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Do You Know: Nurses are ranked the most trusted profession(als)?

For the 17th consecutive year, a Gallup Poll for the Most Trusted Professionals found that 84 percent of Americans rated the honesty and ethical standards of nurses as “very high” or “high.”

Medical doctors and pharmacists were next on the list, rated at 67 percent and 66 percent, respectively.

Of course, being considered trustworthy doesn’t necessarily equate with being knowledgeable. This is especially true when it comes to knowledge about the foreskin.

The pediatric literature is clear: An intact foreskin should never be forcibly retracted. Yet, a national survey conducted in 2018 by Intact America revealed that a staggering 43 percent of intact boys have had their foreskins forcibly retracted by an adult at least once by the age of seven. Close to half of these forcible retractions were done by doctors, and nine percent were done by nurses.

In a medical malpractice suit filed last year against Children’s HealthCare of Atlanta (a large pediatric hospital), it was a nurse who forcibly retracted Leon Parks’ foreskin, and who – when told by his mother not to do that – insisted that she was putting the baby at risk for infection if she did NOT regularly retract his foreskin.

These findings – about the high esteem in which American nurses are held, and the irrefutable fact that nurses are not well-informed about foreskin anatomy and foreskin care – tell us how important it is to get the right information into the hands of the medical professionals who treat our children.

Intact America’s Made to Stick campaign is reaching out to professional medical associations and asking them to educate their membership. We are telling pediatricians and nurses that their ignorance of the facts – and the AAP’s own policy – is harming the very children they take an oath to protect. Further, we are putting them on notice that if they continue to push for forcible retraction of intact boys’ foreskins, they are exposing themselves to the same kind of legal jeopardy currently being faced by Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, in the Parks lawsuit.

Stay tuned for more information about our Made to Stick campaign. In the meantime, download our “Foreskin Facts” and “Intact Care Guide” flyers. Bring this information with you to medical appointments and share them with your child’s caregivers.

Let’s help to give nurses (and doctors) the tools they need to truly merit the public’s trust.

Author

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.