Why do American parents choose circumcision?

Most of the world's men are intact. The US is one of the few countries that circumcises a big share of its baby boys for reasons that aren't religious. So why do we do it?

I went digging through decades of research on how parents actually make this call. The answers are pretty consistent, and some of them surprised me.

What parents say

In one study, parents who circumcised gave these reasons (Tiemstra, 1999):

And 37% said it was because dad was circumcised. A more recent survey of 265 parents found the same mix: 63% rated "future health" as extremely important, and 34% said dad's circumcision status was extremely important. (Guevara et al., 2021)

1. "It's cleaner"

This is the number one answer, and it's mostly a myth that comes from unfamiliarity. A baby's foreskin doesn't need any special care. You wash the outside like any other body part and you don't pull it back. Once it separates on its own, sometimes years later, he just rinses under it in the shower. (AAP, HealthyChildren.org)

Part of the problem is that a lot of American doctors don't know this either. In a survey of pediatric residents, 40% gave parents no advice on when or how often to retract the foreskin. (Malhotra et al., 2020) When parents get bad advice and someone forces a baby's foreskin back, it hurts, it can tear, and then the foreskin gets blamed. We wrote a whole guide on caring for an intact boy.

2. "It's healthier"

There are some real medical findings here, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. Circumcision lowers the risk of urinary tract infections in babies, lowered HIV risk for men in African studies, and lowers a few other risks. The catch is that most of these are things that are already rare, preventable in other ways, or that he could decide about as an adult. Even the American Academy of Pediatrics, at its most pro-circumcision, said the benefits weren't enough to recommend it for every boy. (AAP, 2012)

We break the medical side down in what doctors actually say about circumcision.

3. "He should look like his dad"

This might be the biggest one, even when parents don't say it first. Study after study since the 1980s has found that a father's own circumcision is one of the strongest predictors of what happens to his son. (Brown & Brown, 1987) In one survey of expecting parents, 82% of those with a circumcised father planned to circumcise. With an intact father, it was 15%. (Rediger & Muller, 2013)

It usually isn't about masculinity. It's more like: this is what the guys in our family look like. We wrote a separate piece just for dads: "I want him to look like me."

4. "I don't want him teased in the locker room"

Back in the 1980s, parents worried about what other boys would think. (Brown & Brown, 1987) That worry made sense when almost every boy was circumcised. It doesn't anymore. Fewer than half of US newborn boys were circumcised in the hospital in 2022, and in the West it was under 20%. (Yang et al., 2025) Your son's locker room is going to look a lot more mixed than yours did. More in circumcision is no longer the norm.

And honestly, kids today barely get naked at school at all. The group showers a lot of us remember are mostly gone. Schools have been dropping required post-gym showers for years over privacy concerns, (CBS Chicago) and even where the showers still exist, coaches say kids just don't use them. (Miami New Times) Newer locker rooms are often built with private changing stalls. The "everyone will see" moment parents worry about mostly doesn't happen anymore.

5. Religion

For many Jewish and Muslim families, circumcision is a religious practice, not a medical one. That's a different conversation with different meaning behind it, and it's not what this article is about. Most US circumcisions happen in hospitals for non-religious reasons.

6. "The hospital just asked"

A lot of parents get asked right after delivery, exhausted, with a form in front of them. That makes it feel like a standard part of having a baby. It isn't. It's an elective surgery. (CDC, 2018)

Money plays a part too. Hospitals in states where Medicaid pays for it circumcise about 24 percentage points more boys than similar hospitals in states where it doesn't. (Leibowitz et al., 2009) Privately insured boys are circumcised more often than boys on public insurance (65% vs 45%). (Jacobson et al., 2021)

Most parents decide before anyone explains it

Here's the stat I keep coming back to. In the Tiemstra study, 80% of parents had decided before they talked to a doctor. In a Texas study, 190 new moms read the AAP's brochure on circumcision, and not one of them changed her mind. (Binner et al., 2002)

That tells me information handed out in the hospital is too little, too late. If you're expecting, the best time to learn about the foreskin is now, before the baby comes.