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Intactivist call on obstetrician’s meeting in New Orleans to stop cutting baby boys

The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) 
draws protesters to New Orleans convention.

Intact America calls circumcision “an unnecessary, inherently risky surgery that
violates boys’ human rights.” Press conference highlights ethical issues surrounding
nation’s most common pediatric surgery.

May 2, 2013

TARRYTOWN, NY—Intactivists are gathering in New Orleans this weekend to call upon members of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) to join the global medical community’s movement away from neonatal male circumcision.

Intact America, the organization leading the demonstration and an 11 AM press conference on Saturday, May 4, placed an advertisement in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and hired a mobile billboard, urging those who see it to “Tell America’s Obstetricians – No More Circumcision.” The sign includes the message “His Body, His Rights” to underscore the organization’s human rights concerns. Approximately 70 Intactivists are expected to participate in the demonstration, displaying banners, carrying placards, and handing out literature.

Georganne Chapin, founding executive director of Intact America, the country’s leading voice against neonatal male circumcision, said, “The leaders of ACOG apparently do not think their members – who, according to estimates, perform at least half of the one million circumcisions in the United States on unconsenting baby boys each year – should hear the arguments that have led medical authorities across the developed world to reject the surgery as unnecessary, inherently risky, and a violation of baby boys’ right to an intact body.”

Chapin commented that ACOG rejected her group’s request to rent space for an educational booth in the convention’s exhibition hall. ACOG’s rejection came in an email in which the group said male circumcision “is only indirectly related to women’s health and of only casual interest to members of ACOG.” Consequently, Intact America decided to communicate with ACOG using protesters.

“It is both sad and disingenuous that ACOG claims circumcision is of no interest to the very doctors who perform the surgery hundreds of thousands of times each year,” Chapin said. “It is also not surprising they have embraced the widely-discredited Circumcision Policy Statementissued August 27, 2012 by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which lauded the benefits of circumcising infants, while admitting that evidence for such benefits is lacking, acknowledging that the risks have never been adequately studied, and ignoring the ethical problems inherent in permanently removing normal genital tissue from individuals who cannot consent.”

Chapin noted further that the AAP’s 2012 report advocates for insurance companies and Medicaid to pay for circumcisions.

The AAP’s 2012 pro-circumcision report, released last summer and endorsed by ACOG the same day, recently came under sharp criticism from a group of 40 international pediatricians, urologists and medical ethicists, whose article Cultural Bias in the AAP’s 2012 Technical Report and Policy Statement on Male Circumcision (published in the AAP’s own journal, Pediatrics), claimed the AAP task force was biased in favor of circumcision before its members even began their deliberations. The article’s authors, all Europeans except for one Canadian, said the purported health benefits cited by the AAP could be achieved by far less drastic measures than the removal of healthy, functioning tissue from the genitals of baby boys.

The physicians’ critical view of circumcision position is identical to that of Intact America. “There is growing consensus… that physicians should discourage parents from circumcising their healthy infant boys,” the physicians say, “because non-therapeutic circumcision of underage boys in Western societies has no compelling health benefits, causes postoperative pain, can have serious long-term consequences, constitutes a violation of the United Nations’ Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and conflicts with the Hippocratic oath: primum non nocere: First, do no harm.”

“Intact America’s intent for this demonstration in New Orleans,” said Chapin, “is to make sure ACOG hears and understands the ethical quagmire they have put themselves into.”

Intact America is based in Tarrytown, N.Y. Visit Intact America at www.intactamerica.org, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

Author

  • Jeannie Ashford is a writer, editor, public relations professional, and communications specialist who has supported Intact America for more than a decade. She received a BA in English Honors at Queens College, City University of New York, and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University.

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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.