Although they make much of the purported medical bene-
fits, these are insufficient to discharge the burden of proof
that must ultimately rest on the shoulders of those who
would take a knife to a newborn boy’s genitals.

A final question that might be posed to the authors:
Why it is so important that circumcision be carried out in
infancy or early childhood? Apart from the argument that
the medical benefits would not be immediately attainable
(convincingly laid to rest by a group of European paedia-
tricians in their response to the latest American Academy
of Pediatrics policy statement on NMC: Frisch et al. 2013),
there is another answer to this question, which is seldom if
ever stated explicitly by circumcision proponents. If the
practice were not imposed upon defenseless children, its
continuity might be threatened.

A scenario in which wide-
spread circumcision essentially dies out and thereafter
proves difficult—if not impossible—to revive in a modern
context is what apologists of religious circumcision seem
to fear, and not without justification. Fear of change (with-
out being able to show why that change is for the worse),
however, is no more a moral argument than blind defer-
ence to tradition or religious injunctions.