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IOTM – Marilyn Milos, RN

APRIL/MAY 2012: This Mother’s Day, as we honor the women, mothers, and grandmothers who have impacted our lives, Intact America celebrates the “founding mother” of the intactivist movement—Marilyn Milos, RN. Thanks to Marilyn’s vision, passion, dedication, and leadership, thousands upon thousands of people across the country have found the courage to stand up for the rights of newborn children; countless babies have been spared the knife; and parents, doctors, and medical professionals are finally realizing that an intact penis is a normal penis.

As a young nurse, Marilyn witnessed a circumcision and heard screams that will haunt her to her grave. After hearing the doctor say, “You know, there is no medical reason for doing this,” Marilyn set out to tell parents and others the truth about circumcision. The organization she founded is the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers (NOCIRC), which has at its center the word “information.”

Since the advent of medical science, the rite of circumcision has been justified under successive waves of pseudoscience. Marilyn has taken them on, one wave at a time, with truthful information. Those screams she heard as a nurse are still all too common. But thanks to Marilyn’s tireless efforts, that is changing. We know for a fact that more babies now leave the hospital intact than those who don’t.

This year, in honor of Marilyn and all the other mothers who’ve had the courage to stand up in defense of baby boys, Intact America is launching the Marilyn Milos Education Fund. Donations to this fund will be used by both Intact America and NOCIRC solely to reach doctors, medical professionals, medical students, and parents all over America with the information that circumcision is medically unnecessary, harmful, and unethical.

As the American Academy of Pediatrics continues to threaten us with new recommendations in favor of circumcision, and as those with an interest in promoting circumcision trot out new justifications, one after the other, we must work harder than ever to get the truth out. Intact America needs your help. Marilyn needs your help. Every future parent who does not yet know that baby boys are fine just the way they’re born, needs your help. By joining forces, NOCIRC and Intact America have made the movement stronger. With your support, imagine how many more lives we can affect, how many more babies we can save? Donate now to the Marilyn Milos Education Fund.

Says Georganne Chapin, Executive Director of Intact America, “Marilyn is that rare person whose reaction to a single event can open up a moral universe. That circumcision she witnessed, and Marilyn’s response, set in motion a new human rights movement, one that for many years subjected its founder to mockery and derision. Marilyn gets up every morning and works until bedtime, organizing events, writing and editing papers, and fielding phone calls from parents worried about their sons, from men who are processing their loss, from curiosity seekers, and from the press. The circumcision rate in the United States is now at its lowest in 50 years, and it continues to fall. Intact America is immensely proud to have Marilyn as one of its founding members, and we honor her for her past and present work, for her wisdom compassion and bravery, for the future victory to which she may certainly lay claim, and for the MILLIONS of babies spared the painful loss of their normal sexual anatomy.” Please help Intact America to honor our mother Marilyn Milos, and to protect our baby boys.

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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.