Who decides whether an infant being placed for adoption will be circumcised or not? The short answer is whoever has custody of the baby.

When we adopted our newborn baby boy, the social worker told us that the birth mother wanted the baby circumcised. There was never a discussion about how we felt about circumcision. If we wanted to adopt this baby, he would be placed into our home already circumcised. We probably would have requested a circumcision regardless, but we really did not have an opinion on the subject one way or the other. Quite honestly, with everything else that was going on at the time, whether or not the baby would be circumcised in the hospital didn’t even make my list of concerns.

However, there are some people, both birth parents and adoptive parents, who might feel very strongly about circumcision. For example, an Orthodox Jewish family might feel very strongly about the baby not being circumcised until he is eight days old for religious reasons. Having a two-day-old baby placed into the home already circumcised could be a very big deal to that adoptive couple.