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Seize every teachable moment!

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By Georganne Chapin
January 7, 2016

HuffPo_photo_01072016

Let’s stop arguing about circumcision and begin teaching about it instead.

I floated this idea in  “Changing Opinions Over the Changing Table,” a Huffington Post article published Christmas Eve (read the article here), and it seems a lot of people liked this approach. The article received 31 positive comments, 1,800 Facebook likes, 278 shares, and 100 pins on Pinterest.

So, we have to do something to educate relatives, friends, and pediatricians who continue to challenge mothers who want to protect their baby boys by leaving them intact. So, when challenged, I’m asking mothers to turn it into a teachable moment.

To quote the article:

“I know you would like to say, ‘How dare you tell me to butcher my baby! You don’t know anything!’

“But what if you said instead, ‘You know, I was pretty clueless about circumcision in the past, because it’s been the so-called normal thing to do in America. But I decided to get educated, and I’m so happy I did. Do you want to hear what I learned?’

One reader commented, “Thank you Huffington Post for having the guts to keep writing about this issue! Great suggestions, and reminder that at one time most of us ‘intactivists’ took for granted that circumcision was normal and necessary.”

 

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3 Comments

  • dianepell

    January 8, 2016 12:18 pm

    Georgeanne, Loved the article and the concept of the teachable moments! Kudos to you for staying on top of this valid, indefensible cause. It takes a village and more to spread the word, and the word is, its his body!!!! I had a bit of an edgy time while my son and his wife were considering this issue for their newborn last March. Thankfully, they decided to leave him “intact” and I believe your newsletters and articles had a bearing on their decision. Thank You for your hard work and dedication in saving our children from the unbearable, intolerable, barbaric procedure! xoxo Diane

  • Gianluca

    January 23, 2016 12:58 am

    Georganne, do you advise what to say when somebody moves to the US from a country where circumcision is unheard of and somebody asks you about the topic of circumcision? I always get totally outraged that such a thing could even be on the table.

  • Sanford (Sandy) D'Esopo

    February 4, 2016 2:38 pm

    I am baffled at the fact that I can find no comment by NIH, CDC, AAP, AMA or any major health agency on the studies conducted by Danish epidemiologist Morten Frisch. He found that couples with a circumcised male partner experience frequent intercourse failure almost three times as often as couples with an intact male partner. More ominous, in 2015 he found a 46% higher incidence of Autism Spectrum Disorder in boys circumcised at birth or before age five. Does Intact America know of an agency investigating these findings?

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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.