To circumcise or not

Greetings.Welcome to DDO. I too have no formal debating education/experience, but I've learned quite a bit (both in terms of debating as well as subject matter) since joining, & if you stick around, you will too.In this debate I will be defending the practise of circumcision. There are a host of false, dubious, & unsupported claims made about the "risks"/"dangers" of circumcision, but rather than attack straw men, I will wait to see what my opponent brings up.In the mean time, I will discus some of the more major & significant benefits associated with circumcision.Circumcision is a relatively simple procedure that is performed in the hospital and has few complications, especially when done with infants. It is the most commonly done surgery in the united states, if not the world.Approximately 60% of U.S. infants are circumcised, & approx. 1 in 3 infants world wide.When performed with a Local anesthetic there is virtually no pain at all.(Older patients often require general Anastasia, which does have some level of risk associated with it.)Benefits:Due to space I’ll focus on 2: HIV:About 50,000 Americans are newly infected with HIV each year. (1) The AAP technical report on circumcision cites 14 studies which found evidence that circumcision is protective against HIV.Circumcision Reduces Risk of AIDS Virus Infection(2) (3)The World Health Organization/Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS - The specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) that is concerned with international public health - describes the efficacy of circumcision as "proved beyond reasonable doubt".(4)Male circumcision significantly reduced the incidence of HIV in three clinical trials. (5)3 randomized trials have evaluated male circumcision for prevention of sexually transmitted infections. The trials found that circumcision decreases HIV acquisition by 53% to 60%. (6) (7)Cancer:The risk of cancer of the penis in an uncircumcised man is one in 600 in the U.S. (8) (9)The most recent American Cancer Society estimates for penile cancer in the United States are for 2012: (10)About 1,570 new cases of penile cancer will be diagnosed.About 310 men will die of penile cancer. Note regarding the following statistics, that a large majority of Americans are circumcised. (About 80% - http://en.wikipedia.org......)"In five major studies in the USA, starting in 1932 [13], not one man with invasive penile cancer had been circumcised neonatal [3]. Another report noted 50,000 cases of penile cancer in the USA from 1930 to 1990, resulting in 10,000 deaths [14]. Only 10 of the cases occurred in circumcised men, but all of these men had been circumcised later in life. Penile cancer is in fact so rare in a man circumcised in infancy, that when it does occur it can be the subject of a published case report [15]. The finite residual risk is greater in those circumcised after the newborn period but is still less than for men who are not circumcised [16]." (11)The Point Is - CIRCUMCISION CAN & DOES SAVE LIVES. It should be noted that if an uncircumcised man chooses to have the procedure done later in life, it will be more complex, (painful) and dangerous, than it would be for a newborn. (12)I'd like to just close with some select words from the article written by A. M. Viens, in The international journal of medical ethics:Medical professionals, especially those engaged in setting policy such as bioethicists, must take as their starting point the fact that reasonable people will disagree about what is valuable and what is harmful. They have an obligation to construct institutional norms and policies that do not presuppose or enforce a particular moral or political doctrine. There is a need to differentiate between rituals and practices that are in fact grievously harmful and those which relate to the enhancement of a child’s religious and cultural identity.In summary, the case against allowing parents to choose whether circumcision is or is not in their son’s interest has not been conclusively made. In our pluralistic society, there will be marked diversity between reasonable conceptions of the good concerning what interventions are valuable or promote a child’s welfare. Even in contexts when such interventions are medical in nature, the potential benefits or risks associated with the child’s welfare concerns will often involve medical, social, and cultural factors. As it presently stands, there is an absence of sufficient evidence or persuasive argumentation to warrant changing the current policy—that parents should have the freedom to make an informed and well deliberated choice as to what's best for their child.I await Cons argument, & will respond to them in the next round. (1) http://www.cdc.gov... (2) http://report.nih.gov... (3) http://www.cdc.gov... (4) http://www.who.int... (5) http://www.nejm.org... (6) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... (7) http://www.jhsph.edu... (8) http://www.medicinenet.com... (9) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... (10) http://www.cancer.org... (11) http://www.hindawi.com... (12) http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org...