So ardently did I believe my family to be complete after my two girls arrived that I did not consider the question of circumcision. I did not consider the question of circumcision even when my daughter’s birth mother later delivered a boy. That boy was not mine to raise, I thought then, so what did my personal snipping opinions matter?

But within weeks he was coming to live with me. “Make sure to get him circumcised,” his mother told me on the way out the door. “The hospital never got around to it when he was born, so you have to take him in soon.” The vehemence of my unspoken response startled me. There is no way in hell I’m taking this baby in for an unnecessary procedure, I thought to myself. If you want him to be cut then you can comfort him during and after the procedure.

Nevertheless, I asked his new doctor about it the first time she met the boy. She flipped through my hastily-gathered pile of paperwork. “He’s only three days shy of a month. I don’t perform circumcisions, and you’re going to have a hard time finding any other doctor willing to do one on a baby this age. Before one month they use no anesthetic, but he’s to the point that they’d have trouble keeping him still during the procedure.”

My stomach went queasy. “Then can we schedule it after he’s a month old, when he can have anesthetic?”

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t recommend it. There’s no medical reason to circumcise him at this point, so why subject him to anesthetic he doesn’t need?”

As time has passed I’ve grown more and more comfortable with the idea that the boy should make up his own mind about circumcision. When he gets to be a teenager — ideally, before he’s sexually active — he can find out what current medical research says about the role of the foreskin in pleasure and disease transmission. With his father’s and my guidance he can decide for himself how to approach the risks and benefits of circumcision, and if he wants to pursue the operation we’ll gladly help him set it up and pay for it.

With that thought in mind, I’m bothered to read that CDC is considering recommending routine infant circumcision based on studies done in Africa which show that circumcision reduces the infection risk by half for heterosexual men who have sex with HIV positive women. I question many things about the applicability of this study but nothing more so than that the potential recommendation targets infants.

Parents of course have the right (within legal limits) to raise their children as they see fit. But for the life of me I can find no logical reason why circumcision should be recommended for day-old babies who are many years away from engaging in the types of behaviors which would put them at risk for HIV and other infections.

“But it also lowers the risk of penile cancer!” people like to mention when the topic of circumcision comes up, but the fact is that this type of cancer is extraordinarily rare in the US. Only 0.2% of cancers in men and 0.1% of cancer deaths in men in the United States are from penile cancer. Contrast this with the fact that 16% of US men will face prostate cancer in their lifetimes — and yet we do not remove the prostate at birth. Or the fact that 12% of US women will develop breast cancer in their lifetimes — and yet we do not remove breast tissue at birth.

“Of course we shouldn’t remove the prostate or the breasts at birth!” you must be thinking. “Why permanently alter someone who hasn’t consented to it for theoretical protection against diseases they don’t have and might never get?

And that is exactly my point.

I’ll be interested to see what the CDC says in their recommendations due out by the end of the year. If they do find reason to recommend circumcision as a way to lower HIV infection risk, I’d like some justification for why it should be done to infants instead of to those who are nearing sexual maturity.

Thoughts? Opinions? I’d particularly like to hear from men. If you knew circumcision was likely to reduce risk, would you want to be circumcised yourself? Would you have it done to an infant son? Or would you wait to see what research said when he was older?

Sound off below.