I Didn’t Circumcise My Son. Did I Make the Right Choice?

In the predawn darkness of a Southern California birth center in July 2024, my son erupted from between my wife’s legs like a screaming jack-in-the-box. Newly arrived in the world, he threw his arms open wide in a triumphant gesture, and when he was handed to us, I beheld his many wild newborn features: the umbilical cord bright with blood the color of Glacier Freeze Gatorade; the baffled eyes of an alien whose Uber just dropped him off in the wrong neighborhood; and the penis, which, unlike mine, remained sheathed by a mysterious and controversial fold of skin. Many things change when you become a parent, but one of the most fundamental is that, suddenly, you’re making decisions on behalf of another person. And, if you’re having a boy, one of the very first is what to do about that foreskin.Like most American men in their mid-30s, I am circumcised. I’m half-Jewish, but I was baptized Catholic, and I’ve never been to a bris. Growing up, my main awareness of the foreskin came from the 2004 comedy Meet the Fockers, when Ben Stiller’s mummified infant foreskin ends up in a fondue. All of this meant I didn’t feel that well-qualified to make this choice for my son. But I’d also been swayed by the conversation we’d had with our OB just a few weeks earlier. We’d been checking off the 100 million things on our to-do list ahead of the arrival of our new roommate, and one of those had been deciding whether he should be circumcised. Both my wife and I were on the fence. I’d consulted the work of Emily Oster, an economist well-known for giving data-driven advice to parents, and her conclusion had basically been the “shrug” emoji. Do it if you want, don’t if you don’t. This did not seem like a good enough reason to cut off a piece of my son’s anatomy, so we asked our doctor what she thought.It turned out that she didn’t see any reason to do it either. In fact, she didn’t perform the operation herself. If you do want to circumcise him, she told us, there’s a doctor at the nearby hospital who will do it. You’ll need to bring $400 in cash.I decided that if the whole thing was going to be like buying weed in high school, then I’d just as soon skip it. So we opted to leave the foreskin be, and moved on to dealing with a helpless human potato who only eats, cries, poops, and sleeps.But multiple times a day—so many times a day—I changed his diaper, which meant that multiple times a day I was confronted with the legacy of our choice. And as the months passed, circumcision popped up everywhere. There it was during the first season of Industry, in which Harper repeatedly mentions “uncut dicks,” and in an episode of How to With John Wilson where we meet an amateur inventor trying to regrow his foreskin. Even Heated Rivalry was pulled into its orbit. When the canonically uncircumcised Ilya sent the canonically circumcised Shane a dick pic, fans were aghast that he appeared to be cut, compelling the author of the books, Rachel Reid, to post one of the all-time great Instagram clarifications: “THE FORESKIN IS PULLED BACK.”Foreskins were on everyone’s minds for a reason. Americans, whose love of circumcision is unique the world over, were mysteriously abandoning it. The number of neonatal circumcisions in the US had fallen nearly 5 percent between 2012 and 2022, driving down the overall rate just below 50 percent, according to a 2025 study from Johns Hopkins. Some estimates even clocked American circumcision rates at a decades-long low. At the same time, foreskins had slotted into many of the other deranged debates driving our contemporary discourse. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a cabinet meeting that studies showed children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism, presumably, he claimed, because they were given Tylenol (there’s little to back this up). In Oregon, a lawsuit brought on by circumcision opponents is making its way through the legal system. Meanwhile, the internet is filled with stories of grown men both pursuing and undoing circumcision, as well as endless threads of looksmaxxers debating the merits of their cut or uncut dicks.While it’s tempting to see this as a mere data point in our never-ending obsession with our bodies, the decline in circumcision has some doctors concerned. The authors of the Johns Hopkins study wrote that “research has continued to confirm that the procedure reduces penile inflammation, urinary tract infections, and acquisition of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, such as genital herpes and HPV (known to cause oral, cervical, and penile cancers).”My son was nearing two years old when I called up the study’s coauthor, Aaron Tobian, MD, a professor of pathology, medicine, oncology, and epidemiology at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health, to ask him what he made of all this. Were the benefits of circumcision really so, forgive me, cut and dry? And if they were, then why the attrition?Tobian believes there’s been “a trend with increasing vaccine hesitancy and also decreasing numbers of parents electing to circumcise male babies.” As he explained, “This all comes in a moment when over the last 15 years, the data supporting the medical benefits of male circumcision have only increased and are very clear.”My heart sank, and it continued to sink further, past my penis and down to my knees, as Tobian listed off the benefits of circumcision mentioned above, all of which fortified both public and personal health. Searching for some reason why I wasn’t a bad parent, I asked him about a major circumcision counterargument: that it made sex worse.