Why Me? Read the Chapter from Please Don’t Cut The Baby
A nurse's memoir by Marilyn Milos, RN
Please Don’t Cut the Baby! A Nurse’s Memoir, by Marilyn Fayre Milos,
will be available for purchase on February 20, 2024. Pre-order your copy now.
Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is Chapter 28, entitled, Why Me?, from Please Don’t Cut the Baby, by Marilyn Milos, RN. Her new memoir shares her experience of witnessing an infant circumcision as a nurse forty years ago and becoming an internationally renown advocate for ending medically unnecessary circumcision. In this chapter, she answers the question, Why Me? Why was she moved to take action to protect all children’s genital integrity and how has this choice impacted her life. In the forthcoming chapter, entitle Why You?, Marilyn explains why everyone should take up this cause and how they can. We will share this chapter on Kindred in the coming weeks. In the meantime, enjoy the resources below, including our interview with Marilyn, and resources. These chapters are shared with permission of the publisher and Marilyn.
Read the foreword to the book, by Dr. Dean Edell, exclusively on Kindred here.
Listen to and download the podcast interview with Marilyn Milos, RN, here and at the end of this chapter.
Discover Kindred’s resources for ending circumcision here.
Read more about circumcision on Kindred here.
About the Book
Marilyn Fayre Milos was a nursing student on the obstetrical unit in 1979 when she first witnessed a baby being circumcised. The only person to step forward to comfort the infant as it writhed and screamed in pain during the surgery, she was shocked when the doctor said to her: “There is no medical reason for doing this.” From that moment on, Marilyn became an advocate for ending medically unnecessary circumcision, protecting our children, and educating parents, the public, and medical professionals about this cultural fraud and violation of human rights. She founded the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers (NOCIRC); organized fifteen international symposia; and became a spokesperson for promoting the genital integrity of all children. A story of determination, service, and love, Marilyn’s memoir describes the myths, misinformation, and economic forces driving non-religious infant circumcision in the United States, where it has become standard practice. Readers may find their own beliefs and assumptions challenged, and their hearts touched by this story of a life devoted to justice for babies and the adults they will become.
Please Don’t Cut the Baby
Chapter 28: Why Me?
As I finished up the work from my final symposium in 2018, wrote the 2019 GA-America Annual Newsletter, and began my work on this book, I noticed my vision was getting worse. The clouding of the lenses of my eyes was becoming more obvious, and I no longer felt safe driving at night. I called the ophthalmologist and had several appointments over the next few months.
In early 2020, I made an appointment with a local doctor for a required pre-surgical exam. However, the following week I received a call from my ophthalmologist, telling me that my surgery at Marin General Hospital (where I had been forced to resign 35 years earlier) was cancelled because, I was told, all elective surgeries had been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
As soon as I hung up, I called Marin General Hospital to ask whether circumcisions, which are an elective surgery, had been cancelled due to the pandemic. I was told that they were still doing circumcisions. So, my elective surgery, which would help me see better and drive safely had been canceled, but a completely unnecessary elective surgery performed on tiny babies who could not consent—a surgery that would neither protect nor enhance their health—was still being done? I was as incensed as the day I’d been told to keep my mouth shut about circumcision after recognizing that parents had a right to know the truth before signing their consent to the mutilation of their child. I didn’t sleep for two nights as my brain worked through options about what to do next. Two days later, I sent this letter to the Bradly P. Gilbert, Director of the California Department of Health Care Services, cc’ing Governor Gavin Newsom, two County Public Health officers, and the Division Director of Child Protective Services.
Re: Freeing up medical personnel and resources during COVID-19 pandemic emergency.
Dear Dr. Gilbert:
My cataract surgery at Marin General Hospital (MGH) in Marin County was cancelled recently because elective surgeries are not being done there at this time. So, I called MGH and asked if non-therapeutic neonatal circumcisions were also cancelled. I was told that circumcision is part of a “bundle package” for parents and they are still being performed at the hospital.
These elective, non-therapeutic surgeries use medical resources needed to fight the growing pandemic and they subject newborns to open wounds and infection. In the past few weeks, two newborn babies died from COVID- 19—one in New Mexico and one in Connecticut. Circumcision can always be done but there is no way to bring back a dead baby. The U.S. Surgeon General and ACOG warn against performing all elective surgeries. Doc- tors who are not complying with Federal and State recommendations must be reminded of their oath to “First, do no harm.”
COVID-19 cases in Marin County are increasing. A moratorium on elective, non-therapeutic circumcision would free up resources as well as personnel to care for COVID-19 patients.
I hope you will help protect our most vulnerable citizens, COVID-19 patients and babies.
Sincerely,
Marilyn Fayre Milos, RN, Executive Director, Genital Autonomy-America
None of them responded.
I decided not to have cataract surgery at Marin General Hospital (MGH) when it became available again. I do not want to have my medical care provided by a facility that cares more about money than the health, safety, and wellbeing of its patients, especially when those patients are babies! Several weeks later, hospitals in California were rated by county. Marin General Hospital rated third in our county, which only has three hospitals. That cinched my resolve not to be a patient there and validated my experiences from the beginning of my quest for knowledge about circumcision that administrators and personnel at MGH are ethically challenged.
Forty-one years after being forced to resign from Marin General Hospital, I learned that, after all my years of work with NOCIRC, other individuals, and organizations, after all the journal articles and medical books that have been published about short- and long-term harmful effects of circumcision, after the International Symposia NOCIRC sponsored that gave doctors the opportunity to learn while accumulating continuing education credits, after all our demonstrations and protests, after the testimony of courageous men who have chronicled the harm done to them by circumcision, there seems to have been no observable change at this hospital. If we still need evidence to prove that appealing to those who profit from an uncaring or corrupt system is worthless, this provides us with an excellent example.
