As a longtime advocate against female circumcision—which typically involves the partial or entire removal of the clitoris, rendering sex painful and even potentially deadly for women—I can definitely see why people are in favor of banning male circumcision. Why harm a poor baby once he is born, after all, while simultaneously taking away a pretty important choice from him before he’s even old enough to know what foreskin is?

Of course, I’m not a man, so I can’t say whether or not I would want foreskin or not if it were available to me. When I asked my husband, he didn’t feel strongly about it one way or another, and said that he didn’t miss his foreskin and didn’t know a man who did! That said, if he’d had it all his life, perhaps he would have felt differently.

San Francisco is considering a ban against male circumcision after a group against the practice gathered enough signatures to make it a ballot issue. That said, if it does pass, it may be contested on constitutional grounds, since it counts as a religious practice.

That may be so, but if the same argument were used to support female circumcision—and the cultural argument is typically used in that case—I would still vehemently argue against it. I’d love to know what men have to say about the issue.