Two of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP’s) most prominent circumcision committee members are once again in the news, via a recently published article by Max Buckler in the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME), considered by many the world’s top peer-reviewed medical ethics journal.
We learned of these statements weeks ago but hesitated whether to use our resources to publicize another event yet again illustrating the AAP’s stubborn and counterfactual intransigence on this topic.
Buckler’s article, published in the November 2025 issue of the JME (website link), contains quotations from the author’s interviews with Douglas Diekema and Andrew Freedman of the AAP’s Task Force on Circumcision.
Freedman declares that “you cannot recommend circumcision based on the medical benefit alone” and that “it’s not really a medical practice”. Diekema claims to have been dissatisfied with the AAP’s 2012 policy, admitting that if asked today about childhood foreskin amputation, he could not “honestly say in a recommendation that the benefits outweigh the risks.”
We are hopeful that the AAP will follow these thoughts to their logical conclusion and form a new committee to publish an up-to-date policy statement based solely on medical advice (which would of course advise against the sexual disfigurement of baby boys), along with a badly needed and overdue retraction of the Task Force’s profoundly flawed and now long expired (as of 2017) position statement.