“The best data that you could obtain are that you take an adult who has been previously sexually active, and then you circumcise them and then you ask them, did you have any differences in male sexual satisfaction?” Tobian says. “And that’s exactly what our group did in Uganda.”Tobian had led secondary trials around a landmark study in Uganda, published in The Lancet in 2007, in which nearly 5,000 men were circumcised. Its authors estimated that the procedure reduced the risk of contracting HIV by half. And when asked if the subjects experienced changes in sexual satisfaction after it, Tobian says “there was absolutely no difference” between those who were circumcised and a control group.Getting off the phone, I experienced the particular parental terror of having made the wrong decision for my son. I hadn’t done enough research. I had made a gut decision. I was as misguided as an anti-vaxxer.But I was also geared up to do more homework. When I talked to Dr. Tobian, my wife was newly pregnant with our second child. We didn’t know its sex yet. I could take this opportunity to properly investigate what this all meant for the American penis with a thoroughness that I hadn’t done before my first. I realized that this operation that had been practiced near-universally on my generation—so commonplace that my parents hadn’t even considered skipping it—had now become a fraught choice, rather than another box to check off after cutting the umbilical cord. The fact that circumcision is irreversible also adds layers of consequence to the birthing experience, all of which will play out over the lifetime of a child. What had happened in the past three decades to cause this shift? And had I, as a dad, made the right choice?Alamy, Getty ImagesCircumcision is a religious and cultural practice with ancient roots in Abrahamic religions as well as both Middle Eastern and North African cultures. Jews circumcise on the eighth day of an infant’s life as part of a ceremony called a b’rit milah, or bris. Muslim approaches vary from routine neonatal circumcisions to rites of passage in puberty.These kinds of circumcision are not what this story is about. I’m interested in the secular medicalization of the foreskin, and that began in the 19th century, when the world’s oldest surgical procedure was discovered by history’s great sickos: the Victorians. In search of a cure for masturbation, the cancer of its time, some doctors theorized that if you removed sensitive tissue from that tempting area, it might dissuade kids from playing with themselves. The procedure hopped the pond in 1870, when the American surgeon Lewis Sayre, a future president of the American Medical Association, declared that it could cure all kinds of serious orthopedic diseases, suggesting that “epilepsy, hernia, and even lunacy appeared to respond” to the removal of the foreskin, as historian David Gollaher wrote in the Journal of Social History in 1994.After WWII, circumcision diverged into two paths that bring us to the present day. When the UK instituted universal medical coverage under the National Health Services in 1948, the government took a hard look at what it should pay for and decided that there wasn’t enough evidence for circumcision to fit the bill. Gollaher cites army records that show circumcision rates subsequently fell from “50 percent of working-class and 85 percent of upper-class Englishmen” to “less than one half of 1 percent” by the early 1960s. In the United States, however, most private insurers continued to cover the procedure, and its frequency rose, peaking at as many as 80 percent of infants in the 1960s. But even then, it had opponents. With the sexual revolution underway and all things Victorian up for debate, a small movement against circumcision emerged on the grounds of bodily autonomy—eventually earning the goofy moniker of “intactivists.” Even with this counterforce, however, by the 2000s, about 90 percent of white men in the US were believed to be circumcised, compared to around 20 percent in the UK. This makes circumcision as American as hot dogs and semiautomatic assault rifles.Even so, the American Academy of Pediatrics currently has no official position on the matter. The group let its most recent circumcision policy statement—which said in 2012 that the benefits outweigh the risks—lapse in 2017. Since then, the world of circumcision can be roughly divided into two fundamental groups: advocates like Dr. Tobian on one side, and the intactivists on the other. The proponents suggest that the evidence for medical benefits is there, and on the strength of it, some have helped turn circumcision into another American export—there were nearly 30 million circumcisions performed in Africa between 2007 and 2020, funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The intactivists, some of whom are doctors and public health advocates, insist that said benefits are overhyped. Some even believe that the procedure is akin to female genital mutilation. They argue for the foreskin’s inherent value.