"Circumcision Can Kill You, But Measles is No Big Deal!"

Heard anything like this in your local "natural parenting" groups? It's not usually stated this directly, but let's take a look at the facts. A good many of us crunchy mamas eschew circumcision because there isn't medical evidence of its necessity, and because circumcision can carry some risks. Granted, these risks are low-- but they're there.

Anywhere from one in two hundred to one in five hundred babies will suffer a complication from circumcision. Almost all of these are mild, like bruising, bleeding, or loss of small areas of skin. Very rarely, they can cause serious infections, or-- most horrifically-- the total loss of the penis. And, as many an intactivist has pointed out, there are even a few cases of babies dying from complications of circumcision.

The number of babies who die from circumcision is extremely low. Two studies, one of 500,000 babies in New York City and one of 175,000 babies in U.S. Army hospitals, found zero deaths related to circumcision. That means that out of 675,000 babies, none-- not one-- died from circumcision.

A lot of us don't really care how low these numbers are. Even one death in a million is a risk we'd rather not take unless it's absolutely medically necessary-- right?

That reasoning would be fine enough if moms applied it across the board, but unfortunately, it seems like most of them don't. For example, in my local crunchy group today, moms were working hard at organizing a local measles party, though they were upset by the fact that no one in the area had yet caught measles. When I swung into the thread to point out that measles isn't a mild condition-- that it can be fatal-- my "fearmongering" was immediately dismissed because measles only has a death rate of about one in a thousand.

Hold up-- so are we, or are we not, willing to take precautions to protect our children even when the odds of them dying are low? If we want to protect our sons from the one-in-a-million chance that they could die of a circumcision, why aren't we willing to protect them from the one-in-a-thousand chance of dying from measles? The game of numbers can't matter only when it fits our biases.

Measles can kill. It probably won't kill your kid, but the odds of him dying of measles are much higher than the odds of him dying of many other things that we earth-mamas prefer to avoid-- like circumcision, medically unnecessary medication, cigarette smoke around kids, and a five-mile ride without an appropriate car seat.

Care about your kids enough to protect them from one-in-a-million? Great.

Then care about them enough to protect them from one-in-a-thousand.

VACCINATE FOR MEASLES.