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Ask Marilyn—What’s the impact of intactivism conferences?

by
Ask Marilyn, Blog
August 22, 2022

The penis advice columnDear Marilyn:

I’m looking forward to attending Intact 2022, the 16th International Symposium on Child Genital Cutting, in Atlanta this week. Can you tell me how child genital cutting symposia have impacted intactivism since you began organizing them in 1989?

—Larry, St. Louis, MO

Dear Larry:

I first witnessed a circumcision in 1979. I was horrified and immediately began researching the subject. Our local libraries, including those at the hospital and universities, had little or no relevant information. Then in 1980, Edward Wallerstein sent me a copy of his book, “Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy.” This book became the foundation of my work. I told everyone what I was learning and appeared on local radio and television shows. I was contacted by an attorney who wanted to file a lawsuit asking if parents have a right to consent to a child’s circumcision, or if the baby’s body belonged to the baby. I found a plaintiff, and our lawsuit got publicity.

The publicity likely prompted a couple of local doctors—urologist Aaron Fink and Edgar Schoen, a pediatrician—to join forces and begin their campaign to validate both cultural and religious circumcision, in the form of a pro-circumcision resolution that Fink introduced to the California Medical Association (CMA) and Schoen took to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

Fink introduced his resolution to the CMA at its yearly convention in 1987, but the Scientific Committee voted it down. Fink came back in 1988 with Arthur Dick, a urologist, who circumcised a banana in front of the CMA membership, and the resolution passed. This was followed by a counter-resolution from Dr. John Hardebeck, who planned to present it at the CMA convention the following year. I knew that meeting was being held at the Disneyland Hotel. So I booked a hotel across the street for our First International Symposium on Circumcision.

I invited Dr. Michel Odent, a French obstetrician and childbirth specialist, to give the keynote presentation. He asked if there would be other international presenters and, when I told him I didn’t have any, he said, “Well then, you need me.” I invited Fink and Schoen, but neither came or even responded to my invitation. But those who did were eager to share their work or their experiences. This was the first time that experts from various disciplines—religion, anthropology, psychology, medicine, law, and ethics—gathered around the subject of circumcision. We were all thrilled by what had transpired. Dr. Paul Fleiss, a popular Los Angeles pediatrician who was both a breastfeeding and anti-circumcision advocate, also attended, and—at the end of the symposium—declared: “Marilyn, now we need to take this show on the road.”

The second symposium was held in 1991 in San Francisco, and Dr. Ashley Montagu, anthropologist and humanist, gave the keynote address. Presenters and attendees alike were amazed at the quality, breadth, and depth of the presentations on this crucial human rights issue.

The joy of each symposium is the new material that has been presented, the medical research that has been done, and the focus on how we treat children at the beginning of life and how this affects society. Those who have attended our symposia have been enriched with important information about the issue and what’s being done to end an anachronistic blood ritual. By coming together, we learn from one another, and become secure in knowing we’re not alone. We have become Intactivists together and we have become a family.

In the following years, we held 13 more symposia around the world including Switzerland, England, Australia, Italy, and Finland; six books of the proceedings were published by Springer—the same company that published Wallerstein’s groundbreaking book decades earlier. Our books are now in universities worldwide and being used in classrooms.

The Atlanta symposium (August 2022) will be the first I will not attend in person. While I’m sorry for that, that’s life! And I’m thrilled to know these gatherings will continue—this time because of David Llewellyn and Georganne Chapin—as will the movement I initiated all those years ago just because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. As you can see, I still can’t. Please, carry on…

—Marilyn Milos, RN

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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.