IV. Circumcision & Bodily Autonomy
AAP Circumcision Policy Statement (2012, expired 2017), American Academy of Pediatrics
Not one medical association on earth recommends routine infant circumcision.
The AAP is the most circumcision-friendly medical body in the world. Even it stopped short of recommending the procedure, concluding the benefits are "not great enough to recommend routine circumcision." No national medical association anywhere recommends routine infant circumcision.
In 2012 the American Academy of Pediatrics released the most favorable position on circumcision of any national medical body. It concluded that the health benefits of newborn circumcision outweigh the risks. Then it added the sentence that gets left out of the pamphlets: the benefits are "not great enough to recommend routine circumcision for all male newborns." The AAP left the decision to parents and declined to recommend the surgery itself.
AAP policy statements expire five years after publication unless they are reaffirmed. This one never was. It lapsed in 2017, and the AAP has not replaced it.
In 2013 a group of 38 physicians and professors, most of them heads of pediatric and surgical associations across Europe and Canada, published a formal response in the same journal arguing the AAP report reflected American cultural bias rather than the evidence. Step outside the United States and no national medical association recommends doing this to a healthy infant.
0
Medical bodies that recommend routine infant circumcision
Not enough
AAP, on the case for recommending it
2017
Year the AAP stance quietly expired
38
Physicians who called the report culturally biased
Why it matters
The single most circumcision-friendly body in the world looked at its own evidence and refused to recommend the procedure. That should be the end of the medical argument.
This is one finding from the research library behind How to Birth a Mother. Everything here traces back to a study, a dataset, or a systematic review.