re medical prophylaxis - there is clinical evidence that circumcision protects to a degree against HIV infection. It also protects (probably to a significant degree) against penile cancer.
Penile cancer, however, is extremely rare disease primarily found in old men, and usually arises only when there is horrendously poor hygeine.
Circumcising as a means to protect against cancer is ludicrous.
As for HIV, again - a ludicrous reason to mutilate a child. It does not immunize (although a lot of scientists are framing it as such), and even the clinical studies likely suffer confounds (it is very hard to have a completely randomized control study when it comes to radical and permanent alterations - you need volunteers, and those who volunteer to be circumcised may systematically differ, in some ways, from those who don't).
Margaret Sommervile (
http://www.law.mcgill.ca/faculty/bio_di ... Print_List ) - a world renowned figure in medical ethics, has written a book called "The Ethical Canary"
Here are some excerpts:
http://www.intact.ca/canary.htm
If someone asked you what our reactions to human cloning could teach us about the ethics of infant male circumcision, you might think it was a trick question. I was working on speeches on both these topics at more or less the same time and, with some surprise, recognized there was at least one important lesson that cloning would provide in relation to circumcision. When they first hear of human cloning, most people's reaction is "Yuck!" But as familiarity increases, and dread decreases, they move from this rejection and horror to neutrality to acceptance, usually with safeguards, and finally even to positive approval. In contrast, many people's view of infant male circumcision has gone in the opposite direction: from positive approval to rejection and sometimes horror. This is certainly true of my attitude.
...
As I have noted elsewhere, good ethics depend on good facts, and good law depends on good ethics. The medical facts about infant male circumcision have changed as a result of medical research. We now know that infant male circumcision is harmful in itself and has harmful consequences. Circumcision removes healthy, functioning, erogenous tissue that serves important protective, sensory and sexual purposes. The surgery also involves risks of further damage-ranging from minor to serious damage to the penis or even its loss or death. In one recent American case a baby died from the general anesthetic he was given in order to deal with the complications that had resulted from his circumcision. Some physicians who continue to support routine-that is, non-therapeutic-circumcision argue that its potential medical benefits-which research shows do exist-justify carrying it out on infants. But these potential benefits do not outweigh its harms when the procedure is not medically necessary, which in the vast majority of cases it is not. Moreover, when we look to the nature of the medical benefits cited as a justification for infant circumcision, such as a reduced rate of urinary infections, we can see that medical problems can be avoided or, if they occur, treated in far less traumatic and invasive ways than circumcision.
The most recent claim of a medical benefit from circumcision is a reduction in the risk of contracting HIV infection or other sexually transmitted diseases. The research on which this claim is based is being challenged, but even if it is correct, it would not justify circumcising infant boys. Even assuming that circumcision gave men additional protection from becoming infected with HIV, baby boys do not immediately need such protection and can choose for themselves, at a later stage, if they want it. To carry out circumcision for such a future health protection reason (assuming for the moment that circumcision is protective) would be analogous to testing a baby girl for the gene for breast cancer and, if it is present, trying to remove all her immature breast tissue in order to eliminate the risk of her developing breast cancer as an adult woman. I believe that most of us would be shocked at undertaking such a procedure on a baby girl, but some of us might not have the same reaction to infant male circumcision. Why is this? Quite simply we value breasts-we see it as a serious harm to a woman to lose them-and we do not value foreskins, in fact they are often devalued-spoken of as ugly, unaesthetic and unclean. Yet both are part of the intact human body and both have sexual and other functions. Consequently, to summarize, routine infant male circumcision cannot be ethically and legally justified on the grounds that it is medically required.
A common error made by those who want to justify infant male circumcision on the basis of medical benefits is that they believe that as long as some such benefits are present, circumcision can be justified as therapeutic, in the sense of preventive health care. This is not correct. A medical-benefits or "therapeutic" justification requires that overall the medical benefits should outweigh the risks and harms of the procedure required to obtain them, that this procedure is the only reasonable way to obtain these benefits, and that these benefits are necessary to the well-being of the child. None of these conditions is fulfilled for routine infant male circumcision. If we view a child's foreskin as having a valid function, we are no more justified in amputating it than any other part of the child's body unless the operation is medically required treatment and the least harmful way to provide that treatment
It never occurs to many people to reflect upon the origins and meaning of this practice. It is so fundamental to their cultural consciousness, that by default, it occupies a privileged place of normativity, relatively immune from critical insight.
What is certain, in my opinion, is that if circumcision wasn't around today, it would absolutely never be accepted by society if all this HIV research suddenly came about.
