The practice sits at an unresolved intersection of medicine, religious freedom and the rights of children, and honest description means setting out the positions rather than choosing between them.
The medical evidence is real and limited in scope. Randomised trials in sub-Saharan Africa found that voluntary medical male circumcision of adults substantially reduced female-to-male HIV transmission, and the World Health Organization has recommended it since 2007 as one component of prevention in high-prevalence settings; programmes on that basis have circumcised many millions of adult volunteers. Evidence of benefit for infants in low-prevalence countries is much weaker, and paediatric bodies differ openly: American paediatricians have concluded that the benefits are sufficient to justify access without recommending it routinely, while several European medical associations have reached the opposite view. Complication rates in trained hands are low but not zero, and are considerably higher where the operator is untrained.
The legal position varies and has moved recently. A German court in Cologne ruled in 2012 that religious circumcision of a minor constituted criminal bodily harm, and the Bundestag legislated within months to protect the practice explicitly, after protest from both Jewish and Muslim organisations. Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland have each debated age limits or bans; none has enacted one. Most jurisdictions continue to treat parental consent as sufficient.
The objection is straightforward: an irreversible modification is performed, for reasons that are not medically necessary, on a person who cannot consent. It is pressed by secular campaigners and by a small number of Jews and Muslims who have declined it for their own children. The response from inside those traditions is that the rite is constitutive of membership and cannot be deferred to adulthood without becoming a different thing altogether. That is a genuine impasse rather than a misunderstanding either side could clear up.