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.

"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.