circum-decision

Boys look like their dads. Right? End of story.

My wife and I found out we were having a boy, and on the horizon approached a fateful encounter with, for all I knew, a supremely sharp pair of scissors.

It was simple: boys look like their dads.

How could they not?

My naiveté can be underscored by the fact that until I was in college, I didn’t realize I was circumcised. I wasn’t Jewish, and guys don’t exactly compare tools, so as far as I knew my body was as God had made it. If circumcision ever came up in conversation, I secretly wondered precisely what there was down there to be cut off. (Whatever it was, it sounded painful!) Eventually I told a friend I was glad I was never circumcised, whereupon he instructed me to go into the bathroom to inspect for one or two telltale signs. Lo and behold! — what I’d been seeing down there all my life was not whole, but remainder.

From that point until the onset of fatherhood I knew, aside from the obvious tissue removal, just three basic things about circumcision:

1. Christians do it because it’s in the Bible.
2. In the New Testament it’s replaced by baptism.
3. Somehow it’s better for you medically.

Those points weren’t all consistent with one another, but that didn’t matter to me — fretting wouldn’t have changed anything.

Still, as a virgin I was curious and a bit anxious about sex, including whether or not I would turn out to be, ahem, any good at it. That included wondering how being trimmed would shape my prospects. Circumcised or uncircumcised — which had better sex?

Neither side lacked pundits on the internet. The pro-circum camp generally argued in terms of friction: either a man’s skin rubs against a woman’s skin, or he just slides around within his own. The anti-camp focused on counts of nerve cells (more skin = more nerves = more pleasure), and suggested that a built-in sheath keeps skin sensitive over the years. Of course as a virgin I had no way to assess these arguments, but they gave me a new appreciation for what it meant to knife to such a nerve-rich area.

Fast forward ten years, five into marriage. My wife and I, still childless, were at the hospital visiting friends who had just had a boy, their second, when a nurse announced that it was time, the doctor was ready. They bundled up their fragile newborn and handed him over.

“Time for what?” I asked as he was walked out. “Where’s he going?”

“Oh, they’re just doing the circumcision,” the father said.

Now, it’s one thing to talk about circumcision during a football game or in the car or even here in writing. It’s a whole different experience to realize that the flesh-and-blood person you were just visiting is off having a piece of himself sliced off his Soft Objects Only zone. Horrified and flooded with sympathy I blurted, “You’re not going to be there?”

“Are you joking?” He winced. “Believe me, they’re better off without me.”

As our conversation continued, internally I resolved that if ever I had a son, I would be there. I doubted I could handle being an eyewitness, but it was the least I could do if I would expect my son to handle being the circumsee.

That was why a year later, when we were expecting our firstborn, a son, and my wife found a video on circumcision at the library, I thought it’d be a useful way to brace myself for the procedure. A little brush-up studying couldn’t hurt.

The video started harmlessly: a female doctor discussing the procedure, the medical benefits and myths, the pros and cons. It was all so objective.

Cut to an unedited clip of an actual circumcision, start to finish, including preparation and bandaging. Two minutes or twenty — who knows how long it was? My heart had stopped. I expected it to be bad. What I didn’t expect:

• a cold metal table; the thinnest of pads
• Frankenstein-style tethers across legs, chest and arms
• metal probes that forcibly reamed open the foreskin
• no scissors, no knife — instead a steel bell apparatus, harsh and massive against tender tissue, clamped far too tight to permit bleeding
• thrashing torso, quaking chin, frenzied rabbit cries that escalated at the doctor’s every touch
• a sucrose-filled pacifier as the only pain relief

By the end of the segment I was doubled over on the carpet, hands over my mouth and nose, desperate to shut my eyes but unable to do so.

The talking head doctor returned. Cue smug recap of issues, dismissing pros and stressing cons. Cut to mock dialogue: stilted parents asking stilted questions, with each answer conveying the superstitious and inhumane nature of voodoo practices. No medical benefits, the doctor intones, no medical benefits. The unpaid actors nod in appreciation. Roll credits.

