IV. Circumcision & Bodily Autonomy
Neonatal Circumcision and Later Pain Response: Taddio et al. (1997), The Lancet
Circumcised babies showed a stronger pain response at vaccination months afterward.
Circumcised infants cried harder and longer at their routine vaccinations months later than intact infants. The pain of the surgery appears to leave a lasting mark on how a baby responds to pain.
Taddio and colleagues followed 87 infant boys and watched how they reacted to the pain of routine vaccination at four and six months of age. The boys who had been circumcised as newborns showed a stronger pain response, scoring higher on crying and pain scales, than the boys who were left intact. The ones circumcised with a topical anesthetic landed in between, which points to the pain of the surgery itself as the cause.
The study, published in The Lancet in 1997, was among the first to show that an early painful event can recalibrate an infant nervous system months later. For most of the twentieth century circumcisions were done with no pain relief at all, on the old assumption that newborns did not really feel or remember pain. That assumption was wrong. Even now a meaningful share of circumcisions are performed with inadequate analgesia.
4-6 mo
Later, the pain response still showed
87
Infant boys followed in the study
Stronger
Pain response in circumcised boys
1997
The Lancet, a leading medical journal
Why it matters
A newborn cannot tell you it hurts in a way the old textbooks would count. His nervous system records it anyway, and carries it for months.
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.