These Jewish Doctors Tried to Stop America’s Circumcision Train

Parenthood doesn’t come with an instruction manual, but it does come with a consent form. Usually within 24 hours.

CULTURE

This is the quick story of how routine circumcision became entrenched as America’s most common surgery. The twist? A surprising number of Jewish physicians have spent centuries trying to discourage the practice.

From Moral Panic to Hospital Habit

A century ago, circumcision wasn’t something most American parents thought about. It was mainly a Jewish religious rite—and a rare medical procedure. Even for Jews, it wasn’t done for health reasons. Then along came early “health reformers” like Dr. John Harvey Kellogg—the cornflake guy and a devout Christian—who claimed circumcision could cure everything from “self-abuse” (Victorian code for masturbation) to insanity.

That mix of guilt, germs, and moral panic worked like a charm. By the 1920s, doctors were offering circumcision as a quick fix for nearly any boyhood behavior they didn’t like. Hospitals saw an opportunity too: it took five minutes, used minimal supplies, and parents almost never objected. For a couple of bucks, everyone felt virtuous—and a new medical custom was born.

The Patriotic Snip

World War II sealed the deal. Army doctors pushed circumcision for hygiene reasons, and soldiers came home thinking it was part of modern life—like penicillin and Lucky Strikes. By the 1950s, hospitals were adding it to the newborn checklist, right between “bath” and “weigh the baby.”

A circumcision cost around $25 back then (about $400 today). For hospitals, that was easy income; for parents, it was reassurance that their sons were “clean” and “normal.” By decade’s end, about 80% of white American baby boys were circumcised before leaving the hospital.

In hindsight, it’s a perfect snapshot of midcentury America: squeaky-clean, seemingly scientific, and slightly obsessed with conformity. If your neighbor’s baby had one, yours probably did too.

The Jewish Angle—It’s Not What You Think

While hospitals were perfecting the snip, something else was brewing. Jewish thinkers in medicine and psychology—many refugees from Nazi Europe—proposed a radical new idea: babies actually feel things.

Sigmund Freud, M.D. discovered the unconscious—and with it, the idea that even unrecalled early experiences can leave lasting marks. Freud, it is said, didn’t circumcise his three sons. Wilhelm Reich, M.D., another Jewish psychiatrist who was initially part of Freud’s inner circle, went further. In his book, Children of the Future, he wrote that circumcision was “one of the worst treatments of children.”

Other Jewish analysts like Margaret Mahler, M.D. and René Spitz, M.D.—who also came out of the Central European psychoanalytic milieu of the 1920s and 1930s—studied how early trauma and separation can shape a person’s whole life, paving the way for attachment theory. But by the time their ideas reached the mainstream in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the industrial train of routine hospital circumcision had long since left the station.

Natural Parenting Revolution

Enter Michel Odent, a French obstetrician credited with founding the modern natural childbirth movement. From the 1960s through the early 1980s, as head of his famous maternity unit in Pithiviers, France, he oversaw thousands of births and pioneered his concept of “undisturbed” childbirth.

Odent drew heavily on Reich’s ideas, grounding them in contemporary medical understanding. What Reich called “life energy,” Odent reframed as the oxytocin reflex—a fragile hormonal process that depends on safety, privacy, and freedom from fear. When that reflex is disrupted by bright lights, constant monitoring, or painful circumcision, Odent warned, the biological roots of bonding and love are disturbed.

Like Reich, Odent believed that early bodily experience shapes the emotional and moral character of societies, arguing that cultures most inclined to interfere with birth are also those most prone to violence.

The ideas of Freud, Reich, Mahler, Spitz, Odent—and no doubt countless others who were all riffing on each other—eventually filtered into American pediatrics. Pop-parenting icon Dr. Benjamin Spock initially shrugged off circumcision as harmless. By 1989, he’d changed his mind, writing in his revised Baby and Child Care that it caused needless pain.

Jewish pediatricians like Milton Senn, M.D. who served as professor of pediatrics and director of the Yale Child Study Center (1948-66), and Julius Richmond, M.D., U.S. Surgeon General under Jimmy Carter, were the heart of a postwar movement that integrated psychoanalytic perspectives into pediatrics. They told parents: Be loving. Listen. Babies are people too.

