There are circumcised men out there who are willing to go to some seriously extreme lengths (pun acknowledged but unintended) to get their foreskins back.

These men feel they were “robbed” of something before they were old enough to have a say. They want the right to decide how their bodies look and function.

Last night, 60 Minutes brought us the story of one of these men, Elwyn Moir.

28-year-old Elwyn was circumcised when he was born and says he has lived with a “sense of loss” since he was old enough to understand what happened.

Elwyn doesn’t blame his parents – he says they did the best they could for their son at the time – but he told reporter Tara Brown that he has always felt an overwhelming sense that he had been “interfered with”.

“(I was) robbed in some way. Just that realisation that there were parts I didn’t have… And I wanted to have the whole set,” Elwyn said. “I experienced it quite a lot as anger; this sort of brewing anger, resentment and even rage.”

To overcome this sense of loss, Elwyn has taken the dramatic and painful step of manually stretching the remaining skin on his penis to try and get a foreskin back.

In this piece for The Punch called “I was circumcised and I want my foreskin back!” Elwyn wrote about that significant decision. The choice, he said, should belong with the owner of the penis.

In my mid-twenties, my GP supported my decision to restore my foreskin. He referred me to a specialist urologist who supervised and advised on my plan to manually stretch my remaining foreskin tissue back into the form of a full foreskin, just as many adults choose to stretch their ear lobes… …Restoration is an elaborate and demanding process, requiring a man to attach a device which gently grips the remaining foreskin on the shaft of the penis and apply tension by hanging weights or stretching an elastic strap from it to their thighs or shoulders.”

That weighted stretching takes places over several hours each day for three to five years.

In Elywn’s own words: “It’s not great. It’s a bit of a burden… but it’s worth it.”

Male circumcision remains a contentious issue in Australia. It can be done for reasons of cultural norms, religious traditions or it is something that some parents choose for health or aesthetic reasons.

At the moment, the rate of male circumcision for baby boys is about 14 per cent in their first 12 months. In the 1950s that number was around 70 per cent. Circumcision hasn’t been offered in hospitals since the 1990s. In Tasmania, it’s banned altogether.

Last year, Mamamia wrote about the circumcision debate after the influential American Academy of Pediatrics publicly declared that the benefits of circumcision out-weigh the risks – which include being infected with sexually transmitted diseases.

This was from AAP at the time: