August 14th, 2010 by ICGI
The US male infant circumcision rate is now 32%, according to the CDC. This is great news for Intactivists and even better news for the more than one million boys who are now remaining intact every year. This means that their efforts have been successful in continuing the steady decline of an unnecessary surgery upon defenseless infants.
The genital integrity community is astonished and happy that the US circumcision rate is now below one-third. Intactivists had been predicting that the 50/50 point wouldn’t occur until 2011 or 2012. This is a huge drop. And, social change can happen quickly. Circumcision has been in the news a lot lately, primarily from the efforts of Intact America.
Intactivists have responded variously to this news. Some are giddy and self-congratulatory, others question the “too good to be true” number, while others are ignoring it because it came from their opposition.
But most of the credit goes to parents who are learning more about circumcision before making the decision. What many are saying is that their decision wasn’t based on whether or not circumcision was beneficial or harmful, but that it is not their place to decide on elective surgery for their child. They figure that since it is his body, not theirs, that he can make the decision when he is older. By leaving him intact, they are leaving him with a choice, not living with an irreversible condition.
The statistic was released during a presentation at the AIDS 2010 conference in Vienna, Austria, late last month. Presenters were C. El Bcheraoui, K. Kretsinger, and R. Chen from the CDC, and J. Greenspan from SDI Health. The CDC hired SDI Health, one of the country’s largest health-care analysts, to do the research. They looked at 21% of hospital records for the last 4 years and found that the circumcision rate has continued to drop, from 56% in 2006, to 32.5% in 2009. SDI Health has worked with the CDC on previous studies. US circumcision rates peaked at about 85% in 1979.
Less than 1/10th of one percent of adult males opt for circumcision, indicating that circumcision has never been medically useful. But, with more boys remaining intact, they will later be at risk for circumcision from mis-diagnosis of penile conditions, and from doctors prescribing amputation to treat them instead of first trying less invasive treatments.
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