the moving part intact, a man and his partners can enjoy this other way of giving and receiving pleasure that cut men's sex lacks. Circumcision is like tearing half the pages out of Kama Sutra in the way it limits a male's options.

It's rare to see any analysis of the ethics of forcibly circumcising children that gives proper weight to just how sensational the foreskin is for sex.

Like0 Dislike0
Submitted by TLCTugger on Mon, 2013-12-02 01:56