The book The Joy of Uncircumcising! by Jim Bigelow contains an excellent discussion of circumcision (and how to restore the foreskin - who knew?! Although you cannot restore the removed extra-rich nerve tissue). I've read the book and I recommend it.

A few items from the book and elsewhere:
*If circumcision must be done to save males from penile cancer (the explanation most often offered favoring circumcision), then why didn't the world suffer a blight of penile cancer before the 1920s when the practice became so prevalent in (principally) the United Staes?

*As most of europe, south america, the middle east and the asia-pacific region leave the penises of their male babies intact, why don't those same parts of the world suffer epidemics of penile cancer?

*The Circumstraint™ is manufactured by Olympic Medical in Washington state. This is essentially a board that the baby boy's body is strapped down to for restraining him while surgery is performed on his penis. This board is a similar but smaller version of what Timothy McVeigh was strapped to at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana when drugs were injected into him.

*Removed foreskins are a profit-making and tax-generating segment of the American economy:
A. Since the 1980s, many hospitals have been supplying baby foreskins to private bio-research laboratories and pharmaceutical companies who require human tissue as research material. Companies that have been, or are, in the business include include Advanced Tissue Sciences, Organogenesis and BioSurface Technology.
B. On average, a doctor (excluding nurse, facility, etc.), earns about US $125.00 per circumcision.

*Parents and guardians are facing increasingly troublesome consequences when faced with the decision to circumcise male children in their care. Lawsuits are increasingly being brought by those that have been circumcised against doctors, hospitals and parents. Some matters continue to be litigated while others have been settled.

*Some federal and state government agencies in the U.S. have begun to curtail or completely end their payment for the procedure because the evidence of its efficacy continues to be examined and reputiated. In 1999, Medicaid funded a total of 310,403 circumcisions with a total cost to the US taxpayer of approximately $35 million.

*Dr. Dean Edell has taken an interesting approach to the issue of circumcision by encouraging parents to:
A. Learn about the subject from more sources than just the family doctor.
B. Watch a videotape of the complete circumcision procedure and decide for themselves whether or not they are comfortable with forcing the newborn boy in their care to go through the same procedure.

Finally, to my way of thinking, it seems odd that human beings would find the need to "fix" something about a perfectly healthy baby boy that has just been born. Nature needs to be "fixed"?!

For more information, in addition to the book above, the web site http://www.infocirc.org is an option.