THE BOTTOM LINE: NOTHING HAS CHANGED 

Circumcision is still not medically necessary. 

Circumcision is still not recommended as a routine procedure. 

Circumcision still carries many risks and harms. 

Everyone still needs to practice safe sex. 

The foreskin is still a normal, valuable body part. 

It’s still “his body, his choice.” 

• Penn & Teller’s 3rd season includes an episode on circumcision.  It’s great!  They definitely address a lot of the myths.  I highly recommend it, especially for young, liberal parents and daddies-to-be.  
• You can read about it and watch a preview, HERE.  
• You can purchase it HERE.  Makes a great stocking-stuffer!  

Foreskins come standard, just like any other body part.  Being born without a foreskin is a rare conenital condition (birth defect) called aposthia.  Why would we want to take a perfectly healthy, normal child and surgically give him an abnormality?   

Traditions are manmade; they start somewhere, often based on myth and superstition and continue, often blindly followed until someone asks, “Why”?  Some traditions are harmless, but genital reduction surgery performed on children is painful, violating, and damaging.

• Grandma’s Cooking Secret

Some things are inexplicable…as one bride found out when she finally thought to question why cutting off the ends of the roast before cooking the meat made for a better result: 

The new Jewish bride is making her first big dinner for her hand and tries her hand at her mother’s brisket recipe, cutting the ends off the roast the way her mother always did.  Hubby thinks the meat is delicious, but says, “Why do you cut off the ends—that’s the best part!”  She answers, “That’s the way my mother always made it.

The next week they go to the old bubbie’s house, and she prepares the famous brisket recipe, again cutting off the ends.  The young bride is sure she must be missing some vital information, so she asks her grandma why she cut off the ends.  Grandma says, “Dahlink, that’s the only way it will fit in the pan!”

Every person reading this has the opportunity to make a difference.  We can end this.  We can stop it.  We can start protecting our sons to the same degree we would protect our daughters if anyone suggested we cut off a part of her body at birth.  Change starts with us.  Our courage now will make it that much easier for our children to say NO to circumcision when we’re one day blessed with grandchildren.Start a new tradition: Bring the Whole Baby Home.

Great T-Shirts from LactivistIntactivist.Com!

Bookmark this site!  http://www.circumcisionandhiv.com/ 

SEE ALSO: 

• Circumcision does not affect HIV in U.S. men

Removing foreskin no protection for American men of color, study finds 

December 4, 2007: MSNBC: READ THE STORY  

 

Circumcision does not affect HIV in US men: study

Washington, Dec 04: Circumcision may reduce a man’s risk of infection with the AIDS virus by up to 60% if he is an African, but it does not appear to help American men of color, US researchers reported on Monday. Black and Latino men were just as likely to become infected with the AIDS virus whether they were circumcised or not, Greg Millett of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. ”We also found no protective benefit for a subset of black MSM (men who have sex with men) who also had recent sex with female partners,” Millett told reporters in a telephone briefing. Doctors believe circumcision protects men because of specialized cells in the foreskin of the penis, which is removed in the procedure. The foreskin is filled with immune cells called Langerhans cells, which are the immune system’s sentinels and attach easily to viruses — including HIV. In addition, sexual intercourse may cause tiny tears in the foreskin, allowing the virus into the bloodstream. The data has been so clear that the World Health Organization now recommends circumcision as one of the ways to prevent HIV infection. But circumcision does not protect men 100 percent — the studies in Africa have suggested it is 50 to 60% protective. Millett’s team studied 1,079 black and 957 Latino bisexual and homosexual men from New York City, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. They filled out a computer survey and were tested for the AIDS virus. ”Overall, we found no association between circumcision status and HIV infection status among black or Latino (men who have sex with men),” said Millett, who presented his findings to the CDC’s National HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta. Experts knew circumcision would not protect a female sex partner, nor the male sex partner being penetrated. But Millett’s study found no benefit of circumcision to any of the men. “We also found no protective benefit of circumcision among those men reporting recent unprotected sex with a male partner in which they were exclusively the insertive male partner,” he said. HIV is much more common among black and Latino men than whites and this may offset any protection offered by circumcision, Millett said. Black and Latino men are more likely to have sex with other black and Latino men, and thus may be exposed to HIV more often than white men. The CDC is about to release new estimates of how many people become infected with the fatal and incurable human immunodeficiency virus each year in the United States. The CDC estimates that more than 1 million Americans are infected, of the 33 million infected people globally. Bureau Report

“No one is promoting circumcision as a license for unprotected sex, but inevitably, in Africa and elsewhere, circumcision will be used not in concert with condoms but instead of condoms, potentially wiping out more than two decades’ worth of safer-sex intervention. Also, in an environment where “cut” = “clean,” women, who already constitute the majority of AIDS deaths in Africa, will have far less bargaining power to insist on safer sex with circumcised partners, and may seroconvert in even greater numbers.”LINK