...but he no longer wore the content, dreamy newborn expression he’d left with. Looking at photos of our first few days with our baby, I know exactly which ones were taken before and after his circumcision, and I regret consenting to it.
When it came to this baby, my decision was not about statistics or medical debates (or even ethical debates, for that matter), it was about what felt right, to me, as a mother who’d just given birth, whose maternal instinct had been allowed to flourish instead of being patronizingly tsk-tsk’d by a doctor who’d want me to believe that a little bit of sugar water could possibly mitigate the pain of genital mutilation. What felt right to me was not handing my baby over to join some kind of boy’s club, but instead holding him close between us and keeping him safe from harm. It was very simple, really.