I’m not very much in favor of circumcision, but my husband wants our son to look like him. What do you suggest that I tell him?
“Your question is a familiar one, somewhat specific to women in North America because they have a medical option about the care of their baby. Expectant mothers have protective instincts and know that cutting off any part of their normal, healthy baby is neither normal nor healthy. Your job, now, is to educate your husband. This is no easy feat. In order for your husband to understand your protective instincts and to acknowledge circumcision as a primal wound that interferes with maternal/infant bonding, disturbs breastfeeding, and undermines the baby’s first developmental task of establishing trust, he’s going to have to come to terms with what happened to him when he was too little to resist or escape a painful surgery. It’s not easy for any man to recognize the harm that was done to him — 20- to 40,000 specialized erogenous nerve endings amputated from his organ of power, pleasure, and procreation! In other societies, the phallus is revered, as in the fertility rituals upheld in Japan. Here, however, we do something different — tragically different — to the phallus, and the male to whom it is attached. ”
Marilyn Milos, RN
Mothering dot com ask the experts Marilyn Milos