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Voices — Sergio Serratto

When my first child was on the way, we met with the doctor for the usual checkups to make sure the pregnancy was going smoothly. In all those months, we never thought about circumcising the baby if it turned out to be a boy. At all. It never came up in our meetings with the doctor. She never asked if we were going to do it. Because it’s something I’d never consider, and I didn’t know it was a nearly-default procedure in this country, I didn’t give it much thought.

The day came to go to the hospital. It was about one in the morning. We were very nervous. I scrambled to get my phone ready to record the moment. The mother was in a lot of pain, and emotions were running high. My son was born around 4 a.m. After the doctor handed him over to the nurse to clean him, she turned to leave. On the way out of the room, she said, “You’re going to circumcise, right?” She didn’t ask me—she told me.

Without even thinking, I said yes. I really didn’t even hear her. She was so nonchalant, and I was so tired and full of emotion. But about two or three seconds later, I suddenly realized what she had asked and I said, “No! Circumcise? No!” She turned around and said, “What?” I held up my fingers like I was cutting the air with scissors. “No cutting!” I wanted to make sure she knew. “No, we’re not cutting, no!”

She said, “Oh, OK.” Her manner was that it was no big deal and everybody does it, but she didn’t try to talk me into it. I repeated myself another two times just to be clear. No, we’re not going to do it.

And they did not cut my son. But how many families who barely speak English might have had a different experience from ours? They go through the entire pregnancy and the checkups and the topic of circumcision never comes up once. Then right after the birth, when everyone is exhausted and overcome with emotion, they ask you if the baby will be circumcised, in a way that presumes the answer is yes. It would be very easy not to understand what is being asked in that moment—especially if you come from a culture where routine medical circumcision is unheard of.

You trust the doctor. You trust that her advice is sound. The moment the baby is born is no time to discuss circumcision for the first time. Perhaps the timing is no coincidence.

Until my son was born, and until I heard about Intact America, I didn’t realize how common circumcision is in this country. I grew up in South America, and circumcisions there are usually for religious reasons. When Georganne Chapin told me how widespread it is here, I couldn’t believe it.

Now I talk about it with basically everybody I know who is expecting a baby. I tell them to be careful because you don’t have to do it. And make sure you tell the doctor that you’re NOT going to do it—multiple times, if you have to.

Not everyone understands the urgency. So I like to use the analogy of fingernails: Why do we cut our fingernails? Because they grow and accumulate dirt. So why, I ask, don’t you pull them out? That way you don’t have to cut them anymore? It’s the same thing with a foreskin. If it gets dirty, wash it. Why would you remove a part of your body that is fine and is there for a reason?

I recently joined Intact America as a program manager after a number of years on Wall Street and then as a New York State Senate staffer. I took the Intact America job because I believe in what Intact America stands for, and what Intact America does. These are challenging times for any nonprofit to get the message out and raise support, but we need more people to be aware of what is happening to baby boys and the men they will grow up to be.

American culture blindly accepts circumcision as just another facet of a boy’s birth. We’re used to it, and most people don’t even think about it. I’m working to change that—so that when the time comes, without any doubt, parents can protect their child’s right to remain intact.

Sergio Serratto
Tarrytown, New York

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2 Comments

  • Jordan Arel

    July 25, 2020 5:12 pm

    This is fantastic! Thank you Sergio! Yes, too often we forget immigrants may not themselves be victims of this horrible practice, but this does not mean they are aware of the horrors of circumcision, and so it is essential to educate them to defend against the insidiously nonchalant and entrenched medical practice and pushing of the procedure. Thank you for sharing.

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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.