New Pro-Circumcision Guidelines: Cutting Comments, Adolescent Choice

Just days after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued draft recommendations on male circumcision asserting that the health benefits outweigh the risks, more than 300 comments (and counting) have been posted on the agency's website.

Surprise: The feedback overall reflects anger over mounting institutional support for what some call a "barbaric, outdated practice." (The public comment period on the agency's proposed recommendations ends on Jan. 16.)

Here are a few random comments:

When I was a little girl and discovered my little brothers had been cut, I was horrified for them and grateful I wasn't born a boy.

The only benefit of infant circumcision is the fatter wallet of the circumciser. Wake up people! Condoms prevent sexually transmitted diseases, not circumcision. Males deserve the same protection from genital cuttings that females do. Shame on the CDC for condoning such a barbaric, outdated practice that nearly every other industrialized nation has refused to adopt!

Routine infant circumcision is morally wrong because it is non-essential cosmetic surgery performed on the body of a human being not yet old enough to give informed consent....

Your agenda clearly shows your primary purposes is for health insurance to pay for male genital mutilation. Please don't continue to make the U.S. the continued laughing stock of the international medical community.

You get the picture.

The CDC stopped short of actually telling parents they must circumcise their baby boys; instead the agency offered guidelines — including a new recommendation that un-circumcised adolescent boys discuss the risks and benefits with their doctors — and laid out the latest research. Male circumcision, according to an AP report, can:

•Cut a man's risk of getting HIV from an infected female partner by 50 to 60 percent.

•Reduce their risk of genital herpes and certain strains of human papillomavirus by 30 percent or more.

•Lower the risk of urinary tract infections during infancy, and cancer of the penis in adulthood.

Studies have not shown that circumcision will reduce an HIV-infected man's chances of spreading the AIDS virus to women. And research has not found circumcision to be a help in stopping spread of HIV during gay sex.

The guidelines say circumcision is safer for newborns and infants than for older males, noting the complication rate rises from 0.5 percent in newborns to 9 percent in children ages 1 to 9, according to the CDC. Minor bleeding and pain are the most common problems, experts say.

CDC officials are recommending doctors tell parents of baby boys of the benefits and risks of circumcision...

These are the first federal guidelines on circumcision, a brief medical procedure that involves cutting away the foreskin around the tip of the penis. Germs can grow underneath the foreskin, and CDC officials say the procedure can lower a male's risk of sexually-transmitted diseases, penile cancer and even urinary tract infections.

I asked circumcision expert Marvin Wang, co-director of the newborn nurseries at Massachusetts General Hospital (and someone who has performed thousands of circumcisions), about the new CDC draft recommendation, and he offered this thoughtful analysis:

First a little history:

For decades, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) (which produces the majority of research-based policy for U.S. pediatric care) has led a relatively neutral stance on male neonatal circumcision, as the literature has shown that there is a relatively small health benefit by performing circumcision (there is huge debate on how one interprets the numbers on this, but overall, that conclusion is true). However, a game changer that tilted the balance towards claiming health benefits came in 2005-2007, when three separate World Health Organization clinical trials were performed in Africa demonstrating that circumcision among adult men in Sub-Saharan African settings reduced the acquisition of HIV by 50%.

With that, the AAP changed its recommendations in 2012 to reflect these studies. Their statement basically said that, yes, we know that there are health benefits now – enough to encourage parents to strongly consider circumcision for the newborn. However, the decision still lays with the parents, balanced by their beliefs (which may be influenced by religious, social or familial reasons). There are other tenets to the statement, but let’s just focus on this one topic, as this is most relevant to the recent CDC statement.

In light of the infectious disease issues involved, the medical community had been told that the CDC would make their recommendations regarding circumcision at about the same time as the AAP’s release. So, with this week's statement, you are basically seeing a reaffirmation of the 2012 AAP statement. We don’t really see anything new. The health benefits touted in the CDC report have all been discussed before in the literature.

The only potentially new issue here is a topic that the 2012 AAP statement neglected: The idea of encouraging un-circumcised adolescents to discuss the option with their physician.

If you consider the argument that circumcision might prevent HIV among ADULT men in third world country settings, it becomes a bit abstract to make the same conclusion for newborn boys in a developed world. This has always been the intangible factor, when the AAP changed its tone towards encouraging circumcision for newborns in the U.S. As such, having an adolescent make that choice, when presented with the possibility of a health benefit, does make more sense. The HIV prevention argument is far more relevant to an adolescent than to a newborn, so to encourage the inclusion of the adolescent population into this forum is appropriate.

As well, one of the primary objections from the anti-circumcision advocates has been that this is life-long alteration performed on a person who cannot consent to the procedure. Thus, including consenting adolescents into the discussion appears appropriate. The downside to this, however, is once a male has grown past the newborn stage, medical circumcision can only safely be performed in an operating room setting under general anesthesia, thus increasing the risk to the procedure. But again, this should not pre-empt the discussion altogether.

Basically, all we’ve seen from this week's report from the CDC is that they are backing up the AAP. The overall result of this is that there are two U.S. research-based governing bodies of medical care affirming the established research.