Our Baby, Whose Choice? Certainty, Ambivalence, and Belonging in Male Infant Circumcision

Abstract: Routine infant circumcision is one of the most common surgical procedures performed in the U.S. Despite its broad societal acceptance, the practice is not without controversy. The stories included in this symposium offer rich insight into the diverse set of attitudes, values, and beliefs related to the practice of circumcision. They additionally offer insight into the complex web of personal, interpersonal, and social dynamics that inform the circumcision choices parents make for their children, the reasons parents make them, and how others can influence decisional choices. More broadly, these narratives raise important ethical questions mirrored today in broader contemporary bioethical and public discourse on the scope and limits of parental authority to make decisions for their children, power dynamics in medical decision making, and the ethics of healthcare activism. In this commentary, I discuss three sets of themes related to the ethics of circumcision running through the symposium narratives, comment on the ethical tensions and questions which emerge from each set of themes, gently problematize some of the rhetoric surrounding the ethical permissibility of circumcision, and gesture towards the future of bioethical inquiry on circumcision discourse.