Marilyn Milo’s life was permanently changed when as a nursing student she witnessed her first circumcision. On the fateful day, she joined her fellow nursing students in the hospital nursery where they found a baby strapped spread-eagle to a plastic board on a counter top across the room. He was struggling against his restrains – tugging, whimpering, and then crying helplessly. Her natural instinct was to comfort the child. When the surgeon arrived, he suggested she put her finger into the baby’s mouth to pacify him. But nothing had prepared her for what happened next.

“The silence was soon broken by a piercing scream – the baby’s reaction to having his foreskin pinched and crushed as the doctor attached the clamp to his penis. The shriek intensified when the doctor inserted an instrument between the foreskin and the glans [head of the penis], tearing the two structures apart. [They are normally attached to each other during infancy so the foreskin can protect the sensitive glans from urine and feces]. The baby started shaking his head back and forth – the only part of his body free to move – as the doctor used another clamp to crush the foreskin lengthwise, which he then cut. The baby began to gasp and choke, breathless for his shrill continuous screams. My bottom lip began to quiver, tears filled my eyes and spilled over. I found my own sobs difficult to contain. During the next stage of the surgery, the doctor crushed the foreskin against the circumcision instrument and then, finally, amputated it. The baby was limp, exhausted, spent.”

Milo does not view hers as a protest movement. “I’d like to make the point that we are not about “protest” as much as we are about human rights and truth. The demonstrations were a way to bring attention to the issue when the media were reluctant to cover this taboo subject. The history of circumcision in the West is not about differences or opinion. It is about the infiltration of genital mutilation of infants and children into Western medicine. I don’t deny I am passionate about the issue, and it is because I was mother first, before I saw a circumcision as a nursing student. It’s been twenty years that I’ve been living with the screams of the baby in my ears – a sound I have never heard come out of the mouth of a human being, except during circumcision [and I have four children!]. I am as chilled and disturbed by it today as I was twenty years ago, and I know that this is consistent with post traumatic stress.”

Pain of Circumcision

According to a popular consumer medical guide published during the 1970s, infants naturally protest any prodding or restraint. “Although the baby may scream and kick during the procedure, this seems to be more a reaction to being bundled to the circumcision board than the actual pain. Many babies fall asleep during the process, especially that part that localizes pain, circumcision done at this age the first few days after birth is probably the best time.”

Pediatricians who studied infant pain produced unsettling descriptions of babies trembling, becoming plethoric, dusky, and mildly cyanotic because of their wailing, and on occasion, vomiting and breathing irregularly. The operation triggered significant physiological changes: in breathing, crying, heart rate, and cortisol levels. Immediately after the operation, babies demonstrated classic responses to intense stress: their appetites deteriorated and they became apathetic, disinclined to interact with their mothers or nurses. In some instances, circumcised infants needed to be fed infant formula, a finding that bothered some physicians, because early feeding with formula tends to reduce the duration of maternal breast-feeding.

In 1994, researchers at Rochester GeneralHospital in upstate New York, led by Cynthia R. Howard, concluded that circumcision causes severe and persistent pain, and that Tylenol had no effect on pain response during or immediately after the operation, though it did provide some benefit after six hours. The most likely explanation, they reasoned, was the circumcision pain was simply too severe to be relieved by a mild analgesic.

Since most circumcisions are done without anesthetic, most boys suffer acute pain. Whether or not this pain makes a lasting impression – influencing the child’s future development – has been hotly debated.

Psychological Impact

As a Jew, Freud himself had been circumcised as an infant, though he subsequently left religious faith far behind. What intrigued him were connections between cutting the penis and his burgeoning theory of sexuality, including the relationship between childhood trauma and later neurosis. Circumcision is perceived by the child as an aggressive attack on his body, which damages, mutilates and some cases totally destroys him.

The most ambitious attempt to find a transcendent psychological basis for circumcision was a treatise written in the early 1950s by the distinguished, and later notorious, psychotherapist Bruno Bettelheim, a self-styled Freudian who would become world famous for his interpretations of fairy tales and myths. “Whatever the origin and meaning of circumcision may be, it must originate in deep human needs, since it seems to have sprung up independently among many peoples, although in different forms.” Moreover, even in places where the practice appears to have spread by diffusion, he reasonably noted, people would not lightly take up such a radical and risky operation. It was “a strange mutilation,” all the stranger for being “found among the most primitive and the most highly civilized people.” Thus, he concluded, circumcision “must reflect profound needs.”

Circumcision: The Hidden Trauma by Ronald Goldman. Arguing that the violence of the operation disrupts the mother-son bond shortly after birth, Goldman asserts that American men on a massive scale are afflicted by post-traumatic disorder. The lingering aftershocks of circumcision, he writes, include low self-esteem, avoidance of intimacy in male-female relationships, disregard for women’s sexuality, and most alarming, a pandemic of violence in America’s high rates of assault, rape, and murder. Both rape and circumcision involve sexual organs and violence. Rape perpetrators’ motivations and excessive, inappropriate anger reflect feelings of having been victimized themselves. It can be argued that in a broader sense, circumcision [what’s done to children] could be considered to be a form of rape [they will do to society].

The Painful Dilemma by Rosemary Romberg [1985], nurse and alternative-child-rearing advocate, concentrates on the violence circumcision visits on male infants and its possible psychological aftershocks which she strongly believes contributes to an increasingly violent American society.