The Form of Money: The Modern Age: Circumcision Curbs STDs

Circumcision by David Gollaher, 2000, Excerpts

Researchers led by Edward O. Laumann, a University of Chicago sociologist, extracted data for the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey. This survey is a rich source of information about the health, attitudes, and sexual activities of Americans. The investigators found that a man’s circumcision status was not useful in predicting the likelihood of his having an STD.

In 1996, Stephen Moses, a Canadian AIDS researcher affiliated with Kenya’s University of Nairobi, shocked a conference of scientists by telling them that there was now a substantial body of evidence that male circumcision provided protection against HIV infection. Prevalent circumcision has not kept the

United States

from becoming the industrialized nation most afflicted by HIV.

A certain small percentage of men with foreskins will get disease of the foreskin, but you just can’t remove everybody’s. You can’t pull everybody’s teeth to avoid cavities, remove breast tissue from little girls so they won’t get breast cancer.