The tragic deaths of two London babies, Mohamed Abdisamad and Oliver Asante-Yeboah, bore striking similarities, though they occurred nine years apart. Both died of postoperative sepsis within days of being circumcised: three-week-old Oliver in November 2014, six-month-old Mohamed in February 2023. Neither child had a medical condition or therapeutic need for surgery. Their deaths were avoidable.
Circumcision, usually by cutting, is an invasive surgery that irreversibly removes the foreskin: sensitive, specialised, erogenous tissue that also protects the penile glans, or head. After circumcision, these attributes are permanently lost.
Other than for surgery and regulated sports, intentionally wounding another person is normally a serious criminal offence, even with that person’s consent. Surgery is highly regulated for competence, safety, and ethical practice. Medically unnecessary or non-therapeutic male circumcision (NTMC) is the singular exception.
Doctors licensed with the General Medical Council (GMC) must submit regular evidence about all aspects of their work. This includes demonstrating competence to recommend and provide the most effective, least invasive treatment options. Those who perform surgery, as I did in my GP practice, must use sterile equipment in regulated, clinical environments, periodically refresh their skills, keep full documentation, and audit processes and outcomes.
GMC guidance emphasises child safety and wellbeing. Wherever possible, children should be involved in decisions about their own care and their future choices maximised. Proxy consent by a child’s parents or guardians applies to recommended, time-sensitive treatment for illness, abnormality, or prevention. Conversely, doctors who believe a child is at risk of, or has already suffered, significant harm, including from parental action, are professionally required to make a child safeguarding referral. This is because the extent of parental child-rearing decisions is limited by children’s fundamental rights.
NTMC permanently breaches the bodily integrity of an intimate, psychosexually important body part for no medical reason. Affected children are generally too young to comprehend what is happening, and their adult worldview is yet unformed. A 2015 High Court ruling established NTMC as significant harm, the legal threshold for compulsory state intervention to safeguard children’s best interests. Therefore, one might reasonably expect child safeguarding considerations to apply to NTMC, with regulation as a bare minimum, alongside medical ethical concerns.
Instead, the regulatory framework has been dismantled for NTMC, to which none of the standard surgical precautions described above applies. Training is optional, and there is no statutory register of circumcision practitioners, so anyone can circumcise a child anywhere using whatever implements they choose, including scissors or fingernails.
Mohamed and Oliver were circumcised in this regulatory wilderness. The practitioners were non-doctors working in unregulated premises. A further connection between their deaths is that the two coroners subsequently raised the alarm with the Government. Each submitted a Prevention of Future Deaths report (PFD), warning that more children could die unless appropriate regulation was introduced.
In recent years, five UK children are known to have died following circumcision. At least two of these deaths, including Oliver’s, followed procedures performed by rabbis. Because NTMC data collection is inevitably haphazard, information about non-fatal side effects is limited. Freedom of information responses reveal numerous hospital attendances, including intensive care unit admissions. For example, in 2025, Birmingham Children’s Hospital documented seventeen babies requiring treatment for life-threatening circumcision complications. Notably, no child safeguarding referrals were made.
The extent of circumcision harm was encapsulated by a urology specialist who performs therapeutic circumcisions. In 2009, I referred to him a 20-year-old man seeking legal redress for life-changing injuries sustained from infant NTMC. He had severe penile scarring, sinuses, skin bridges, penile deformity, and painful urination and erections. The urologist’s medical report confirmed the injury severity, adding a caveat that negligence litigation was unlikely to succeed because these types of circumcision complications are common.
In this context, it is sobering to consider that the British Association of Paediatric Surgeons regards circumcision as rarely medically necessary in young children, particularly the under-fives. Worldwide, no recognised national medical association recommends routine childhood circumcision for health reasons.
Even so, some NTMC advocates claim overall or incidental health benefits for children, often citing the 2012 position statement of the American Academy of Pediatricians (AAP) and the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision (VMMC) campaign.
The AAP asserted that the benefits of NTMC outweighed its risks, while conceding that those risks could not be quantified; senior European and Canadian paediatricians criticised the statement as culturally biased. It expired in 2017 without being renewed or replaced. VMMC is a targeted HIV-prevention intervention for consenting heterosexual men and adolescents in high-prevalence regions of sub-Saharan Africa. In its 2020 guidance, the WHO warned of an ‘increased risk of serious adverse events among adolescents with immature genitalia’, recommending deferral until greater physical development. The campaign remains controversial; in particular, there are concerns about methodological bias in the three foundational trials. Even setting such concerns aside, there is no scientific or ethical basis for extrapolating any perceived benefits to men elsewhere, still less to children unable to give consent.
In the 2015 High Court ruling described above, the judge reflected that the law is still prepared to tolerate this significant harm. For an explanation of this anomalous circumvention of standard child safeguarding and surgical norms, it is useful to consider the circumcision demographic, the two NTMC-related convictions in 2025, and recent Government statements.
