Editor’s Pick, March 2015: Robert Darby   

This quarter’s editor’s pick is “Risks, Benefits, Complications and Harms: Neglected Factors in the Current Debate on Non-therapeutic Circumcision,” by Robert Darby. Darby offers a vivid critique of our current justifications for routine male circumcision. His critique focuses less on the practice itself than on how we have discussed the ethics of circumcision. He argues that our analyses of the ‘risks and benefits’ of the procedure have focused on narrowly medical concerns, and made invisible the layered symbolic, personal, and psychological significance of the foreskin and the attendant harms that may result from removing it without consent. He covers some of the fascinating social history of our attitudes towards circumcision, and develops an extended and effective analogy with mastectomy: while our current practices recognize and incorporate the potentially powerful personal significance of the female breast to identity and gender, our circumcision practices have no such sensitivity. This paper can be difficult to read, as it can be a challenge to confront a clear-headed critique of a procedure that many readers underwent or had performed on their sons with little reflection.