[vc_empty_space height="-5px"]
a
Alienum phaedrum torquatos nec eu, vis detraxit periculis ex, nihil expetendis in mei. Mei an pericula euripidis, hinc partem. [vc_empty_space height="10px"]
[vc_empty_space height="20px"]

Call us (914) 400 1915

[email protected]

Tell America’s OBs: His Body, His Rights

Intact America dogbone placard selection - by Dan Bollinger
by
By Georganne Chapin
April 11, 2013

I’m heading to New Orleans on May 4 to protest outside the annual conference of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). As you may have read in Intact America’s last newsletter, we tried to rent a booth in the Exhibit Hall, but were rejected on the grounds that male circumcision is only “indirectly related to women’s health” and “…of only casual interest to members of ACOG.”

Indirectly related to women’s health?  What does that even mean?

Of only casual interest to ACOG members? Now, that would be funny, except for the fact that obstetricians (OBs) perform the majority of the million infant circumcisions that take place each year in the United States!  So why are they cutting babies?

Say NO to circumcision!

Join our protest in New Orleans and tell OBs to
stop cutting baby boys!

For an OB, circumcision is business. A moderately busy Midwestern doctor can easily make an extra $36,000 in annual income, if he’s good at selling circumcisions to the families of the 200 baby boys he delivers (calculating a 90 percent circumcision rate, and a very conservative $200 per circumcision). If he delivers more babies, and charges more per surgery, the income escalates.

Add to the money the fact that, once you’ve started cutting babies, it’s really hard to stop. Denial sets in; fear of admitting that you might be doing something wrong takes over; you worry that if you say “no,” you might lose your client (the parent) to another doctor who’ll be happy to trim up her son’s genitals for a fee.

But there is absolutely no excuse for infant circumcision. It’s an outrage that ACOG not only refuses to allow intactivists to distribute educational materials and engage in conversations with its members at their convention, but actually disclaims any responsibility for perpetuating this violation of boys’ rights. And it’s time for America’s OBs—trained to operate on women’s reproductive organs—to stop selling a surgery that will permanently alter the bodies and future sexual experiences of their patients’ sons.

I hope you can join me in New Orleans as we carry the message that, just as a girl is entitled to autonomy and bodily integrity, when a boy is born, it’s HIS body, HIS rights. Obstetricians need to get out of the baby-cutting business. They need to keep their hands off baby boys’ genitals.

Georganne Chapin

, , , , ,

Related Posts

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.