Most circumcisions in the UK are performed on male children born into Jewish and Muslim households, in some Christian denominations, and sometimes as a cultural practice. NTMC is often described as a religious requirement and a mark of belonging. Approximately 30-40,000 NTMC operations take place annually.
The two convicted circumcisers were given custodial sentences for a catalogue of crimes affecting multiple boys, including causing actual bodily harm. The judges expressed concern that ‘circumcision is almost entirely unregulated’ and called for urgent regulation. The first conviction illustrates the absurd irrationality appertaining to NTMC.
Mohammad Siddiqui worked as an NHS paediatric surgeon. He also performed community circumcisions. In 2015, the GMC revoked his medical licence, determining that he had acted with ‘reckless disregard of good medical practice and patient safety’ in his private circumcision practice, including seriously endangering a child’s life.
Practising medicine after being struck off the medical register is ordinarily a criminal offence. Instead, Siddiqui’s unlicensed status served only to shield him from regulatory oversight as he continued to circumcise children using rusty instruments.
One of Siddiqui’s convictions was for child cruelty, causing ‘deliberate infliction of pain’ by operating without anaesthetic. In this regard, he aligned with the Jewish Medical Association, a registered charity which states that ‘No formal anaesthesia is given routinely.’ The Royal College of Anaesthetists, however, confirms that anaesthesia is required for circumcision.
The second convicted circumciser was Mohammed Alazawi, a taxi driver with a previous conviction for violence. Alazawi’s crimes included causing grievous bodily harm to children and illegally procuring and using anaesthetic, the dangers of which were compounded by his illiteracy. He operated in dirty environments, using teenage boys as assistants.
In 2015, the government’s response to the PFD following Oliver’s death was that legislative change ‘would require considerable consultation…’. Mohamed’s subsequent death in comparable circumstances followed woeful government inaction over the intervening years. Lessons remain unlearned.
After the two convictions, a parliamentary question about NTMC safety led to this response in November 2025: ‘The Government has no plans to make changes to the regulatory framework for unanaesthetised non-therapeutic circumcision of boys.’ Then, following Mohamed’s inquest, a question about preventing more such deaths elicited this reply in February 2026: ‘The Government has no current plans to bring forward legislation or further guidance on [NTMC].’ The government minister who penned both responses was Baroness Merron, the former Chief Executive of the Board of Deputies, the main representative body of UK Jews.
In March 2026, responding to the PFD relating to Mohamed’s death, the surgeon and ‘British Muslim Government Minister’ Dr Zubir Ahmed acknowledged the coroner’s serious concerns, whilst stating that ‘it is rare that a death occurs’. Mirroring previous responses across the political spectrum, he refused to countenance statutory regulatory measures, implying that the risk of an occasional baby death following unregulated, medically unnecessary surgery is acceptable. The regulatory vacuum appears to be founded on the tenuous premise that NTMC may be in the child’s best religious or cultural interests.
A golden rule of child safeguarding, depressingly reiterated after successive tragedies, is to remain focused on the child. Instead, deference to religious communities and to well-intentioned parents prevails, despite accumulating evidence of significant, ongoing harm to children. The misguided presumption that children’s adult views will undoubtedly replicate their parents’ beliefs is manifested in damage to children’s genitals while subverting their religious freedom.
I do not belong to the orthodox Jewish community into which I was born. We will never know what the adult views of dead babies might have been. Genitally disfigured men rarely speak publicly. I have witnessed brave men being ridiculed for articulating the harm they have suffered: senior religious representatives declaring that they must have ‘other psychological problems’, as if the surgical reduction of their genitals according to beliefs they don’t share was insufficient.
A bodily mark of religious belonging may be life-affirming when freely chosen. However, freedom of belief is illusory without accompanying protections from coercion or being forced into a permanent bodily modification. A more accurate descriptor for someone irreversibly denied that choice is that they are being treated as a belonging rather than a person.
The Talk PANTS campaign run by the children’s charity, the NSPCC, tells children: ‘What’s in your pants is yours alone’. There is no coherent reason why this principle should exclude children’s foreskins.
The determined abdication of responsibility by government and safeguarding professionals for defending children’s basic rights is sustained by cultural relativism and reinforced by religious privilege. The perceived religious significance of NTMC has long obscured what would otherwise be obvious: every child deserves to be protected from traditional genital cutting practices until they are old enough to make such important decisions themselves.
Related reading
Circumcision: the human rights violation that no one wants to talk about, by Alejandro Sanchez
Britain has changed. The relationship between religion and state must change, too. By Stephen Evans
Keir Starmer must bring the UK’s diverse but divided people together, by Megan Manson
The case for secularism (or, the church’s new clothes), by Neil Barber
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