Normal Thing to Be: How Infant Circumcision Became a Global Health Agenda

Infant circumcision has been an American norm since the mid-twentieth century. At the dawn of the twenty-first, health officials harnessed it as a public health intervention against HIV abroad. No other surgery has ever been deployed this way, much less one performed on children too young to consent. This led to inevitable controversy.

The Normal Thing to Be is an in-depth account of how a small network of primarily American researchers and government officials made it happen. Drawing on years of Freedom of Information requests, internal government correspondence, and original interviews, Ryan Jones traces a decades-long campaign that stretched across the CDC, the NIH, and the WHO. Its architects tried to box skeptics out of the policy process, fought running battles in academic journals and the press, and dismissed every dissenter as fringe, regardless of credentials. Intense pushback from the concerned public was largely ignored. The goal was to normalize the needless removal of healthy tissue from children, at home and abroad. What was the result?