Joybell, things have changed. Most doctors who do circumcisions these days use a local anesthetic or some other method of pain control.

Personally I have mixed feelings about it, and I was very glad my daughter was a daughter so I didn't have to face that decision. (Since I'm Jewish, there would have been a very strong expectation--both from outside and from my own beliefs--that it would be done, but I also would have had strong reservations.) I was also glad that for most of my career as a general pediatrician I practiced in an area where the pediatricians did not do circumcisions...because I didn't like doing the procedure.

Basically, some form of ritual mutilation has been part of human culture for thousands and perhaps millions of years. In many cultures it's done at puberty as part of a rite of passage. Many anthropologists believe that the ritual represents a symbolic death and rebirth. (Read the book "Transitions" by William Bridges for a helpful discussion.) In other cultures, the mutilation, without the ritual, is done as a personal or fashion statement...witness all the tattoos and piercings that are currently so popular among young (and not so young) people these days--or, if you prefer, try to find a pair of clip-on earrings in a jewelry store.

Circumcision is generally considered not to be medically necessary. On the other hand, it clearly does protect against urinary tract infection in infant boys, which is much less common than in girls. That can lead to kidney failure or death if not treated adequately, and that's not trivial, though I'm not sure it's enough of a justification for the procedure. Also, I've treated more than a few uncircumcised boys for infections caused by lack of careful hygiene. Those problems don't exist in circumcised boys. On the other hand, we don't pull out everybody's teeth because some people get bad tooth decay.

An interesting sidelight is that when doctors do circumcisions, it's sometimes obstetricians and sometimes pediatricians. Which one does it depends completely on the tradition in the local community. The fact that obstetricians sometimes do this surgical procedure on babies, when they don't provide any other care to the baby, is a throwback to the old days when the newborn nursery was considered part of the obstetric service, and the mother and baby were both the obstetrician's patients until they went home.

Whether or not babies are circumcised mostly depends on the history and culture of a particular community. I've been in places where nearly all the boy babies were circumcised, and in others where the percentage was much lower. The numbers also change over time, as "what everybody does" goes in and out of fashion.

Aloha,
Mark