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Promoting the Prepuce

by
By Georganne Chapin
May 13, 2016

This month, two important pieces appeared in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The first is by a group of Danish researchers who found in a large study in Denmark — a society where the foreskin is treated as a valuable body part — that only four out of a thousand intact boys might require circumcision later in childhood. The second is a commentary by Dr. Andrew Freedman, a pediatric urologist who was a member of the AAP’s 2012 Task Force on Circumcision.

Dr. Freedman acknowledges the widespread criticism of American doctors’ routine removal of boys’ foreskins, by physicians and ethicists abroad and by “anticircumcision activists.” Remarkably, he admits that the medical reasons for circumcision are not compelling, and says that parents are the ones who should make this permanent, most intimate decision for their infant sons, based on their own (the parents’) “religion, culture, aesthetic preference, familial identity, and personal experience.” He says the AAP subscribes to the “best interest of the child” ethical principle, despite the fact that this standard is not applicable when there is no medical problem requiring intervention of any kind.

Also remarkably, Freedman addresses “anticircumcision activists” directly, with this advice: “[R]ather than directing an angry focus on the negative and the courts, your efforts would be better spent to educate and promote the prepuce positively, to win in the court of public opinion, and to change the culture, so as to make having a foreskin the ‘popular thing to do’.” (“The courts” presumably refers to the 2011 San Francisco ballot initiative that would have banned medically unnecessary circumcision of children; the initiative was thwarted by opposition from religious groups and the American Civil Liberties Union.)

We’re way ahead of you, Dr. Freedman! That’s what Intact America is doing — promoting the prepuce positively! And we’re making progress. We just wish that the AAP wouldn’t make our work so difficult, by continuing to promote circumcision as though it were a medically useful and legitimate procedure, and by advocating for Medicaid and private insurance to pay for this cosmetic surgery.

All that said, we’re happy to know that our movement is on the AAP’s radar.

By Georganne Chapin

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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.