Thanks for reviving this thread, Exy, as I've revised my opinion on the issue.
Having read more and seriously thought about having children, it isn't at the bottom of the list. Just because we've been socialized to see it as normal in this country doesn't make it normal. It's still an unnecessary surgery on your child's genitals. It's still being done for dubious reasons. Any health benefits (except perhaps from a minuscule effect on a rare type of cancer) that it provides are less than is provided by hygiene and condoms. And some of the reasoning offered is ridiculous:
From http://www.fhi.org/en/RH/Pubs/Networ...curcumsion.htmSome observers also point out that variation in circumcision practices may help explain why HIV rates in countries or regions differ. In areas where circumcision is common, HIV infection rates tend to be low. In North America, where about 80 percent of men are circumcised, only a fraction of 1 percent of the population is HIV-positive. In western Africa, another area where circumcision is widely practiced, rates of HIV infection among those ages 15 to 49 are just 1 percent to 5 percent. But in eastern and southern Africa, where typically fewer than 20 percent of men are circumcised, rates of HIV infection range from 15 percent to 25 percent.
That sounds pretty good for North America until you consider that in western Europe, the country with the highest percentage of the population that is HIV positive as of 2007--Switzerland--had a rate of 0.6%. Finland, Germany, Malta, Norway, and Sweden all have a rate of 0.1%, the same as Israel. I don't have circumcision stats on Malta, but for the rest they all have a circumcision rate of under 20% (similar to eastern and southern Africa). Israel's circumcision rate is obviously high, at nearly 100%, but their HIV rates are the same as in all those countries where they aren't circumcising routinely.
And what's the specific number for the USA's HIV rate? 0.47% So in western Europe we're looking at Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the UK as all having lower HIV rates than the US. Yep, circumcision is clearly doing us some good there.
As far as non-religious circumcision goes, it's a practice that was begun and when its reasoning was found to be faulty a new set of rationalizations was looked for. That's not medicine or science. That's superstition.