My wife and I stared at each other, eyes wide, traumatized. In the warmth of her belly kicked our unsuspecting boy. What would await his entrance to the world — a merciless clamping and slicing? The fact that circumcision was no longer Biblically commanded suddenly loomed large in our minds. “In Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value,” Galatians chapter 5 reads. “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.” Our impression was that all Christians got their sons circumcised, but did that justify our turning conformist? We had an out. Our son had an out. Should we take it?

The video doctor we wrote off as a propagandist. In retrospect we realized her entire production was a carefully scripted argument against circumcision, luring in viewers with apparent objectivity, slamming them with graphic footage, then mopping up with progressively stronger and stronger arguments. That sadist had probably filmed several circumcisions so she could use the boy who screamed most. No wonder she offered no shred of comfort during the procedure, not one word or stroke of reassurance, nothing. We became queasy, realizing we’d witnessed a newborn offered as a sacrificial lamb on an anti-circumcision altar.

“If we end up doing this,” I told my wife, “I am definitely going to be there.”

“And we’re going to get him some real pain relief,” she insisted, “not some stupid pacifier filled with sugar.”

Yet we couldn’t help wondering about the accuracy of the sadistic doctor’s information. Suppose there was no true medical benefit? Vaguely we knew something about circumcision preventing cervical cancer, but had to admit it was hearsay.

Gradually we found ourselves speculating — rather than follow typical Christian American culture, what if we acted on the Bible’s freedom and chose not to circumcise? The idea that my son might end up looking very different from his dad suddenly arose as a real possibility, and strangely I felt empowered. God was entrusting this boy to us. The decision was ours — mine really, as my wife felt that, lacking the equipment in question, she should defer to my judgment. I resolved to make the best decision I could for our son, regardless of whether it matched my preconceived ideas.

Unfortunately the medical research we found proved inconclusive. Half mindlessly parroted the old tried-and-true health benefits line without taking into account recent challenges. The other half dogmatically dismissed religious tradition as myth without addressing circumcision’s thousands of years as a successful public health policy. We kept reading that circumcision had no conclusive evidence of benefits, and found the term conclusive undefined. Might the AMA have begun holding out for some hyper-statistical proof in order to stick it in Christianity’s eye, when in the meantime the wisdom of the ages would protect my son and his future wife from cancer?

“Look,” one of our friends broke it down, “you know how many cases of cervical cancer occur with circumcision? Zero. That’s all you need to know.” His confidence was tempting, but still hearsay — he was an engineer, not a doctor. Still, the fact that the AMA did not so much as mention such striking claims, even to refute them, made us suspicious.

Perhaps it would all come down to cleaning. To avoid infection uncircumcised boys must be taught to clean themselves well, a difficult task in the early years when the foreskin doesn’t retract. (A fresh circumcision also risks infection, the sadistic doctor was quick to point out, but come on! — that was a matter of weeks versus years.) My wife challenged me: would I mind teaching my son to clean himself? I didn’t think so, just as I didn’t think I’d mind talking to him about sex. That kind of transmission of manhood is what I sought out of fatherhood. But never having done such cleaning myself, I wasn’t confident about staving off infection. My brother never brushed his teeth, despite our parents always jumping on his case, and at fifth grade that was a process you didn’t mind monitoring as a parent. How would we monitor our son’s private hygiene? I’d heard that in order to stop frequent infections, some boys must be circumcised at the age of five or six, when they’re old enough to recall the procedure. Yeesh! — if that happened to me I’d resent my parents for not taking care of it when I was a baby.

And yet a single flashback from that video was enough to weaken my resolve. Those poor little rabbit cries! He didn’t know where the pain was coming from, certainly could have done nothing to escape it, even if he wasn’t strapped down. He could only lie there as probes reamed open his foreskin, cold steel clamped into place, razor sliced through flesh.

If that was necessary, if it was mandated by God, then so be it. But it was optional and could be avoided — albeit at risk, and with the hassle of long-term diligence and care.

If only there was a way to deal with the pain!

We decided to consult my wife’s mother, a nurse practitioner and pain specialist in Maryland’s Shock Trauma Team (which wasa fitting considering the shock and trauma we were contemplating inflicting on our son). On top of the sucrose pacifier she suggested a cocktail: local injection (ouch!), topical emla blocking cream, and preloading Tylenol. We felt reassured.