“Once we circumcise, we get rid of the foreskin, which means we don’t have much information about it,” says Jonathan A. Allan, a professor of gender studies at Brandon University and the author of Uncut: A Cultural Analysis of the Foreskin. While researching the book, he’d sifted through sex manuals that saw the foreskin as an enhancer of sexual pleasure, despite those aforementioned studies from the medical establishment. In other words, maybe the Victorians were right to worry.“What am I supposed to do with this information if I’m a parent, or I’m a 25-year-old trying to decide whether I should get circumcised?” Allan says. “You’ve got the medical community saying there’s no difference, but you’ve got all these sexperts saying there is.”What makes the subject even more difficult to navigate is that American men without a foreskin can’t imagine what it’s like to have one. It’s like a believer and an atheist discussing God. You either know that He is real, or that there’s no such thing. It’s hard to even agree on what you’re talking about.This uncrossable gulf encourages a debate in which nobody can ever change their mind, making the topic of circumcision a darling of the algorithm. Social media is filled with posts about the pros and cons of getting one’s “pencil sharpened.” The posters range from medical experts fielding the question of the procedure’s impact on doing it—“you can have a loss of sensation if you are an adult man who gets circumcised”—to women sharing how living in Europe made them anti-circumcision—“They snip it off—for what? For what? To look pretty?”—to sex workers weighing in on issues of…let’s call it hygiene: “The cheese I have seen.” Forums like Reddit also abound with sexually effusive oversharing about “cut vs. uncut” in both the gay community and among women. Some “love em uncut,” as one commenter wrote, because it gives them “something to chew on”; others “don’t love mushroom dicks,” per a different user, “both visually and practically.” Many don’t care either way, as long as they’re clean.This discussion coincides with the rise of internet pornography, which provides unlimited opportunities to compare your penis to others; unsurprisingly, urologists now offer circumcision for cosmetic reasons.Even before you could watch hard-core sex on your phone, the specter of the circumcised member loomed large. Jaime Cardenas, a 36-year-old Texan, told me that when he got the procedure done for medical reasons in high school, it also brought aesthetic relief.“I always wished I [was circumcised] just because of what we see in the media,” Cardenas says. “It brought a lot of shame whenever it came to being with new people.”Given Cardenas’s generally positive experience with the procedure, he was surprised to see so many opponents of it online. It’s hard to spend more than 30 seconds reading about circumcision without a binary appearing: Is it better to have a foreskin, or not? But, then again, how can a parent evaluate the two options when they’ve only experienced one of them?Despite the burgeoning foreskin discourse in my media ecosystem, I felt shy asking people about their sons’ penises. Wielding my journalistic assignment like a shield, I started by inviting a pair of new parents from the neighborhood for an afternoon hang in my backyard. As their baby systematically put every toy he could find in his mouth, I asked them how they’d handled the decision.She was northern European and he was an American Jew, which meant that they came from completely different universes. “One person had a rock-solid belief that the body should not be altered from the way nature made it, unless medically necessary,” he texted me later. “The other, a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, had a strong feeling and belief that it was important to continue the hard-fought traditions and lineage of his people.” But eventually, when push came to cut, they decided against it, agreeing to raise their son Jewish “in every other way.”Another dad friend, whose wife had deputized him with the decision, said he’d done a similar version of what I had: “instinctual self-reckoning combined with very bourgeois research,” and concluded that, safety-wise, doing the procedure would pose “infinitesimally less of a risk” given the potential benefits as far as hygiene and infections. His wife gave birth at a hospital, and the medical staff went down a list of questions, one of which was whether to circumcise. My friend said okay. The fact that it was presented as just one of many boxes to check made him ponder the decision even less. He has since been amazed by the debate.