One of humanity's oldest operations still splits medical opinion across continents
Somewhere between 37 and 39 percent of the world's men are circumcised, and the oldest written trace of the practice comes from ancient Egypt. Yet doctors in America and doctors in Europe, reading the same studies, reach opposite verdicts on whether routine infant circumcision is worth doing.
Removing the foreskin is done for religious, cultural, social and medical reasons. In Judaism it ranks among the weightiest commandments and is treated as obligatory, and it is also central in Islam; some African and Eastern Christian churches require it too. It is common in Israel, the United States, the Philippines, South Korea, most of Africa and Muslim-majority nations, but uncommon outside religious settings in Latin America, Europe, Australia and most of Asia.
Its use as preventive medicine began in 1850s England and later spread worldwide. Today roughly half of all circumcisions are done for that preventive purpose. Doctors may also consider it necessary when conditions such as phimosis or repeated urinary infections fail to respond to other treatment, and it is ruled out for some structural abnormalities or when a patient's general health is poor.
The strongest agreement concerns HIV. Major medical bodies accept that, performed safely by professionals, it lowers heterosexual men's risk of infection in high-risk settings, by up to 60 percent. In 2007 the World Health Organization and UNAIDS backed voluntary adult and adolescent circumcision in regions with heavy HIV burdens, provided consent, confidentiality and freedom from coercion were guaranteed. That advice extended to newborns with parental consent in 2010, and in 2020 the WHO reaffirmed it as an essential strategy alongside other measures. Eastern and southern Africa, where few men were circumcised and HIV spread mainly between men and women, became the priority region.
Wealthy countries are another matter. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention judge the benefits greater than the risks, while medical bodies in Europe, Australia and New Zealand mostly consider the gains too small to justify routine surgery on children. The calculation depends on which illnesses are common locally. Complications become markedly more frequent with age; bleeding, infection and removing the wrong amount of tissue are the usual short-term problems, and narrowing of the urethral opening is the commonest lasting one.
Source: Circumcision
