Lastly, we have a similar halachah to the one we placed in foundation. From the last word of the verse, “his foreskin,” we learn that only when the child has a definitive foreskin is there an obligation to circumcise on the eighth day, but if there is a doubt about the foreskin, there is no obligation. There are a few possibilities here when this would happen. We will only look at the two central ones.
The first is when a person is born already circumcised; then there is an obligation to perform the act of drawing a drop of blood (known as Hatafat Dam Brit), but since there is no definitive foreskin, there is no obligation to circumcise on the eighth day and the drawing of the drop of blood does not overrule the Shabbat. In other words, if someone is born circumcised on Shabbat, the drawing of blood is not performed on the next Shabbat, even though doing so is part and parcel of the commandment to circumcise.
The second example is a case of a so-called androgynous child—one who has both male and female sexual characteristics. Such a child, who has even partial characteristics of both male and female genitalia is not considered a definitive male, and therefore, does not fulfill the requirement of having “foreskin” that must be circumcised on the eighth day.
