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With all religious respect and all...

Would you trust your religious snip-snip guy over a licensed doctor? Not everyone has the option or inclination to be Jewish.

Urgh. I lost where else I was going with this.

When it comes to circumcision? Yeah. They're both trained, they're both using sterile equipment and materials, but one of them knows he's going to be surrounded by un-involved bystanders who may do violence to him if he messes up or unnecessarily tortures the baby. The mohel has both an ethical, moral and economic reason to do it properly. A doctor only has an ethical reason. And that hasn't kept doctors who botch circumcisions from fleeing the country when they realise what they've done.

There's some recent research regarding disease transmission that seems to back up the argument for circumcision.

I, myself, don't buy it. I suspect that in addition to ethical concerns (for which The Lancet rejected the study for publication), the data are going to turn out to have been fudged somewhat or simply artefacts of the experimental process.

I'm sticking with the "It's your child and therefore your choice" argument, just like the AMA.

You should do that regardless of whether he's circumcised or not. The question is, does it have a real benefit, epidemiologically speaking? If so, then presumably the more guys are circumcised, the less often they will spread diseases, and so the frequency of transmission will decline, causing the growth of the infected population to decline as well.

Now, I doubt the epidemiology of the group that did its study in Uganda. I think they may have fudged their data for ideological reasons. For which reason, I do not either endorse nor recommend against circumcision for other people. If and when I have a son, I'll make a choice then; I suspect I have my mind made up. But it won't be done in a "medical" fashion, if he is circumcised, it'll be done by someone like the mohel who circumcised me.

I'm told he did a pretty good job, by the way. That's a totally unsexy remark to hear from your partner but what the hell, you can't choose what people say to you xp

I used to think it was mainly a religious thing eek .

dry sex dry sex, were not having sex yet talk2hand xd

Can't miss what you don't remember having, right?

My mum is a nurse in Intensive Care and with the number of horror stories that I've heard about the uncircumcised guys, I've come to the conclusion that it's probably better off being done. There are some cases in which I believe that things should be done before the kid is old enough to remember and this is one of them. Would you want to remember some guy chopping part of your p***s off?

On the side of the uncircumcised boys, one of my friends reckons that circumcision causes a hardening to occur over the tip, which can reduce pleasure during sex. Whether or not that's true, however, I'm not sure.

TAKE IT AWAY!! I will now entertain you with a story that gave me my beliefes. I have 2 twin boy cousens, who are now 5. The parants couldn't make up their minds, so they took it off one and left it on the other. The boy who was not circumsized was caught under the table at thanksgiving jacking off!!!! My sweet old granny neerly choked to death on her food, my aunt dropped an entire thing of mashed potatoes, everybody was sitting there staring at him and he just continued sitting there jacking off. And when his mother asked him what he was doing, he pulled the table cloth back down so that we couldn't see him and said "GO AWAY! IM JACKING OFF!"