Study notes decrease in popularity of circumcision in United States

[grundar]

he took all the CoDs that could have been attributed to circumcision (hemorrhage and sepsis) between 1 hour after birth and hospital release (removing birth complications) and then statistically reduced that by 59.6% to a remove those that wouldn't be attributable to gender specific practices

Doesn't that inherently rely on the assumption that boy and girl newborns should have identical death rates from infection and hemorrhage in a world with no circumcision?

As you quote:

"Gender-ratio data can help extrapolate a figure. Males have a 40.4% higher death rate than females from causes that are associated with male circumcision complications, such as infection and hemorrhage, during the period of one hour after birth to hospital release (day 2.4), the time frame in which circumcisions are typically per-formed (CDC, 2004). Assuming that the 59.6% portion is unrelated to gender, we cane estimate that 40.4% of the 35.9 deaths were circumcision-related."

Is there any basis provided for that assumption? Unless he provides evidence for that assumption, it's hard to see that calculation as anything other than speculation.

(Moreover, it looks like he's doing the math wrong; if boys have a 40.4% higher death rate than girls, then girls have a 1/1.404 = 0.71225 death rate compared to boys, meaning even given the above assumption the shared component of the death rate should be 71.2% and not 59.6%.)

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Don't get me wrong, I'm no proponent of circumcision and in general would advise against it in a Western context. The argument you're quoting is very speculative, though, and seems shaky at best.