An infant boy has died in Italy as a result of a do-it-yourself circumcision, the third in four months from the illicit at-home procedure. On Tuesday night, a five-month-old died in Genoa after his Nigerian mother and her grandmother called a practitioner to their home to perform a circumcision. In March, a five-month-old Ghanaian baby died in Bologna after going into cardiac arrest after a home circumcision; and in December, a 2-year-old boy bled to death in Rome after a botched circumcision. Italy’s state health-care program does not cover circumcision because it is not practiced among the country’s Roman Catholic majority. Immigrants often call unlicensed practitioners to perform the procedure with disastrous results.
