An article in the October 2025 issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics by researcher Max Buckler, titled “As controversies mount, circumcision policies need a rethink,” has reignited debate about the ethical and scientific foundations of American circumcision policy. The unprecedented article exposes the cultural, personal, and political factors behind the U.S. medical establishment’s official position on infant circumcision, revealing that even the experts who helped write the policy now question its validity.

Behind the Policy: Cultural or Science?

Buckler’s investigation draws on rare interviews with two members of the 2012 Circumcision Task Force of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP), which was responsible for the widely cited statement claiming that “health benefits outweigh the risks.” Despite the 2017 expiration of that policy without it being reaffirmed, it continues to influence pediatric practice and parental decision-making.

Bioethicist Douglas Diekema, M.D., MPH and pediatric urologist Andrew Freedman, M.D. acknowledged that the task force’s recommendation was not entirely scientific. Diekema admitted, “When you look at all the data, I don’t think you can honestly say in a recommendation that the benefits outweigh the risks.” He further noted that “pediatricians should not be recommending it…. To the parent who is on the fence, I would say they are probably better off not doing the procedure.”

Freedman, who represented pediatric urology on the task force, went further. He described the “benefits outweigh the risks” phrasing as a compromise, intended to satisfy members with divergent cultural and ethical views. “It is a non-therapeutic procedure,” he said. “If it can be called preventive medicine, it’s at the very weakest level…. There is nothing wrong with the uncircumcised penis; you cannot recommend circumcision based on medical benefit alone.”

Freedman concluded “Maybe the AAP should get out of the [circumcision] business, since it’s not really a medical practice. It’s only a medical procedure in the sense that medical professionals are performing it.”

A Call for Transparency and Ethical Clarity

Buckler’s analysis argues that such admissions expose a deeper ethical problem: public health recommendations should rest on transparent scientific and ethical reasoning, not on cultural accommodation or parental preference. Parental desires do not constitute patient assent by the person (the child) who must endure the lifelong consequences of this irreversible genital reduction surgery. Blurred lines between medical advice and social reassurance, Buckler contends, undermine public trust in health authorities like the AAP, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the American Medical Association (AMA), and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Bodily integrity advocates, such as Tim Hammond, Executive Director of the Genital Autonomy Legal Defense and Education Fund (GALDEF), applauded Buckler’s article. GALDEF is a non-profit organization working with attorneys and plaintiffs to create impact litigation in the U.S. to advance the right to bodily integrity and genital autonomy for all children, regardless of sex. Hammond emphasized “From an ethical and legal perspective, medically unnecessary surgery, even when performed to the standard of care and without immediate complications, still constitutes harm. It violates physicians’ duties under the Hippocratic Oath they take to ‘Do No Harm’.”

He added, “Physicians do not take an oath to act as the agents of social or cultural customs. It’s time for ethical physicians to find the courage to refuse to perform these genital surgeries and to let the law deal with the remaining physicians who insist on harming children in this way.”

A Call for National Introspection and Reassessment

Buckler’s article should prompt medical professionals, parents and the media to ask: Why do we persist in treating newborn male circumcision as a medical issue rather than recognizing it as a social custom that inflicts serious harm and violates the human rights of the child? According to Buckler, “National medical bodies must disentangle medical rationales from cultural accommodation.”

Creating a Future that Respects Bodily Autonomy

Buckler has exposed a tipping point in the national debate over newborn circumcision, where even its previous defenders are now questioning the medical orthodoxy underpinning it. He has highlighted the need to define better boundaries between science and social customs, for consistent ethical positions between sexes, and for universal respect for bodily autonomy. GALDEF expects that Buckler’s article will mark the start of a pivotal era of increased respect for the legal and human rights of children, one in which cultural norms and social customs no longer have a place in the practice of medicine.