Billing Became Destiny

But a powerful counterforce was also influencing parents. In 1965, Medicare and Medicaid came along—and automatically started paying for circumcisions. Private insurers soon followed suit, adopting the same billing and coding standards. Attachment theory hadn’t yet—well—attached, and nobody debated circumcision. The practice just slipped into the established medical system like an unnoticed line item.

The freethinking hippy generation that spoke of “the sexual revolution” (Reich coined the term, publishing the first English-language edition of a book with that title in 1945) might have been inclined to abandon circumcision—and some parents of this time did—but by now the practice was thoroughly entrenched: boys had to look like their circumcised fathers and grandfathers, and avoid locker room taunts.

Three prominent Jewish physicians tried to stop the circumcision train as it roared through the 1980s. Robert Mendelsohn, M.D. a Chicago pediatrician became a countercultural icon with his 1984 bestseller How to Raise a Healthy Child… in Spite of Your Doctor. He warned parents about unnecessary drugs, C-sections, and hospital births—and condemned circumcision as painful, risky, and pointless. “Doctors,” he joked, “are the only people who can make a living by cutting off perfectly good parts.”

In Los Angeles, Paul Fleiss, M.D. shared the same skepticism. A well-loved pediatrician and author of the book What Your Doctor Might Not Tell You About Circumcision, Fleiss openly refused to perform the procedure, arguing that it violated the medical duty to do no harm.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Dean Edell, M.D. brought the conversation to a national audience. Through his widely syndicated radio and television shows, Edell calmly explained that circumcision was not medically necessary and that parents had every reason to skip it.

Around this same time, a small but determined network of advocates—including other physicians, as well as nurses, ethicists, and parents—also began publicly challenging routine circumcision as non-therapeutic. The anti-circumcision movement was born.

The no longer active group NOCIRC (the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers), founded by Marilyn Milos in 1985, helped bring the issue into policy discussions for the first time. They framed routine infant circumcision as a violation of medical ethics and children’s rights, held academic conferences, and lobbied state Medicaid agencies to stop using taxpayer money to fund it.

Today, groups like Intaction have taken over where NOCIRC left off. These activists don’t have huge budgets or tremendous political clout, but they’ve been persistent and data-driven, showing that circumcision isn’t medically indicated yet consumes millions in public Medicaid funds each year. In some states, that argument has resonated. Seventeen states have now removed circumcision from their list of covered Medicaid services, though most private insurers continue to pay for it.

Benefits Outweigh the Risks Era

The American Academy of Pediatrics began weighing in on circumcision in the early 1950s, taking a mild, deferential tone that downplayed medical benefits. Six decades later, in 2012, it flipped the script, declaring that the health benefits outweighed the risks.

Why the change? Studies from Africa were making headlines suggesting adult circumcision could slow HIV transmission. Meanwhile, zealous anti-circumcision activists had recently turned their sights on religious circumcision, attempting to ban it in San Francisco. Against that backdrop, the AAP’s statement served as a legal bulwark, encouraging insurers to keep paying.

That policy officially expired by default in 2017, and the AAP hasn’t touched the issue since. Does that mean they’ve changed their mind again? Nobody is quite sure—but two doctors who helped write the policy have gone on record saying the “benefits outweighs risks” slogan was more cultural and legal compromise than medical conclusion.

One of those doctors—Andrew Freedman, M.D.—a pediatric urologist who performed a brit milah (Jewish ritual circumcision) on his own son at the family’s kitchen table, quipped: “Maybe the AAP should get out of the [circumcision] business since it’s not really a medical procedure. It’s only a medical practice in the sense that doctors are performing it.”

Circumcision in Decline?

Today, fewer than half of newborn boys are circumcised before leaving the hospital—down from about 80% in the 1960s. But that number doesn’t tell the full story. Shorter postpartum stays, lower hospital reimbursements, and patchy Medicaid coverage mean many procedures have moved out of maternity wards and into clinics. When those are counted, the real rate may approach three-quarters of all U.S. male births.

Circumcision in America. It began as a Christian moral crusade, morphed into a profitable habit, and remains a topic of heated debate. Through it all, Jewish physicians have played the most unexpected role of all—trying to make it less routine.