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Voices — Marci Eggers

There are such strong opinions on newborn circumcision. If the topic ever came up, which it did more often than one would think, there was usually negativity about intact boys. I didn’t have reason to worry about such things until I realized that I would someday have to make a decision on whether or not to circumcise.
Marci Eggers
Growing up, my grandmother had told me the story of my dad’s circumcision. She was 16 years old when she had him, and he was born tongue-tied. She scheduled an appointment to have the web of his tongue snipped. My grandmother was asked to sit in the lobby while they did the snip. When she got home, she noticed that there was blood in his diaper. She immediately took him back to the doctor and asked why he would be bleeding. The doctor explained that he had gone ahead and performed the circumcision to get it out of the way. The bleeding wouldn’t stop and my dad nearly died. My grandmother almost lost her baby due to a negligent doctor performing a procedure that wasn’t approved by her. Being young, she didn’t put up a fight, but she told me she never took my dad to that doctor again. Obviously, this story had a huge impact on my view of circumcision.

I found out I was having a boy in January of 2005. He was due to come in July, so we had some time to prepare for our bundle of joy. Right away, I had expressed to my husband that I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do. Thankfully, he didn’t argue. He just told me it was up to me. I decided I didn’t know enough about the procedure and why it was done. I got pamphlets and searched for answers on the internet. To make the research legit, I needed to explore all sides. I looked up websites that are for and websites that are against. Some examples I found of reasons why a person should do newborn circumcision are: it’s cleaner, to be like dad, to prevent penile cancer, to protect future partners from cervical cancer, to prevent UTI’s, and so on. I made sure to deeply research each claim I found. It has been determined that an intact person is not the cause of cervical cancer. It has also been proven that the foreskin is there to protect against UTI’s as long as it is not prematurely retracted. As for any other claim, I concluded they are all absurd! To think we will cut a body part off to be cleaner or look like a parent is unthinkable. In the end, I chose to leave my baby intact.

When I was about seven months along, some family came to help me prepare his nursery. During the decorating, they were telling me stories about when they were expecting, labor and delivery, bringing home newborns, etc. One family member told me that she had decided to get her baby cut because she wanted to protect his future wife from cervical cancer. I’ve heard her tell the story how her dad held the crying baby for hours disgusted that she could do such a thing. It was at this time that she asked what I was going to do. When she found out that I wasn’t planning on getting the procedure done on my baby, she made it her duty to try to change my mind, bombarding me with questions about why I thought it was a good idea. I explained to her that I had done my research and found that there is no medical reason to have this done. I think this may have offended her a little bit because she thought she did a good thing by doing this to her son. She immediately went downstairs, and asked my husband what he thought of the whole thing. Surely he would want the baby circumcised! When he told her he wished it had never been done to him, she couldn’t believe it. I felt bad for her because she truly thought she was doing the right thing, but I really feel sorry for the moms that are still doing this today. So many people just agree to it without ever getting all the details. I’ve advised every expecting mom in my life to at least do the research.

Even though I had been met with a huge amount of opposition to my choice, I stuck with my decision. I kept my baby with me in the hospital and reiterated many times that the procedure was NOT to be done. I had a fear that I would get the third degree, but shockingly enough, not one health official tried to persuade me. In fact, the pediatrician told me it was for the better. It was for the better.

Marci Eggers

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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.