When is the right time to circumcise?

Answer 1

The eighth day of the boy's life (Genesis ch.17), if he is healthy enough.

Answer 2:There is no right time for the cutting of any childs genitals. The human body is the product of many many years of evolution and is equiped at bith with a prepuce that is stul fised to the Glans penis, The freskin protects the Glans penis from all kinds of harm as it does in the case of all mamals. No blood sacrifice is timely and the damaging of a child by a minor religion is certainly no guide. Go to the related link below (Circumcision: A Source of Jewish Pain byRonald Goldman) for a cleaser idea on this subject. Rebuttal:No one claims that Judaism is a minor religion. It is the seed for Christianity and has influenced Islam as well as the Western world.

Circumcision is accepted by hundreds of millions of modern Americans, not only Jews and Muslims.

Answer 3:Answer 2 is non-traditional. Circumcision of male babies is a fundamental part of Judaism which has been kept, unchanged, for over 3700 years in keeping with God's explicit command to Abraham. Jews have sacrificed their life in times of persecution, in order to avoid abandoning this command. Tens of thousands of grown men, Jews who emigrated from the former Soviet Union, have askedto be circumcised. This is one of the few Torah-commands which even completely non-religious Jews make sure to keep.

The right time is as stated in Answer 1.

As an operation, circumcision has an extremely small complication rate. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine (1990) reported a complication rate of 0.19 percent when circumcision is performed by a physician. When performed by a Jewish mohel, the rate falls to about 1 in 1000. When a complication occurs, it is usually excessive bleeding, which is easily correctable. No other surgical procedure can boast such figures for complication-free operations.

One reason why there are so few complications involving bleeding may be that the major clotting agents, prothrombin and vitamin K, do not reach peak levels in the blood until the eighth day of life. Prothrombin levels are normal at birth, drop to very low levels in the next few days, and return to normal at the end of the first week. One study showed that by the eighth day, prothrombin levels reach 110 percent of normal. In the words of Dr. Armand J. Quick, author of several works on the control of bleeding, "It hardly seems accidental that the rite of circumcision was postponed until the eighth day by the Mosaic law."

Circumcision has been known to offer virtually complete protection from penile cancer. According to a recent review article in the New England Journal of Medicine, none of the over 1,600 persons studied with this cancer had been circumcised in infancy. In the words of researchers Cochen and McCurdy, the incidence of penile cancer in the U.S. is "essentially zero" among circumcised men.

Also, research at Johns Hopkins University Medical School in Baltimore have shown that circumcised men are six to eight times less likely to become infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Researchers believe that protection is due to the removal of the foreskin, which contains cells that have HIV receptors which scientists suspect are the primary entry point for the HIV virus. (Reuters, March 25, 2004)

Several studies reported that circumcised boys were between 10-to-39 times less likely to develop urinary tract infections during infancy than uncircumcised boys. In addition, circumcision protects against bacterial, fungal, and parasitic infections and a variety of other conditions related to hygiene. During the trench warfare of World War 1, American physicians noticed that uncircumcised solders were getting infections while Jews were not. As a result, doctors circumcised American solders.

The extremely low rate of Cervical cancer in Jewish women (9-to-22 times less than among non-Jewish women) is thought to be related to the practice of circumcision.

As a result of studies like these, a number of prestigious medical organizations have recognized the benefits of circumcision, and the California Medical Association has endorsed circumcision as an "effective public health measure."

Still, it must be borne in mind that Jews circumcise because of God's command. The above health considerations are merely side-benefits.