"Its cleaner." "Babies don't feel pain." "Its just a piece of skin."... These words make up a blind fold that keep us from seeking the truth.
I was sixteen when i gave birth to my son, 7 pounds 3 ounces and 21 1/2 inches of pure perfectness. As i wiped the tear of joy from my eyes and touched his tiny feet i knew that i would never let anyone harm him, little did i know the same people i trusted with him would be the ones to inflict the most excruciating pain his little body will ever feel... The first night in the hospital was rough, lots yawning, visitors, and of course diaper changes. Did i have trouble changing my uncircumcised babies diaper?, no there was no pushing skin back and scrubbing just wipe and your done. So why is it that in less than twenty four hours i handed my perfect baby off to complete strangers to have them remove his foreskin, well that takes us back to the first few sentences in this blog... So here i am, handing my child to these people with this disgusting feeling in my gut and i cried, but babies don't feel pain right? so why was i crying! I guess my motherly instincts were screaming at my to stop them, to run after them and take my baby back but i didn't. I let these people take my baby from my warm loving arms and i didn't even know anything about this procedure!
"We will have him back in 30 minutes." So there I sat staring at the clock trying not to imagine what was happening to my baby at that very moment. 10 minutes.....20 minutes.....30 minutes.....1 hour.... Where is my baby at! Finally after over an hour he is brought back to me. His eyes are red and puffy, you could tell he had been crying. I was then shown how to change his diaper and care for his newly cut penis. Red, sore, and raw i had to apply a large amount of ointment to it at each diaper change while he screamed in pain.
Excuse me while i stop for a moment and wipe the tear away the pain and regret of what i did to him is still very strong.
Moving on. Its the first night home and hes been asleep since they brought him back to me in the hospital. I'm worried because its been almost nine hours and nothing will wake him to eat, at the time I figured he was tired but now I realize he was in shock. Hes now 1 week old and hes healed already, so I go on with our lives enjoying my newborn. At his 2 month check up he was as happy as can be. Laying on the table kicking his legs and cooing away. When the doctor came in he started with his routine check up. Checked his heart beat, felt around his stomach and abdomen then opened his diaper to check how his circumcision had healed. "this is going to hurt" were the last words I heard his doctor say before i heard a blood curdling scream come from my babies lungs and when I look down all I see is blood. Wondering what happened? Aiden has a large adhesion connecting the shaft skin to the head of his penis and it had completely healed that way so the doctor tore it apart... My son is screaming like I have never heard his scream before and i'm just crying because at this point I still want told what had happened. The doctor informs me that he cant stop the bleeding so he gets out this thing that looks like a giant match and presses it to the area that is bleeding and tells me that he is cauterizing(burning) the area to stop the bleeding. This of course makes my poor baby scream more and all I want to do is pick him up and make it better. I have now been given the instruction to push back the shaft skin after every diaper change until hes 2... but wait a second i thought that with a circumcised penis that its unnecessary, guess i was wrong.
I don't want to keep you here all day but to sum it all up my son suffered recurrent adhesion and has lots of thick scaring and is likely to need corrective surgery when he is older. There isn't a day that goes by that my heart doesn't ache from what i allowed done to him. Ill be honest, every time I hear that someone has chosen to keep their baby whole i feel a big of "envy" towards them, why couldn't i have left him whole, why didn't i protect my baby boy! Sometimes i wish that I would get pregnant again just so I could have a second chance to do right and ease some of my pain. In the end whats done is done but the pain is here forever.
Some facts about circumcision you probably don't know:
- Approx:120 baby boys dies each year due to circumcision complications in the united states.
- The male foreskin has more concentrated, specialized nerves than anywhere else in the human body.
- The foreskin keeps bacteria from entering the urinary tract.
- There is no retracting, the foreskin is fused the the head of the penis until later years ( puberty)
- The foreskin has 25,000 nerves and the clitoral hood(foreskin of a female) has 8,000
- 70% of babies born today go home ans stay whole(intact)
- Circumcised men are more likely to use lubricant in their sex lives.
- the foreskin acts as a lubricant because of the motion during sex.
- 10 out of 10 babies appose circumcision!
- Anesthetic has been proven to not work 100% during a circumcision and sometimes not at all leaving the baby feeling everything.
- most doctors don't use any sort of numbing/ nerve block
- a babies brain changes during a circumcision and never goes back.
- babies only have to lose 1 ounce of blood to hemerage and 3 ounces to die.
Please Do your research before having this procedure done to your son...
