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IOTM – Kira Antinuk

APRIL 2016: April’s Intactivist of the Month is Kira Antinuk, a registered nurse and founder of the Canadian Children’s Health & Human Rights Partnership (CHHRP, pronounced “chirp”).

A native of Victoria, British Columbia, Kira first learned the truth about circumcision in 2003, when pregnant with her first child. She began researching and speaking out about the practice and, using her background as a graphic designer, created a line of T-shirts to raise awareness.

In 2006, Kira attended the International Symposium on Circumcision, Genital Integrity, and Human Rights in Seattle. “That’s when it became clear to me,” she says, “that I needed to leave my career as a graphic designer and follow in the footsteps of Marilyn Milos, the courageous nurse who has inspired so many.” Kira returned to university and became a registered nurse.

She won the Paul Wainwright Nursing Ethics prize, and published a paper on circumcision and nursing responsibilities in the journal Nursing Ethics. She also founded CHHRP, based on “an awareness that, as health care professionals, we can and must do more to promote and protect children’s rights to genital integrity.”

The non-therapeutic circumcision of all infants was condemned in a resolution by British Columbia’s registered nurses at their annual convention in 1995. “What was particularly noteworthy about this resolution,” says Kira, was its emphasis on the fact that “nurses play an important role in educating parents about the harm of circumcision, and that nursing associations have a responsibility to raise awareness about this issue.”

In 2012, in collaboration with physician Christopher Guest (pictured with Kira above, and a former IOTM), CHHRP was incorporated. Children’s rights advocates Tim Hammond and Dave Saving are also co-founders and serve on the Board of Directors of the organization, which counsels Canadian health professionals on their responsibilities and obligation to promote genital integrity for all children through positive and professional education and advocacy.

CHHRP also provides new media and print resources, referrals, and support to the greater public. Kira serves as Nursing Director, working to educate Canadian RNs regarding their right (established in the Canadian Nurses Association’s code of ethics in 2008) to take conscientious objector status in the case of male circumcision.

In addition to working for CHHRP and studying for her Master’s degree, Kira is employed as a Registered Nurse Medical Adjudicator for the federal government of Canada. In Fall 2016, she will begin a PhD program at the University of Victoria (British Columbia), where she plans to examine factors that influence nurses’ perceptions about circumcision, and explore how gender bias may impact nursing research on male and intersex child genital cutting.

“It is my hope that nurses in the United States will work to ensure that their right to take conscientious objector status is similarly protected by U.S. nursing bodies.” To that end, Kira has created a brochure for Nurses for the Rights of the Child, which outlines conscientious objection to non-therapeutic child genital cutting for nurses, employers, and educators. About Intact America, Kira says: “I want to acknowledge the education and advocacy work your organization does to protect the human rights of children in the United States and around the world.”

“While Canada’s circumcision rate is lower than that of the United States, challenges to ending the practice are similar in the two countries,” says Georganne Chapin, Intact America’s executive director. “Kira Antinuk is a dynamo in the fight to expose and end infant genital cutting, having brought together a group of powerful allies to carry out the work, and having helped to further both the theory and practice of conscientious objection in nursing. When infant genital cutting finally goes the way of other outmoded and barbaric medical practices, Kira will be among those to whom we will forever be indebted.”

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.