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Ask Marilyn – Circumcision Is a Bigger Risk Than Penile Cancer

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Ask Marilyn, Blog
April 4, 2022

The penis advice columnDear Marilyn:

My obstetrician tells me circumcision will prevent penile cancer in my son. Is that true?

—Ann, Lansing, MI

Dear Ann:

Your obstetrician is wrong. Penile cancer occurs in circumcised males as well as intact males, but it is among the rarest of cancers. The American Cancer Society estimates that 2,070 new cases of penile cancer will be diagnosed in the United States in 2022 (compared to 287,850 new cases of breast cancer) and that 470 men will die from the disease (compared to 43,250 fatalities among breast cancer patients). Despite the higher incidence of breast cancer, no doctor recommends removing a baby girl’s breasts after birth.

Neither should doctors recommend amputating healthy tissues from a baby boy’s penis. Especially since the American Cancer Society itself questions the association between circumcision and penile cancer risk. The biggest risk it is most closely associated with genital hygiene and HPV infection. Proper genital hygiene and conscientious condom use offers far more protection for this disease.

Also, bear in mind that cancer of the penis is a rare disease of elderly men. Your son will be denied the protection and pleasure of his foreskin for many years until his age possibly puts him at risk. However, he will immediately face a risk from circumcision: more than 100 baby boys die each year from circumcisions.

There is no reason to risk circumcision of an infant for fear of cancer in the later years of life. As my mother used to say, “Never trouble trouble  ’til trouble troubles you.”

­—Marilyn

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Marilyn

Marilyn Fayre Milos, multiple award winner for her humanitarian work to end routine infant circumcision in the United States and advocating for the rights of infants and children to genital autonomy, has written a warm and compelling memoir of her path to becoming “the founding mother of the intactivist movement.” Needing to support her family as a single mother in the early sixties, Milos taught banjo—having learned to play from Jerry Garcia (later of The Grateful Dead)—and worked as an assistant to comedian and social critic Lenny Bruce, typing out the content of his shows and transcribing court proceedings of his trials for obscenity. After Lenny’s death, she found her voice as an activist as part of the counterculture revolution, living in Haight Ashbury in San Francisco during the 1967 Summer of Love, and honed her organizational skills by creating an alternative education open classroom (still operating) in Marin County. 

After witnessing the pain and trauma of the circumcision of a newborn baby boy when she was a nursing student at Marin College, Milos learned everything she could about why infants were subjected to such brutal surgery. The more she read and discovered, the more convinced she became that circumcision had no medical benefits. As a nurse on the obstetrical unit at Marin General Hospital, she committed to making sure parents understood what circumcision entailed before signing a consent form. Considered an agitator and forced to resign in 1985, she co-founded NOCIRC (National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers) and began organizing international symposia on circumcision, genital autonomy, and human rights. Milos edited and published the proceedings from the above-mentioned symposia and has written numerous articles in her quest to end circumcision and protect children’s bodily integrity. She currently serves on the board of directors of Intact America.

Georganne

Georganne Chapin is a healthcare expert, attorney, social justice advocate, and founding executive director of Intact America, the nation’s most influential organization opposing the U.S. medical industry’s penchant for surgically altering the genitals of male children (“circumcision”). Under her leadership, Intact America has definitively documented tactics used by U.S. doctors and healthcare facilities to pathologize the male foreskin, pressure parents into circumcising their sons, and forcibly retract the foreskins of intact boys, creating potentially lifelong, iatrogenic harm. 

Chapin holds a BA in Anthropology from Barnard College, and a Master’s degree in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University. For 25 years, she served as president and chief executive officer of Hudson Health Plan, a nonprofit Medicaid insurer in New York’s Hudson Valley. Mid-career, she enrolled in an evening law program, where she explored the legal and ethical issues underlying routine male circumcision, a subject that had interested her since witnessing the aftermath of the surgery conducted on her younger brother. She received her Juris Doctor degree from Pace University School of Law in 2003, and was subsequently admitted to the New York Bar. As an adjunct professor, she taught Bioethics and Medicaid and Disability Law at Pace, and Bioethics in Dominican College’s doctoral program for advanced practice nurses.

In 2004, Chapin founded the nonprofit Hudson Center for Health Equity and Quality, a company that designs software and provides consulting services designed to reduce administrative complexities, streamline and integrate data collection and reporting, and enhance access to care for those in need. In 2008, she co-founded Intact America.

Chapin has published many articles and op-ed essays, and has been interviewed on local, national and international television, radio and podcasts about ways the U.S. healthcare system prioritizes profits over people’s basic needs. She cites routine (nontherapeutic) infant circumcision as a prime example of a practice that wastes money and harms boys and the men they will become. This Penis Business: A Memoir is her first book.