Mortality Blog

A large study in Uganda involving 5,534 men found that those who underwent circumcision as adults were 25 percent less likely to become infected with herpes and more than 30 percent less likely to catch human papillomavirus (HPV) than their uncircumcised peers…. Previous research has shown that circumcision reduces a man’s risk of acquiring HIV by as much as 60 percent.

Male Circumcision Cuts Risk of HIV, Herpes, and HP Transmission [blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats]

MALE CIRCUMCISION FENDS OFF THE MOST COMMON STDS [sciencenews.org]

This is an interesting fact to learn - but I won’t be surprised when pro-circumcision groups cite this study as strengthening their argument against foreskin retention. It’s unfortunate, because even if circumcision protected males 100% against HIV, I’d still be very basically against the practice, since it would still fall squarely under preventative surgery. People who have their appendix or tonsils removed at birth have a 0% chance of developing appendicitis or tonsillitis - so why isn’t it common medical practice to have those organs removed at birth, along with the foreskin? You can live without them - but why would you want to, if it’s not necessary? In the case of a man’s foreskin, attention paid to sexual partners and use of contraception can provide 99.99% protection against all kinds of STDs, fluid-transmitted especially. Which is better - to snip off some of the most sensitive skin on a boy’s body at birth, or make sure they’ve got easy access to condoms when they’re teenagers?

I’ve got to admit that a little bit of my incredulity over the implication of the results of this study is the countries that it targets - it wasn’t conducted in the United States, and there are a lot of socio-economic factors that additionally influence infection rates. But even if that weren’t the case, I would feel the same way: that despite the latest revelations about the benefits of this practice, it’s still completely unnecessary, and arguable more harmful then helpful.

My aversion to murder (in the general “humans killing other humans regardless of context” sense of the word) is pretty familiar to most people who know me - and the other night I decided to try to think through the implications it posed for abortion, embryos, and stem-cell research.

I’m going to have to depart from the average liberal and say I can’t condone abortion or the destruction of embryos, whether research-related or otherwise.

We all know where babies come from - when a man and a women love each other very much, the man wants to be as close to the woman as possible, and the closest he can get is by laying on top of her, and putting his penis inside of her vagina. This feels very good, and eventually his penis releases sperm into the woman’s vagina (this feels really good for both of them) and later, the sperm swim up the woman’s fallopian tubes, in search of an egg to fertilize.

Up until the point that the two gametes merge, there’s no human life present. There are human cells, but they belong to the woman and man, and will eventually die off on their own, to be replaced by more. However, as soon as a sperm squeezes its way into the egg and the two halves of their DNA zip together, it’s a human, totally unique, with a future ahead of it. It doesn’t really look human, and it hasn’t even started to grow yet, but I can’t see it as anything but a person. A very small person. Not even a fetus yet. The longer we’re alive, the more our spectrum of available future paths narrows to a single point - that point is our death, the single event in our future that we cannot avoid. But at the moment of fertilization, that human’s entire life is undetermined. It could die before it even attaches to the wall of the uterus, it could be miscarried, it could die from complications during childbirth, afterwards, in a second, a day, a year, or even a century. It literally has its entire life ahead of it.

And there’s no way I would ever feel comfortable with taking that life away. It’s murder. You’re taking a life that’s just begun, and ensuring that it has no chance of continuing. That’s reprehensible.

Of course, accepting this involves accepting situations which make people incredible uncomfortable: rape is an often-quoted excuse to justify abortion. It’s hard for me to stick to my guns on this one, but I can’t help thinking of it this way: the child growing inside the victim doesn’t know anything about the circumstances of its conception. This tiny human doesn’t deserve death for the sins of its parent(s). Children whose parents are unable or unwilling to fulfill their responsibility as a parent (one of the few responsibilities I really think people inherent posses) should be taken care of by the state (in the “general governmental” sense of the word, not in the “geo-political boundary” sense) and given a fair chance at the American dream: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s hard to do all that when you’re dead.

All that said, I’m not sure I have the balls to recommend that my conclusions be made law. I think it’d be reasonable to implement them in a nation that had first developed adequate infrastructure to stand in for biological parents in child-rearing, in a nation where rape and incest were a rare occurance. I think we can do it - but I don’t think we’re there yet, so I’m not really ready to commit to any actual legal stuff about it yet. However, if anyone were ever to ask me about it, I know exactly what I think about it, and why.