Quick question for you...

There is no strong evidence circumcision helps ANY of this. Circumcision removes natural skin, exposes your penile head to dryness that it isn't supposed to feel.

If the "it helps with hygiene" crowd were right, then boys in europe would get more HIV, more UTI, and more std's than boys in the US. This simply is not the case. there are no more cases of STDs or UTIs in france than here, or germany than texas. And AIDS was not more prevelent in Europe than here, in the gay or straight community.

the ONLY place that has ever "proven" that circumcision was effective was AFrica. And since a human man is the same here or there, it tells me the studies are not that good.

By the way, if you *really* think it's a good idea, then do it at 16 or 18, before the kid has started having sex, but is old enough to be asked, "do you want your boy parts cut?" I'm sure they will find the studies as compelling, and the health bennies as important as you suggest they are.

One more set of facts. There's sorta a "natural study group" if you will, about circumcision and AIDS or HIV.

The US v. Europe. When I googled, I found that .3% of adult males in the US have HIV/AIDS. In France, it's .4% of adult males. In Germany .1 %, in Spain .4 %, etc. (http://www.avert.org/hiv-aids-europe.htm). In the US, well over 50% of all men are circumcised. In Europe, It's less than 10% of the men. Yet the numbers of AIDS/HIV cases are pretty consistent.

That's not science. It's just sorta looking at the numbers. Again, if there really were such significant differences, given the cultural issues for the last 50 years in Europe vs. US, you'd think someone would say "oh my god, americans aren't getting UTIs".

"Circumcision removes natural skin, exposes your [glans] to dryness it isn't supposed to feel" Yes, that's the point. The explanation that I've seen is that the foreskin is susceptible to micro-tears during intercourse that create pathways for the virus. The glans is much less susceptible to these, so there aren't easy pathways for the virus to exploit. Boom, there's your "mechanism".

Keep in mind re hygiene, you're looking at national statistics, NOT a scientific study. There so many variables that aren't being controlled for that it's pretty much irrelevant. Off the top of my head, Europe has evil "socialized" medicine, which means that all socioeconomic classes get access to affordable care, so you'd expect to see lower incidence rates of STD's and UTI's than in the US, where lower classes often might not have access to good healthcare, so they would be more susceptible regardless of circumcision status, which would massively skew the data. You're absolutely right, "looking at the numbers" is not science, and it's stupid to brng up correlations or anecdotes and think that they are viable evidence to scientific studies.

"the ONLY place that has ever "proven" that circumcision was effective was AFrica" Well no shit, we're discussing this relative to Africa. People aren't dying of AIDS by the millions in the US. It's a serious problem there. It's a minor one here.

"By the way, if you *really* think it's a good idea, then do it at 16 or 18, before the kid has started having sex," Then why not wait until 16 or 18 to vaccinate them? After all, I'm sure they'd appreciate they input before looking at the evidence! We wouldn't want to unduly force people to have medical procedures as a kid, even though we do it for vaccinations and appendicitis and deformities, no, never!

BTW, you still haven't answered my original question of "where do you draw the line between "For the good of public health" and "My right to privacy trumps the medical well-being of others around me"?". Please do so, my intention in my thread was for you to answer that, not randomly spew claims on the subject.

When is it "for the public good?" When you can come up with studies that actually make sense, and are provable. Not ones that are incomplete.

the numbers of 60% are a GROSS over statement of something that *Might* be 10% but more like 2-5% (CDC by the way - it's linked on another page). I'm not going to advocate "safety" when we cannot prove this.

Give me studies that are compelling, show that micro tears really exist (the reports I've read say this is a POSSIBLE reason it works, again - it's not been studied), and give me numbers that are more compelling than 5 percent and fine - you have something. But that's not these studies.

And of course you can compare countries. If a medical procedure is effective, it's effective. Biology does not take into account, coustoms.

And again, harming the human body is NEVER an acceptable answer when you have other EVEN MORE EFFECTIVE answers.

Of course, you want to know why the "mirco tear" theory was proposed? Cause rapists who have partners that are not aroused, have to rub harder. So, are we saying that africa has a higher rape problem? of course we are. But circumcision is not the answer for that, either.

castration might be, but that's the feminist in me talking.

I mean, you can compare countries, but then you have to control for variables. If the US/Western Europe have similar rates, then you also have to account for, as I said before, the fact that WE has a far better healthcare system, so that could be skewing the numbers. If you compare the US's to Eastern Europe, which has a healthcare system much closerto the US's, then you start to see incidence rates from .4-1.2%, which are notably higher than 0.3%

Re "harming the human body"- it's not really harming. You have no memory of the pain if done in childbirth, no decline in sexual pleasure or performance, and no massive psychological trauma- in exchange for lower incidences o disease and easier hygiene. It's more like getting a nipple piercing to prevent breast cancer than getting your beasts cut off, to use your ridiculous analogy from above (Unless getting a nipple piercing is exceptionally painful, I wouldn't know).

Rape is a separate (serious) problem, let's not bring it int the discussion.