News

Laura MacDonald
(This page does not contain medical advice)

117 American boys die each year from forced circumcision

Tuesday 27th April 2010
A study published this week in Thymos: Journal of Boyhood Studies has shown that 117 American babies die each year from complications of non therapeutic circumcision surgery.

The research collected information from hospital and government sources on neonatal deaths (those which occurred in the first 28 days of life) and found that infant circumcision is responsible for one in every 77 neonatal deaths. It also concluded that more babies die each year from circumcision than from sudden infant death syndrome (known as SIDS). Causes of death post circumcision included stroke, haemorrhage and infection.

The report calls these deaths, "an unrecognized sacrifice of innocents" and comments on the reasons why the data on circumcision mortality is difficult to obtain (previous attempts to estimate circumcision deaths in the US have varied wildly - from 2 per annum to 230).

Information on deaths occurring in Britain is also rather under-reported. One example is the 20 day old boy who died on 27th September 2006 after being circumcised in Walsall by Dr Muhammad Siddiq - then Head of the Islamic Medical Association. Dr Siddiq was subsequently suspended by the General Medical Council (GMC) for a range of misconduct issues including refusing to suspend circumcision surgery and to co-operate with a review of his practice, however the GMC was at pains to point out that they did not criticise Dr Siddiq's techniques or consider him responsible for the death in any way. The minutes of Dr Siddiq's Fitness to Practice panel hearing do however state that the circumcision wound was found to be the likely portal of entry for the fatal infection. This entirely avoidable death of a child is described as, "simply an unfortunate consequence of the procedure"; and newspaper coverage such as this Daily Mail piece - brushed over it, highlighting instead the issue of a homophobic letter sent by the GP to Pulse magazine.

Just a few months after this unnamed baby died from his genital cutting, a nine week old baby named Celian Noumbiwe bled to death after being circumcised by a GP in Reading. This death was mentioned in only one national newspaper, and this made no commentary on the ethics of subjecting a child to the dangerous excision of this highly sensitive and blood rich part of his genitalia...

In subsequent correspondence with the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) about why the Government fails to take the same strong stance against the forced circumcision of males as it does on the forced circumcision of females, the MoJ told NORM-UK that female circumcision is much more dangerous ....because it could cause immediate death from haemorrhage and infection.

No mention was made of the deaths of the boys above, nor any of the other British boys who have died in the last 20 years as a result of circumcision.