Who Decides for Children? Debating Parental Purview by Contesting Male Circumcision

• In Event: 30866 - Culture and Meaning in Health and Medicine

Abstract

This paper draws on archival, interview, and participant observation data to examine the ongoing, heated debate over whether parents should be allowed to choose circumcision for their sons. I focus on the United States and Anglophone Canada, two of the only countries in which foreskin removal was ever adopted as a prophylactic medical practice. Well into the twentieth century, physicians expected patients to follow their orders; North American hospitals often circumcised infant boys without consulting their parents. By the 1960s, doctors began (sometimes grudgingly) involving patients, or their parents, in decision-making. But new tensions emerged, due in part to new understandings of youth as deserving more say over their lives. Today’s battle concerns whether parents should ever be allowed to choose routine circumcision for their sons, or whether the decision should wait until boys can choose. My analysis contributes to knowledge about medical controversy and symbolic politics, illuminating how societies address the possibility that parents and children may have different best interests (as when youth want to receive vaccinations or birth control against their parents' wishes).

Author

• Laura M. Carpenter, Vanderbilt University