LETTER TO THE INTACT AMERICA COMMUNITY
Dear Friend:
As 2022 comes to an end, I want to thank you for being part of Intact America, and for your commitment to ending the abusive practice of removing an intimate body part—the foreskin—from baby boys who cannot consent.
Now in its 15th year, I am proud to report that our organization is bigger, stronger, and more impactful than ever. I feel confident that IA is taking the right steps to end the routine cutting of baby boys’ genitals in America.
In 2022, we produced an international conference on child genital cutting, modeled after 15 prior symposia carried out over three decades by Marilyn Milos, founder of NOCIRC and Genital Autonomy-America. This dynamic event, held in Atlanta and streamed live for remote attendees, was a tremendous success. The conference brought together old and new participants and ideas, and an unprecedented level of optimism that we're getting closer to the tipping point, when public opinion will turn in our favor.
We're making progress. But we still face big challenges.
Intact America's national surveys show that circumcision persists because it is embedded throughout the entire U.S. medical system—including doctors, hospitals, academics, insurance companies, and the medical supply and human tissue industries. This predatory, $2-billion-dollar-a-year business thrives by needlessly harming a baby boy's penis, risking his health, and compromising his own and his future partners' sexual pleasure.
It is irrefutable that cutting a child's healthy genitals, whether that child is male, female or intersex, is child abuse. Up to now, though, both human and institutional perpetrators have been protected from accountability, at least in part because filing a formal complaint is difficult and usually ineffective.
But the voices protesting this travesty are getting louder and more numerous. Parents who have been misinformed and coerced into cutting their sons are reaching out for assistance in seeking redress. Healthcare professionals who have been railroaded into participating in the assembly line of hospital-based circumcision are saying, "I won't do this anymore; and I won't be silent about it."
As the largest intactivist organization in the world, Intact America has a duty to act.
Our newest project is a customer-facing data-collection and reporting project that will be publicized through national marketing and advertising, coupled with our extensive social media outreach. Expanding upon the work done by our colleagues at Doctors Opposing Circumcision, we will compile complaints about circumcision solicitation, circumcision injuries, and incidents of forcible foreskin retraction, the latter experienced by more than 40 percent of American boys.
Our database will streamline the submission of complaints to providers, health care facilities, state regulatory agencies, and a national quality-monitoring organization, and will track and their responses or failure to respond. Intact America will publicize these results widely, so that no one can dismiss our mission by saying, "I never heard anybody complain."
Another exciting announcement: In 2023, Intact America will be releasing two books through Lucid House Publishing. One, a memoir by Marilyn Milos, the "mother of the intactivist movement," is called Please Don’t Cut the Baby. The other is my own memoir, called This Penis Business.
It is my privilege to do this work and to have you as Intact America's partner. With the strength of your uncompromising voice and ongoing support, we will use our influence in 2023 and beyond to dismantle the predatory system that profits from irreparably harming baby boys and the men they will become. We will ensure that future children grow up whole.
