• Our Story
  • Our Team
  • Initiatives
  • Blog
  • Events
  • Support Us
  • Donate

IOTM – George Hill

AUGUST 2013: Intact America is extremely pleased to honor George Hill as Intactivist of the Month. George, who turned 76 last month, has been fighting for babies’ rights for more than thirty years. But his awareness of circumcision goes all the way back to when he was 9-years old, when he realized that something “horribly wrong” had been done to him as a baby – but didn’t have the words to express his feelings.

George’s career is extensive, spanning time in the military to 25 years in the pilot’s seat of Eastern Airlines jetliners, to his family’s sugar farm in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which he now manages. His real passion, however, is intactivism. George is well-known within the movement for his encyclopedic knowledge and grasp of intactivist information, from scholarly journals and medical articles to detailed clinical trials in Africa.

For many years, George served as Secretary for Doctors Opposing Circumcision (D.O.C.), compiling hundreds of articles and journals for the organization’s members. Now D.O.C.’s Vice President for Bioethics and Medical Science, George is a published author in his own right:

  • Just last year, George published “Circumcision and Human Behavior,” which discusses the impact of circumcision on the behavior of infants and the men they become.
  • In 2011, he coauthored “Sub-Saharan African randomized clinical trials into male circumcision and HIV transmission: Methodological, ethical and legal concerns” with Gregory Boyle, debunking the randomized clinical trials often quoted in support of mass circumcision efforts in Africa.
  • In his article “George Hill iotm” published by D.O.C. in 2007, George directly addresses the problematic issue of circumcision and human rights. “Children enjoy a right to special protection due to their status as a child, including the right to protection from ‘traditional procedures prejudicial to the health of children.’ Circumcision is harmful to the health of children.”

George is also singlehandedly responsible for ending Medicaid coverage of non-therapeutic infant circumcision in Louisiana in 2005. Since then, Louisiana has gone from a circumcision rate of 42% to being the tenth lowest of all the states in incidence of circumcision. Thanks to George, genital integrity is now the norm in Louisiana.

“George has done a tremendous amount of behind-the-scenes work for the intactivist movement,” says Marilyn Milos of the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers (NOCIRC), who first met George in the 1980s. “His articles and letters have been published in medical journals worldwide. George wrote our pamphlets on bioethics, HIV/AIDS, and MRSA. His contributions to the genital autonomy movement have been invaluable!”

“My career as an intactivist is winding down,” George told us in an email from his Louisiana home. “It is time to pass the baton to another generation of intactivists. Intact America is now the leading organization for a new generation of workers for genital integrity. I believe that, with Intact America’s guidance and counsel, we shall soon see genital integrity become the norm in America as it now is in Canada and Australia.”

“Every important human rights cause needs a George Hill,” says Georganne Chapin, Intact America’s executive director, “and intactivism has George himself!” His knowledge of circumcision is, quite literally, awe-inspiring, and is only equaled by his passion and dedication to our cause. Thank you, George, for three decades of your work “

[sc name=”IOTM”]

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.