Penile adhesions, also called skin bridges, are a common circumcision complication. Photo credit: www.flickr.com
My genitals hurt. My brain hurts. My heart hurts. For the past few weeks I’ve been researching the nitty gritty infant male circumcision. Less than two months ago, a 22-day-old Ontario infant died from bleeding due to a circumcision his parents claim they never wanted in the first place.
Then there’s this jury verdict: over $1.3 million to an Illinois boy whose circumcision was so botched that doctors had to surgically reattach his penis.
And the medical miracle of a successful penis transplant described in this April 2015 Washington Post article: A penis from a dead man was successfully attached to a young South African who lost his own penis in a botched circumcision.
Doctors are celebrating?
But the part about the young man losing his penis is the part of this story that stays with me.
We’re told that severe complications from circumcision are “rare.” Yet the reported rates of acute complications from circumcision are 1 in 500, which does not seem rare at all.
Then there are the COMMON complications from infant circumcision that your doctor may not have mentioned.
Penile adhesions, a common complication from circumcision
Penile adhesions—also known as skin bridges—are considered a “common complication” after circumcision.
The skin left over from the circumcision adheres to the head of the penis, which can cause pain and bleeding when a baby has an erection.
Photo credit: Circwatch.org
This common complication can create lifelong problems for boys and young men.
Penile adhesions cause self-esteem issues
“I’m an adult male of 25 with a skin adhesion,” writes an anonymous reader in a comment on a BabyCenter discussion about what do to about infant penile adhesions.
I would just like to tell all you parents who are struggling with this to please continue your efforts in correcting it! I can’t even tell you how conflicted I am as an adult with this thing. When I realized as a teenager that my penile adhesion was something unnatural, I was quite embarrassed, and even angry. I had absolutely no one to turn to. I couldn’t confront my parents about it. Too awkward, asking for help to correct an issue with my penis that THEY CAUSED. Fix it before your sons become more cognizant and understand what is happening, please. All that’s left for me now is surgery. Not fun. To be fair, I do have a normal sex life and my adhesion was not bad enough to cause any lasting problems, but it does cause some self-esteem issues, and from what I’ve read, these CAN cause worse problems if the adhesions are bad enough. I will NOT be circumcising any sons I have. Please end the FAD of circumcision. It’s cruel and unnecessary.”
That BabyCenter thread was started years ago but is still getting comments from parents whose baby boys are suffering from penile adhesions.
Harms of circumcision outweigh benefits
Journalists must remain impartial. Journalists do not begin articles by stating that their genitals hurt.
But I don’t honestly know how anyone can read the current scientific literature on circumcision complications or that young man’s words of anger and regret without wincing.
The harms of circumcision vastly outweigh the benefits.
This practice, routinely done to infant boys without their consent, needs to come to an end.
Related articles:
Circumcision Pros and Cons: One Mom’s Regret
To Circumcise or Not to Circumcise?
12 Reasons the AAP is Right and You Should Circumcise Your Son
Published: December 14, 2015
Updated: January 27, 2021
This thing happens everywhere, I’m Mexican, where circumcision usually is performed when the boy is 4-5 years old and ok tell you, is the same barbaric procedure with the same complications, the only difference is the total anesthesia, but as the pediatricians know, medicate a child is more complicated than do it to an adult, in consequence, thereare few cases when the boy wakes up in the middle of the amputation, can you imagine that? And you know what, they actually can remember.
If you love your son, let him choose, don’t pull back HIS foreskin either, is not gonna be infected, research, take care. Please, not give him a reason to mistrust you in the future, respect that future man, respect your son’s body.
To Adam – I thought that Mexico/Mexicans didn’t circumcise their sons! This is very sad to hear.
Thank you. I became very aware of this issue when an ex boyfriend used to bleed during sex. I wasnt sure if it was a too tight cut – he had zero movement on the shaft and scrotal hair more than halfway up it – or if it was adhesions. What I do know is that sex was a huge issue for us. What skin he did have left had very little sensation so it took forever and sometimes he would stop because it tore and he was in pain. Yeah – way to make sex safer!
Circumcision is so wrong, so brutal, so stupid, so cruel.
In the USA and Canada, there is no honest counting of the botched and lethal outcomes. Hence we have no idea if infant circumcision is safe. Reported complication rates focus only on complications brought to the attention of the same hospital where the circumcision was performed, within 90 days of the date when the RIC was done. There has never been a study of what North American pediatric urologists observe. Many complications of infant circumcision do not become apparent until after puberty, or after the onset of sexual activity, or even until middle age. There are no studies as yet of how RIC can affect the quality of normal adult marital sex.
Thank you for this article. All people need to know how severely disfiguring and harmful (physically and psychologically) genital mutilation of children is. Exposing the lies and myths of “circumcision” will end this atrocious child abuse.
All children deserve the right to keep their genitals as God/nature made them. No adult should be deciding what or how their genitals should look or work, they have the right to bodily autonomy and can make decisions themselves on what to do with their bodies and future sexual lives! As an American RN and Mother to an intact son, sister to an intact brother and daughter of an intact Father, I speak for all men in America. Let the default be as they are born. It is unethical and a human rights violation to remove healthy, functional and erogenous tissue from their bodies before they can say no.
I presume this article was written before the study by Danish researcher Morten Frisch was published. His study of the medical records of over 300,000 Danish boys found that those circumcised at birth or soon after had a 46% higher incidence of Autism Spectrum Disorder. He sought correlation, not causation, but for years other studies of both animals and humans have established that pain early in life can permanently alter the brain’s responses to stress–a primary symptom of autism. As troubling as his findings has been the American medical establishment’s lack of response to Frisch’s findings. Neither the American Pediatric Association, the AMA, CDE, NIH, or any major organization has publicly commented, criticized, or promised further study. Why?
ABOUT HALF of adults cut in childhood have marked artifacts of circumcision that no cutter would brag about. (Fletcher 2010)
But ADHESIONS really means something else. This article is about SKIN BRIDGING.
“Adhesion” is when the circumcision scar binds with the underlying shaft tissue and immobilizes the skin tube. Cut guys have so little slack, many don’t realize the skin tube is normally VERY mobile. It slinks and glides to give the erection a frictionless massage.
Cut guys embarking on non-surgical foreskin restoration often discover adhesions that make the restoration process very difficult. It’s adding insult to injury that they have finally discovered what they were missing, found out about a way to make it better, and THEN to find out that NO, this means of improvement is maybe not going to work because child circumcision is so haphazard, and this one’s crappy than others.
Just say no. Informed adults can decide for themselves about cosmetic genital surgery.
It’s unfortunate that you would write this post with very little education and truth. Penial adhesions can occur with circumcised AND UNCIRCUMCISED penises! When a baby boy is born the foreskin is in most cases not retractable. There is no need to retract it but if issues arise with cleaning, leading to infection parents are often encouraged to gently move the foreskin, cleanse and then apply ointment. Adhesions are a normal occurrence,not caused by circumcision. The adult male who blames his parents is wrong to believe they are at fault.
Hey dumb dumb. The one he is referencing, occurs only in circumcised males. They skin FUSES to the head. You can’t release it like you can with an uncircumcised male. You have to get it surgically corrected. This is caused from the parents not properly caring for the cut after circumcision. There are so many that make the statement you are. They have no IDEA what they are talking about. This is not the same as what you’re saying.