A number of years ago, I remember delivering a baby boy, and the first thing the father asked me was, "When can he be circumcised"? The father seemed panicked. I'd never seen anything like it before. He truly seemed in an uproar that something was terribly wrong with...

I was born and raised on an isolated farm in East Africa, a descendant of a Boer War veteran who settled there in the early 20th century. My younger brother and I seldom saw other children. At the age of six, I was sent to boarding school. I can still remember the...

I believe strongly that baby boys should not be circumcised. For me this is an issue of personal choice, a basic human right that a baby can’t claim for himself. I first thought seriously about this in my twenties when I read an article in a body modification e-zine....

I am 77 years old. It has taken me a lifetime to deal with the consequences of the trauma of my circumcision as a newborn infant in 1942. For most of my life, the earliest memory I had of my mother was when we were traveling on a railroad train across the western...

Since her days as a hospital floor nurse more than 35 years ago, Marilyn Milos, RN, has been at the front of the fight to end forced circumcision in the U.S. She founded the National Organization of Circumcision Resource Centers (NOCIRC), now Genital Autonomy –...

When I became an intactivist, I found that simply bringing up the subject with others provoked responses falling into one of two categories: disgust, horror, and disbelief; or entrenchment and defensiveness. If this person was a circumcised man, the reaction would be...

Recently, a longtime friend confided that had his wife given birth to a boy rather than to their daughter, he would not have allowed his son to be circumcised. He had researched circumcision and found it unnecessary and unjustified. After hearing my friend's...