The obstetrician didn’t. Injection posed one risk; topical posed another. She wasn’t even keen on the Tylenol. Eventually, however, she relinquished on the last two because she could see we were so concerned. Still, no injection — period.

“One more thing,” I told her. “I want to be there. He won’t realize it, I know, but it’s important for me to be there. If I’m making this decision I need to face it. I need to be a dad who’s there to support him through it. Just because he won’t know it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be there.”

It wasn’t usual for fathers to attend, the obstetrician said. But from time to time she did permit concerned fathers to watch, and decided I could as well. I would need to remain seated (in case I fainted?) and not speak.

Leaving that meeting we were encouraged, but losing the injection gradually weighed in on us. How would I feel facing circumcision with Tylenol and a numbing cream as my only defense?

How bizarre, how seemingly cruel, that God ever would have required this of His people!

Yes, I understood health concerns in an era when hygiene was lacking. I understood consecrating a man in the very instrument he would use to create future generations — nothing else a man does can withstand the test of time, so it makes sense that God would mark a man there. But it wasn’t as though the penis was flawed by design. God pronounced it good, foreskin and all, right at the beginning.

What if circumcision’s excruciating pain left subconscious scars? What if it led later to an overcompensating fixation, an unhealthy craving for pleasure? Might circumcision make a man more vulnerable to sexual temptation?

But impacting my son in the long run, even if only subconsciously, wasn’t the point. I didn’t want such pain to enter any moment of his existence.

The more I stewed over it, the more I thanked God for placing me under the New Covenant, not the Old, and frowned on circumcision. My boy would be as God originally intended.

And then a funny question popped into my head: what would my son’s future wife want?

Impossible to know, of course. But it occurred to me that as a man I knew nothing about women’s views of circumcision. What if there was some general consensus out there that might influence my son’s future wife, setting her up for a potential disappointment should I make the wrong decision? The last thing I wanted was to set up my son to be a matrimonial letdown.

I asked the leading expert on women’s issues I know: my wife. She laughed. “It’s not as though she’d stop loving him!”

“I know, I know,” I said. “But would a woman ever go, ‘Eww!’? Would there ever be the slightest bit of disappointment?”

She gave that most politic of answers: she didn’t know. It wasn’t something women walked around talking about. But after a great deal of probing I finally got her to acknowledge (with great embarrassment) that growing up, whenever she oh-so-rarely happened to quite accidentally visualize a hypothetical example of the male anatomy … it happened to be circumcised.

So there I had it: one woman’s expectation. Where to go for the rest?

Where else but the internet?

Again the web proved frustrating, full of dogmatic accounts by women bragging about their exploits. How do you trust the advice of a woman loose enough to have slept with enough men to have sampled both flavors, and glib enough to publish her preferences to the world? What I needed was impossible: a sexually-experienced woman whose opinion I respected.

Thankfully, nothing is impossible with God.

I was recounting the entire circumcision dilemma to a close friend when she remarked, “Well, my first husband wasn’t circumcised, and my husband now is.”

I practically tripped over my jaw. “Are you serious?” Such a possibility hadn’t even occurred to me. I leaned forward, far too excited for a conversation of this sort. “And would you mind — I mean — what did you — er — did you have any sort of —”

She watched my verbal bumbling with some amusement, then bailed me out. “Circumcised,” she said. Absolutely. Definitively. For health, for aesthetics, and for all the other reasons (wink).

Now on more than one occasion she’d described marriage to her first husband, he of the uncut nature, as a miserable hell. So I dared venture just a little bit farther, and asked if her opinion might be biased.

“It could be,” she admitted, “but I’d say my opinion is stronger than my bias against him. All around, without hesitation, I’d definitely say circumcised.”

And there it was. Upon this pronouncement the wavering, heavy-laden scale finally clanked on one side. My mind was decided.

* * * * *

I didn’t sleep the night before our son’s birth because my wife, experiencing early labor pains, was breathing funny. The next night was the actual delivery, an all-night affair — no sleep again. The two nights after that our newborn’s fussing kept me awake. Thus it was that I had four sleepless nights in a row leading up to Circumcision Day.

