“If an attempt is made to separate the prepuce from the glans at birth by running a probe around the potential preputial space, numerous raw bleeding areas are encountered where the connecting tissues have been torn. Healing then takes place by fibrosis, leaving an adherent foreskin .

This information is essential because frequently parents and doctors have believed that the infant’s foreskin should be forcefully retracted, either shortly after birth or during the first few months of his life before it has separated of its own accord. Sometimes new parents of intact sons have been instructed to retract and wash under their baby’s foreskin every day. In a society that is only familiar with circumcised penises, people have been led to believe that care of the intact penis is quite difficult and complicated, and therefore have proceeded to make it so.


Forceful retraction of the infant’s or young boy’s foreskin before it has loosened naturally is extremely painful to the child and can create future difficulties which would not have occurred had it been left alone. While innumerable parents of circumcised infants have expressed remorse over having allowed their babies to undergo the painful operation, parents of intact sons often express just as much anger and dismay because their child had his foreskin forcefully torn back from his glans. Since the infant’s foreskin is normally adherent to his glans, artificially breaking these adhesions literally involves tearing one layer of skin away from another. Some observers have believed that this step of the circumcision procedure appears to be more painful to the baby than the actual clamping and cutting. Since forceful retraction of the foreskin often is done to the baby more than once, the intact baby in our unenlightened society has frequently experienced much more pain and trauma to his penis than the circumcised baby!!


circumcisionthepainfuldilemma.…e-of-contents/chapter-17/