Circumcision Saved My Life San Francisco’s proposed ban on the practice could lead to more HIV infections.
This is the story of how my husband’s circumcision saved my life.
It’s a personal story, but let it also serve as a public health rebuttal to the proposed ban on male circumcision that will be on the San Francisco ballot this November.
San Francisco’s ballot initiative would prohibit circumcision on all males under the age of 18. It would allow no religious exemptions, and it apparently gives no regard to the numerous studies demonstrating that male circumcision can substantially reduce—by more than 50%—the transmission of the HIV virus during sex.
“Communities, and especially women, may benefit much more from circumcision interventions than had previously been predicted, and these results provide an even greater imperative to increase scale-up of safe male circumcision services,” concludes a study published this year in the peer-reviewed journal Sexually Transmitted Infections.
Peter, my husband, was born with hemophilia, best known as the disease of Victorian royals (and for good reason, since the guilty gene passed through the brood of Queen Victoria right down to the doomed young son of Russia’s last czar). Those who suffer from hemophilia lack the crucial factor in the blood that makes it clot.
When we are cut, we all bleed—usually, we need only a Band-Aid and some pressure to stem the flow. Except for the most minor injuries, hemophiliacs almost always need more. Specifically, they need a transfusion of the blood factor of which their DNA made them bankrupt.
As a result of one such clotting factor transfusion prior to 1985, Peter became HIV-positive.
Associated PressA baby rests on a pillow sounded by family members, immediately following his Bris, a Jewish circumcision ceremony in San Francisco. San Francisco voters in November will be asked to weigh in on what was until now a private family matter: male circumcision.
Today, the U.S. blood supply has been cleaned up significantly, reducing the chance of such transmission to almost nil. But before the risk was known and blood screening had been introduced, the risk to hemophiliacs was enormous.
Peter and I had met and fallen in love at college. We married in 1977, and by the 1980s we were getting ready to have children. I had already suffered two lost pregnancies and we were eager to try again.
I remember reading the earliest news stories about AIDS, a mysterious new blood-borne disease, and freezing with the intuitive knowledge that whatever was borne through the blood could be borne into Peter’s blood—and, by accident, perhaps mine, too. Since we were trying to get me pregnant, we had stopped using any birth control. How innocent it seems in retrospect that even when I suffered our second lost pregnancy in 1984, Peter had gamely whispered in my ear, “Don’t worry. I’ll knock you up again.”
But we had no chance. Soon thereafter, it was confirmed that the very blood products that had helped save and heal and improve the lives of so many hemophiliacs also had the power to infect them with AIDS. As for sex—as they say in Brooklyn, fuggedaboutit. In politer terms, Peter’s hematologists advised us to cease and desist getting pregnant again. Our mutual, sad assumption in the months that ensued: Not only had our love not produced a baby, but it may well have doomed me, too.
And then our very own HIV test results—his and hers—arrived. Peter was positive. I was negative. How had it happened that I never became HIV-positive myself?
It wasn’t until recently that we knew: He was circumcised. Actually, I should say, now I know. Peter died in 1999.
But here is the reason I am alive today: In the same way that circumcision vastly diminishes the chance of infecting women with the human papillomavirus that causes cervical cancer, studies suggest that circumcision also helps guard against the transmission of the HIV virus. In both cases, cells on the inside of the male foreskin are implicated in spreading the virus. But if the foreskin is removed, a source of infection is also removed.
So there you have it: My husband’s circumcision saved my life.
That reprieve allowed us to make the decision to adopt a child (our son, now 22, who will soon graduate from college). And it impressed on me the importance of public health decisions that unwittingly can save a life—which in this case happened to be mine. If the San Francisco initiative passes, and encourages other communities to do the same, who knows whose lives won’t be saved.
Ms. Cole is the author of the memoir “After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges” (Simon & Schuster, 1992) and the book columnist for the Psychotherapy Networker.
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