Circumcision Since 1950
In 1949, a lack of consensus in the medical community as to whether circumcision carried with it any notable health benefit motivated the United Kingdom's newly formed National Health Service to remove infant circumcision from its list of covered services. One reason may have been Douglas Gairdner’s famous study, The fate of the foreskin, which revealed that for the years 1942–1947, about 16 children per year in England and Wales had died because of circumcision, a rate of about 1 per 6000 circumcisions. Since then, circumcision has been an out-of-pocket cost to parents, and the proportion of newborns circumcised in the hospital has fallen to less than one percent.
Similar trends have operated in Canada, (where public medical insurance is universal, and where private insurance does not replicate services already paid from the public purse) Individual provincial heath insurance plans began delisting non-therapeutic circumcision in the 1980s. Manitoba was the final province to delist non-therapeutic circumcision which occurred in 2005.
In South Korea, circumcision was largely unknown before the establishment of the United States trusteeship in 1945 and the spread of American influence. More than 90% of South Korean high school boys are now circumcised, which makes South Korea a unique case. The average age of circumcision is 12 years.
In some South African ethnic groups, circumcision has roots in several belief systems, and is performed most of the time on teenage boys:
- "...The young men in the eastern Cape belong to the Xhosa ethnic group for whom circumcision is considered part of the passage into manhood... A law was recently introduced requiring initiation schools to be licensed and only allowing circumcisions to be performed on youths aged 18 and older. But Eastern Cape provincial Health Department spokesman Sizwe Kupelo told Reuters news agency that boys as young as 11 had died. Each year thousands of young men go into the bush alone, without water, to attend initiation schools. Many do not survive the ordeal...""South Africa circumcision deaths". BBC Online. 15 July 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3069491.stm. Retrieved 2009-04-07. .
Prior to 1989, the American Academy of Pediatrics had a long-standing opinion that medical indications for routine circumcision were lacking. This stance, according to the AMA, was reversed in 1989, following new evidence of reduction in risk of urinary tract infection. A study in 1987 found that the prominent reasons for parents choosing circumcision were "concerns about the attitudes of peers and their sons' self concept in the future," rather than medical concerns. A 1999 study reported that reasons for circumcision included "ease of hygiene (67 percent), ease of infant circumcision compared with adult circumcision (63 percent), medical benefit (41 percent), and father circumcised (37 percent)." The authors commented that "Medical benefits were cited more frequently in this study than in past studies, although medical issues remain secondary to hygience and convenience." A 2001 study reported that "The most important reason to circumcise or not circumcise the child was health reasons." A 2005 study speculated that increased recognition of the potential benefits may be responsible for an observed increase in the rate of neonatal circumcision in the USA between 1988 and 2000. In a 2001 survey, 86.6% of parents felt respected by their medical provider, and parents who did not circumcise "felt less respected by their medical provider".
In the United States, statistics (1999) collected by the National Center for Health Statistics show that the overall rate of neonatal circumcision had remained near 65% since data collection began in 1979. However, strong regional differences in the circumcision rates have developed during this time. While more than 80% of newborn boys are circumcised in the Midwest and South, circumcision rates have declined to about 37% in the West in 1999. This has been attributed in part to increasing births among Latin Americans, who usually do not circumcise.
Read more about this topic: History Of Male Circumcision