Making America Safe for Foreskins

What "Emotional Harm Affecting a Child

Throughout His Life?"


To The Saturday Evening Post (7/9/82):
       The two articles about infant circumcision in your December issue mention the possibility of "emotional harm" and "deleterious effects on the male psyche, affecting a child throughout his life."
       What emotional harm? What deleterious effects? Affecting him how?

To Ladies' Home Journal ("Innocence for Sale," April 1983) (5/24/83):
       If it's true, as your article states, that abused children often become child abusers, what about children who are strapped down and have part of their genitals cut off -- what do they become?

To American Health ("Circumcision: A Cut Too Many?," Sept. 1984) (8/27/84):
       One of the reasons your article gives for circumcising babies is to keep them from feeling different in the locker room.
       But after the baby has been circumcised and has no foreskin, and then later sees males who have chosen to keep that part of their penis that was cut from his without his consent -- what does he feel then?
       What should he feel?

To Foreskin Quarterly (5/1/87):
       I notice that many of the classified ads in Foreskin Quarterly are placed by men who designate themselves as circumcised but who are looking specifically for men who are not circumcised.
       What goes on in a male's mind between the time he realizes that his foreskin was cut off when he was a baby and the time he places an ad in the hope of finding a man whose foreskin he can share?
       That information is not included in any of the literature I've seen that claims to give parents the information they need in order to make an informed choice about having a newborn son's foreskin amputated or letting him keep it intact.
[cc: American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists]

To Surgeon General Koop (11/24/87):
       In your letter about circumcision in the July-August 1982 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, you mention "psychological problems that do occur in families with two little boys, one of whom is circumcised and one of whom is not."
       What psychological problems? For whom? The circumcised boy? The intact boy?
       If problems occur in families in which one boy has all of his penis and one boy doesn't, what problems must occur in societies in which some men have all of their penis and some men don't?