“There are people who are like, you’re a demon if you do it, and then there are people who are like, you’re an anti-vaxxer if you don’t, and then there’s people like me who are 50-50 and you need a feather to knock you over to the other side,” he says.I asked my wife to text a moms’ group she’s in, and four women immediately volunteered to chat about the topic. Two of them were hard nos—both used the word “barbaric.” A third was a hard yes. Her husband and most of the men she knew had been circumcised. The fourth was more uncertain. She and her partner were considering it before they examined their reasons and found that none of them held up to close scrutiny. While the mythical “locker room” came up a few times—the fear of your son having a weird-looking penis compared to his peers—it wasn’t a strong-enough factor to justify it. Same with the idea that fathers and sons should match: “I have a theory that sons really don’t care what their dad’s dick looks like,” she says. “We’ll see.”During my quest, I was put in touch with a soon-to-be mom who told me she was pro-circumcision when she learned they were having a boy. But the soon-to-be dad pushed back, and they found themselves on opposite sides of a parenting choice for the first time. Their son’s penis was a topic of conversation among their friends for months. “So at the baby shower, we were like, Why don’t we settle it once and for all?” she says. “We’ll have everyone vote.” The verdict? Eleven in favor and 15 against.“I haven’t decided this for sure, but I think as a result of the research and the conversations and the poll, we won’t be circumcising him,” she says. “Which is really an unexpected turn for me.”My anecdotal survey had resulted in more stories of parents who had chosen not to circumcise than those that had. Yes, I live in California, which became the first state in which Medicaid no longer covered the procedure, in 1982, and in general, the West Coast has had a lower rate of circumcision than regions like the Midwest and Northeast. But none of the parents I spoke to seemed particularly countercultural. Maybe this had less to do with a distrust of the medical establishment and more with something inherent in the reasons for circumcision itself.I first encountered the idea that circumcision is the solution in search of a problem when I talked with Lauren Sardi, a professor of sociology and women’s and gender studies at Quinnipiac University. This sentiment is largely attributed to Edward Wallerstein, author of Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy, which was part of the writing Sardi reviewed while in her PhD program, hoping to use science to come to a conclusion about the procedure’s place in our culture. Instead of the rigorous, well-articulated studies that she was expecting, though, she found literature she saw as ethically fraught, poorly designed, and misrepresentative of the data.She mentioned a handful of sub-Saharan African studies from the 2000s, including the same Ugandan study that Dr. Tobian cited on our phone call, which claims that an adult circumcised male is less likely to contract HIV. The men in these studies were often also advised to use condoms and have sex with the same partner—behaviors that are also proven to reduce HIV transmission. Another study found that circumcising HIV-infected men didn’t reduce the disease’s spread over a two-year period, and instead might increase it if those men had sex too early post-surgery.“There’s a lot going on in these studies that is not talked about,” Sardi adds. “And I want to be really clear about this. I’m not sitting here trying to be a conspiracy theorist. It’s in these studies.”Speaking with Sardi, the peculiarity of the procedure dawned on me. For decades Americans have accepted its supposed health advantages, but there are very few other instances when surgery is used as a preventative measure.“Our first way to combat something should not be to remove a part of somebody’s body,” she says. “And if we do, then we should be consistent with that. Women are now at a 1 in 8 chance of developing breast cancer throughout their lives. That’s a pretty high amount. So should we remove breast buds at birth?”The phrase solution in search of a problem kept echoing in my mind. Circumcision had been performed on more than 80 percent of American men at its high point, according to some CDC researchers, despite being introduced to stop masturbation and cure insanity. Not only that, but Sayre’s peers at the time had also advocated for removing women’s healthy ovaries and the clitoris, based on similarly faulty explanations—and that hasn’t stuck around in the US.Within our collective reasoning in favor of circumcision I detected a deeply American dynamic; after all, what is a solution if not something you can sell? Necessary or unnecessary, everyone gets paid, and very few get sued.The more people I talked to, the clearer this disconnect between the US and its international counterparts became. “Suppose you are a cynical parent, and you say, I don’t trust the American Medical Academy,” Allan says. “If you look to Canadian pediatrics, the British, the Dutch, you’re going to come up with the