I happened to have my newborn circumcised just last week. Meticulous research was conducted before the decision was made, as any rationalist would do for a surgery. My finding from medical studies (results have varied so take them as indicative ranges): 1) 5-10% of male have congenital conditions that for sure need circumcision, but identifiable only after puberty, 2) ~50% uncircumcised male encounters medical conditions that may or may not be relevant to foreskin, e.g. infection or cancer, evidence is not significant, 3) father with those 5-10% congenital conditions may increase son's similar conditions 2-3x, evidence is not significant.
However, I'm the unfortunate 5-10%. I'm not from a culture where circumcision is common or culturally required, but I had mine at 17 and suffered both physically and psychologically. He will suffer greatly too if he finds out those conditions later. After calculating the odds and going through details of the procedure with the pediatrician, we went through the surgery. My son is now fully recovered, much faster than me at 17, but I do believe he suffered from pain especially in the first 24h after anesthesia.
For the non-5-10% fathers without cultural considerations, it seems there are only weak and insignificant evidence so far for a circumcision, as was agreed by 2 pediatricians. All surgeries incur sufferings - instead of arguing on infant abuse, I believe better medical data is the way to justify newborns circumcisions or not in the future.
Bryan Caplan writes
Whether or not you agree with my conclusion, I think it’s hard to deny the following claim: Unless you have a good reason for circumcision, it is child abuse. Cutting off a baby’s healthy body parts might be justified in some situations, but justification is a must.
This is the worst argument in the world, and the essay doesn't get much better from there.
Cutting off a baby's arm is child abuse because it causes long term trauma and pain. Cutting off their foreskin does not. It might be bad, but you're going to have to work harder than that to prove it.
I live in a society where essentially every male is circumcised. Not only doesn't it bother us, we never stop to think about it. Our lives look exactly identical as they would if we weren't circumcised, and its impact on our lives is essentially zero.
Now there is some evidence that circumcision impacts enjoyment of sex. There's also some evidence that it reduces STDs and various cancers. I enjoy sex just fine, and plenty of Israeli's have STDs. You can do the numbers add them all up, and it's basically a wash. Circumcision doesn't really have much of an impact on life outcomes.[1]
Babies cry when they are circumcised. For about 5 minutes. They cry a lot less than they do when you don't feed them, but we don't call sleep training child abuse.
Of the things my parents did to me in the name of religion, I was far more impacted by them forcing me to go to Synagogue than by them circumcising me. But we recognise that it's better for society if parents have some ability to decide what their child does, even if you would disagree with their decisions.
Now I will grant the following: our society would be better off if we could keep making a party one week after a boy is born, but stop chopping their foreskin off. However we don't live in that society and if I were to change 100 things about our culture this wouldn't even be close to making the cut. See: every other essay on LessWrong.
Given that I do live in a culture where you won't be able to get married if you haven't been circumcised, going on a crusade to disallow parents from making that choice and forcing children to delay that decision till they're 18 would only split society apart, and cause a lot of unnecessary pain and trauma to religious 18 year olds. Circumcision is way more risky and painful the older you are.
Overall I think essays like Bryan's do far more harm then good. In fact I would say they're very much an infohazard, encouraging healthy normal people to think they've been abused as a child.
Actually botched circumcisions are incredibly rare. The numbers you'll see on this will likely be inflated, because they'll link to a one in a million scenario of someone's penus getting chopped off, and then conflate that with a 1% chance of complications, where complications include things like greater than expected bleeding.