Growing up as both an American and a Jewish person, it was a given that I would someday circumcise my children.

I didn’t really question it. When I was pregnant with my son, my husband, who is circumcised, but not Jewish, told me that he wanted to circumcise him because he wanted them to ‘look the same.’ It was reasoning that I couldn’t really argue with. I didn’t know much about circumcision, and I wanted to respect my husband’s feelings on the issue. And, if I’m being totally honest, it was a relief to defer this decision – my two previous miscarriages had sucked any joy and spontaneity out of this pregnancy, and the anxiety over it happening again, and the overabundance of information that I buried myself in as a distraction, left me exhausted and overwhelmed. Circumcision was very low on my list of concerns at that point.

My doubts began when the nurse at the hospital came to take my son. It hit me that I was trusting strangers to take my newborn child, the one we’d gone through hell to bring in to this world. And now strangers would be performing minor surgery on him without my supervision.

I had only been a mum for around a day, and every instinct I had told me not to do this. I didn’t even take the time to question whether this was important to me, although it obviously wasn’t. I’m not particularly religious - I married a Catholic, meaning our only collective reason for circumcising our child was for cosmetic purposes. But I had deferred the decision, so I let the nurse take him.