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

IOTM – Steven Svoboda

NOVEMBER 2014: Seven years ago, when Intact America was just an idea among a handful of intactivists, J. Steven Svoboda—a human rights and patent law attorney in San Francisco—was an integral part of the conversation. In fact, he’s been fighting for human rights for decades.

While attending Harvard Law School in the late 1980s, Steven traveled to Guatemala to volunteer on behalf of indigenous people—working 14-hour days, visiting morgues, confronting army generals, interviewing families of murdered peasants, and contributing extensively to a major report by Human Rights Watch.

When Steven began to hear from others who saw circumcision as a men’s rights and human rights issue, the commonalities with his earlier humanitarian work was clear. “The more I learned, the more concerned I became. I knew working on this would be worthwhile and would help children—and, indeed, all of us.”

In 1997, Steven founded Attorneys for the Rights of the Child, an international network of attorneys who work to secure equal protection for children’s legal and human rights to bodily integrity and self-determination. ARC works to help plaintiffs looking to expand the legal standard on male genital mutilation. “We want to make legal relief potentially available to all involuntarily circumcised males,” says Steven. “We’re forcing the medical profession to confront a challenge to the inhumane disfigurement of baby boys’ genitals from an organization of legal professionals which it cannot afford to ignore.”

Steven has authored and co-authored more than 30 academic articles on the legal and ethical issues surrounding child circumcision. In 2001, he presented to the United Nations the first document centrally addressing male circumcision as a human rights violation. He works closely with Intact America and serves on its Steering Committee. “Intact America inspires all of us working for genital autonomy for boys, girls, and intersex people by its professionalism, its unique and fresh approaches, and its commitment to reaching as many people as possible in all walks of life regarding the importance of allowing our children to decide for themselves about their bodies.”

Georganne Chapin, Executive Director of Intact America and an attorney herself, serves on the Board of Directors of ARC. Referring to the collaboration between the two organizations, Georganne says, “Steven is a terrific colleague. His analysis of legal issues and of circumcision’s role in American society is always thoughtful and precise. I’m so grateful for everything he does to protect baby boys, and I’m proud to work alongside him.”

[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.