answer of, no, don’t do it.”Allan’s mention of the Dutch is notable because the Royal Dutch Medical Association stated in 2010 that “circumcision is not justifiable” unless there’s a clear medical or therapeutic necessity, and that “insofar as there are medical benefits, such as a possibly reduced risk of HIV infection, it is reasonable to put off circumcision until the age at which such a risk is relevant and the boy himself can decide about the intervention.”This disagreement contrasts radically with the worldwide approach to vaccine recommendations, which, according to the University of Oxford’s Vaccine Group, is roughly the same across most developed countries. In fact, circumcision is one of the major aspects of neonatal health care in which the United States differs from its international counterparts. Even more curious: The AAP’s aforementioned 2012 statement on circumcision isn’t even, technically, a recommendation, it’s merely a presentation of the procedure’s benefits. And when the AAP initially released it, prominent clinicians and heads of medical societies in Europe, Canada, and Australia responded by criticizing the organization’s “cultural bias.”“Nothing like that’s ever happened before,” says Brian Earp, a bioethicist and philosopher who works as an associate professor at the National University of Singapore and is co-editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics. “Usually, the AAP comes out with a policy, and then most other pediatric societies around the world basically agree with it, or they might perform their own independent analysis, but you never see this kind of disagreement.” He pointed out that two contributors to the AAP’s 2012 circumcision statement distanced themselves from the central claim that the benefits outweighed the risk in a recent Journal of Medical Ethics article.Speaking with Earp, I wondered why Americans have such a commitment to circumcision when there’s a clear alternative: Let people choose when they’re old enough to do so, as the Royal Dutch Medical Association had suggested. Perhaps the problem with the choice that parents face isn’t that the procedure is divisive, or that the consequences are subjective, but that the decision lay in our hands at all?Earp credited it to inertia. When an estimated 80 percent of the men in your country are circumcised, it’s easier to try to think of reasons why you were right to do so than it is to say: Actually, you know what? That thing we did to everyone? Maybe we should reconsider? It had already become a part of the assembly-line nature of birth in America, a procedure often paid for by insurance and that earned providers money. Circumcision rates have started to decline in states in which Medicaid stopped covering it, a number that has now reached at least 16.It’s also hard to appreciate the foreskin’s value when you don’t actually have one. “Nobody on the AAP committee had a foreskin, most likely,” Earp says. “There’s no sense that there’s anything lost by removing it.”The only people who have a perspective on that are the few who have undergone adult circumcisions. I talked to one, a German man who got the procedure for medical reasons and asked to remain anonymous. After he healed, his quality of life improved. But he discovered that post-circumcision, masturbation was “completely different” and he needed to use lubrication for certain sex acts. “Parts of the experience are gone,” he says. Still, “people are horny. You figure it out.”There’s an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer delivers a baby boy in an elevator. Once it’s out, he declares, “It’s a dude! And he’s uncut. Very Euro!” The joke here is that uncircumcised penises are so unusual in America that even a newborn having one is notable. But what’s ironic is that default neonatal circumcision itself feels decidedly foreign to the typical American mindset. We’re the country of free speech and self-determination, but at least when it comes to penises, the call is most often made for us.By the end of my journey into the Heart of Circumcision, I was less worried about whether it was the “right” decision for my son and more concerned about how our society could untie the knot of complex issues at its core, in which two firmly entrenched camps were arguing over the right to make medical choices for a third. I also came away with even more empathy for parents, who are forced to navigate a treacherous landscape of contradictory information and hidden bias in order to best serve their children.At the very least, I no longer doubted my move to skip the procedure. One day, my son will deal with the baffling experience of having an adult body, and he’ll be able to make whatever decisions he wants with it, including, assuredly, neural implants and bionic T-shirt-cannon arms and whatever other wonders the future has in store for us. Who knows what guys will be doing with their penises then. I’m going to try not to think about it.And, by the way: the second baby? It’s a girl. Thank God.A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2026 issue of GQ with the title “To Cut or Not to Cut?”