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IOTM – Adrienne Carmack

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Blog, Intactivist of the Month
October 30, 2014

OCTOBER 2014: One of the outstanding speakers at this summer’s Genital Autonomy Symposium in Boulder, Colorado, was Dr. Adrienne Carmack, a Board-certified urologic surgeon and author of Reclaiming My Birthrights: A Mother’s Wisdom Triumphs Over the Harmful Practices of Her Medical Profession. Dr. Carmack is an outspoken advocate for natural childbirth and an opponent of unnecessary medical interventions, including “routine” circumcision.

Dr. Carmack began her medical career in a traditional fashion, but soon began to question some of the medical system’s orthodoxy. Among other things, she realized that the system’s approach to circumcision and other perinatal interventions is profoundly flawed. Driven to learn the truth, she reviewed international medical research, first on circumcision and then on natural birth and breastfeeding. She realized that most American birth practices are not founded on fact-based science, but rather on current cultural norms.

Dr. Carmack believes that all parents have a right to know the medical facts around birth rights, which she defines as the rights of mothers and children to experience safe, natural births free of unnecessary interventions. As a doctor, she supports medical intervention when it is appropriate and necessary. However, she has made it her life’s work to free parents and children from the unnecessary medicalization of normal life events.

Dr. Carmack’s book has received wide praise. Reclaiming My Birthrights”This profound memoir is the incredible journey of a woman who was able to complete a medical education with mind and heart still willing to learn,” says Marilyn Milos RN, founder of the National Organization of Circumcision Information and Resource Centers (NOCIRC). “Even when new information challenged ingrained medical and cultural dogma, Dr. Carmack was willing to listen, to question, and to grow. The United States is 50th in the world for infant mortality and 47th in the work for maternal mortality, so changes in our obstetrical system are long overdue. Her story moves us from the myths inherent in fear-based medicine to an approach that is in alignment with wholesome healthcare, especially as it relates to birth.”

Georganne Chapin recently invited Dr. Carmack to join Intact America’s Board of Health Professionals, a title which Dr. Carmack graciously accepted. “When Intact America asks me for clinical advice, it is clear that I am working with an amazing group of individuals thoroughly dedicated to human rights. One of my personal agendas is to do what I can to increase the level of empathy and connection in this world, and I am pleased to work with Intact America to achieve this goal.”

“The importance of Dr. Carmack’s work cannot be overstated,” says Georganne Chapin, Executive Director of Intact America. “It is a great honor to work with her. I am confident that other physicians will recognize her leadership, and decide to step forward.”

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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.