Signing the consent form was sobering, knowing full well the procedure was elective, neither Biblically nor medically necessary. My will alone would bring to my son a pain excruciating beyond imagination, beyond anything I myself could remember. The pen dragged.

After that I fretted about leaving our hospital room for even a minute, afraid a nurse might whisk him away to do the deed without me there. Every time they pulled him into the nursery to check his vitals I asked if he was about to be circumcised. “Stop worrying,” they kept reassuring, “fathers don’t need to be there.” Were they going to pull a fast one on me? When I asked a pediatrician about it she told me I wouldn’t be allowed in.

“You don’t understand,” I said. “The obstetrician agreed I could be there.”

“No, you don’t understand,” she retorted, rising on her toes to stare me down. “This isn’t a baptism, it’s surgery. It’s a sterile environment. If something goes wrong the doctor can’t have you in the way while she’s taking care of it.”

When the time came, to my relief the obstetrician did invite me back. We gave our son a dose of Tylenol and then wheeled him, swaddled and sleeping in his plastic bin, to the nursery. The circumcision room was small; one doctor plus one nurse plus one anxious father in a corner chair left little room to maneuver. I lifted my boy, kissed him, told him I loved him even though it wouldn’t feel that way … and handed him over.

The obstetrician was quite professional, showing me the blocking cream as it was applied, the sucrose pacifier as it was filled. Then without looking back she explained each step as the procedure progressed. It went quickly. From my chair I couldn’t see much, but that wasn’t my job anyway — it was to be there for my son, and to pray.

Yes, he cried. Badly. Not as much as the sadistic video, but close enough to prove it hadn’t been an exceptional case after all. When the nurse laid him back in his plastic bin his chin still quivered uncontrollably. I couldn’t pick him up. I worried about jostling him where it hurt, but more than that I felt too cruel to offer him comfort. Not even three days old, he couldn’t begin to grasp that I had chosen such pain for him. Who was I to offer comfort?

Deflated, close to tears, I wheeled his cart out to nursery entrance where another new father waited with his first son. He eyes searched mine for reassurance. I put on a brave face, offered a weak smile. “It’s pretty rough,” I said. “Good luck.” Then I wheeled my whimpering son out to where his mom waited.

She saw it in my face instantly. “Aww, how was it,” she hummed maternally. I tried to speak, but four sleepless nights, the fear of labor, the thrill of seeing our son born healthy — all of it came crashing in on me, mixed with the feeling that I’d just betrayed a fragile, unsuspecting life. I crumpled onto the nearest couch and burst out crying.

* * * * *

I’d make the same decision again. It was the best I could make, carefully researched and obsessively weighed. Just because it wasn’t easy doesn’t mean it wasn’t good.

For two weeks afterward his penis looked exposed, raw. At every diaper change I was reminded how much I owed him — my utmost best as a father.

A few months later I read in the news about men protesting circumcision, outraged over the mutilation of their bodies. They want the United Nations to declare male circumcision a violation of human rights. To a degree I understand their position.

Mostly, though, I wonder who they think they’re fooling. Daily my wife and I make decisions that will impact our son’s future far more than the amount of skin he has at the tip of his penis: where we live; how much money we have; the food he eats; the medicine he takes; the mental stimulation he receives; the people and places he encounters as he begins to explore his world. Add all of that up and more, and you realize what an illusion self-determination is. There are no self-made men. Even our adult lives our shaped far less by our own choices than by those made by our parents.

And so the day may come when it’s my son’s turn to agonize over whether or not to circumcise his own boy. How strange he may find it, that exercising dominion over the earth would extend to a body part now too susceptible to infection. He may even come to wear the decision like a mantle, accepting the weight of fatherhood even as he shudders at it.

What an enormous risk God takes, putting these little ones in our hands. They begin existence so unaware that their health, their futures, their very lives hang on our decisions. Who can possibly live up to such a responsibility?

There’s no way. We’re simply too flawed.

But it’s still worth trying.

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copyright © 2006, michael w. hobson