San Francisco activists say they have gathered enough signatures to earn their circumcision-banning proposal a spot on the city's November ballot. "It's excruciatingly painful and permanently damaging surgery that's forced on men when they're at their weakest and most vulnerable," Lloyd Schofeld, a proponent of the ban, told Reuters. If the measure is approved, anyone who performs the procedure on a boy under age 18 would face up to a $1,000 fine or a year of jail time. The effort has renewed a debate among doctors and parents about whether there are health benefits to snipping the foreskin off the penis of a newborn boy. Aren't there medical reasons to keep circumcision legal?
Yes, circumcision can prevent disease: Researchers have shown time and again that circumcision can have sexual health benefits, says Michelle Bryner at Live Science. "Three studies published in 2009 in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews revealed that circumcised men were 54 percent less likely to get HIV than uncircumcised men." There's also some evidence that it can reduce the risk of transferring HIV from a man to a woman.
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