I cc’d Georganne on my letter and she said Intact America was going to do something, too. Intact America submitted a petition to the Surgeon General of the United States, addressing the pandemic and mentioning that elective circumcisions are still being done at hospitals during the pandemic, when non-therapeutic genital cutting dangerously violates a child’s rights to security of person and bodily integrity. It was signed by people nationwide. The Surgeon General never responded.
Although we were disappointed with the reaction by government officials to the fact that healthcare providers continued to circumcise infants during the pandemic, we were, and remain, encouraged that growing numbers of parents are contacting our organizations and get- ting information from our websites.
In August 2020, however, something happened on the personal front of my family that was as troubling as the continuation of circumcisions during the pandemic. My oldest son Michael called to tell me he had cancer. Because of COVID-19, doctors had refused to see him earlier about the pain he was having in his lungs. He said, “Mom, I’m going to die from COVID, even though I’ve never had it, because doc- tors refused to see me for more than six months as my fast-growing cancer took over my body.”
On a more serious scale than denying me my cataract surgery, doc- tors had denied my son the opportunity to live longer by deciding not to see him for symptoms that would have identified his lung cancer six months earlier. So, the medical establishment could take a beat from treating serious symptoms that resulted in death; but they could not pause in the delivery of routine unnecessary surgery on newborns. This was a new low point for me. Was there any reason to trust doctors and hospital policies?
On June 26, 2021, ten months after his diagnosis, Michael Paul Edmiston Preston died.
I am no stranger to loss, but nothing compares to the loss of a child. As sadness began to fill my heart with increasing darkness, I read some- thing that changed my perspective. “Grief is love persevering.” The dark- ness I had felt was replaced with the light of loving memories. Now, when darkness lurks, I remember with gratitude the joy my son brought into my life.
Not long after that, my friend Patricia Acuña in Mexico sent these words that I shall never forget: “When our loved ones depart, they stop living among us to live within us.” That was a reminder that the Uni- verse is perfect as is.
Nine months after Michael’s death, my daughter was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Kate didn’t want to tell me because we’d just lost Michael, but I’m glad she did. Her first question to her doctor was, “Is this curable?” The doctor said it was and all her tests have shown the same thing. She had two masses removed from her bladder right away and then went through chemotherapy, which proved very trying for her. I hope and believe Kate will be the first person in our family to survive cancer. What a marvelous legacy for Kate… and a tremendous relief for her mother!
Before 1979, I wanted nothing more than to do the best I could in the field of nursing and to be a Certified Nurse Midwife, helping women and families have a joyful birth experience. When I received NurseWeek magazine’s Nursing Excellence Award in May 2001, more than two decades after I began my work to end circumcision, it was for “outstanding advocacy for the past 22 years on behalf of those among us who are the most vulnerable and unable to protect themselves—infants and children,” not for nursing or midwifery.
I’ve often wondered why it was me who took up the banner to end circumcision, as I was asked at dinner on the eve of the 2004 symposium in Padua, Italy. There were others who came before me who questioned or criticized circumcision and wrote articles about it. But for me, ending circumcision became my life’s work. Investing over 40 years in understanding the origins of circumcision, the arguments sur- rounding it, and realizing the issue is more than medical—it is a violation of human rights—has been a natural process, one that paralleled my development and maturing as a daughter, mother, wife, partner, friend, student, nurse.
At the beginning, I did not realize I would become a target for ridicule, hostility, hatred, and venom. I even received death threats over the phone: “Milos, you’re dead” and “We’ll get you.” No one ever took responsibility for the threats, and I was too angry to be scared for more than a minute. This misguided harassment impacted my life, but it didn’t stop me. People might criticize me but they couldn’t discredit me. I had the evidence.
This swirl of negative energy is a common response to new ideas that challenge our belief systems. Those familiar with hygiene protocols will know that in the 1870s Joseph Lister improved the chances for surviving surgery by using a spray of carbolic acid on wounds, dressings, and surgical tools, as well as by washing his hands before and after surgery. However, few remember Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian physician who in 1847 first advanced the idea of “hand hygiene” in medical settings, after observing fewer maternal deaths when doctors washed their hands in between bare-handed examinations of diseased corpses and delivering babies.
Why wasn’t Semmelweis credited with a revolutionary contribution to medicine? It was too soon and too radical for the medical establishment in Vienna. He was hounded and bullied and ended up in an asylum.
We think of medicine as a vitally progressive field in terms of innovations. Yet, it is undeniably slow to change when its conventions and methods are challenged, especially when there are financial incentives to stay the same.
Writing this memoir, I see more clearly how life prepared me for this calling. I was born to speak my truth, even if it resulted in one of my father’s punches. My friends included people like Lenny Bruce, who taught me to keep calling out injustice, and to treat with equal dignity those on each side of the social divide, whether they are poor or rich.
Prior to my exposure to the pain and trauma of circumcision, I was part of an amazing cultural awakening, starting with the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco, followed by endless opportunities for clarifying my values and beliefs as the world and our country transformed into tangible local and global communities. A single mother with three children, I became involved with education reform, co-creating an alternative school and, after Matt and I moved our family to a more rural area in 1970, an alternative Open Classroom within a public school that is still operating today. I had a rich and varied training ground for shaping my activism.
Becoming involved with midwives and assisting with natural home- births provided me with a network of alternative healthcare practitioners who fueled my desire to contribute to a beautiful birthing experience for every mother, father, and newborn. I was fiercely devoted to protecting the mother-infant bond. This led to my decision to become a Certified Nurse Midwife and my nursing school education. Then, once I witnessed a circumcision and heard the doctor say, “There is no medical reason for doing this,” there was no turning back from my call of duty to stop circumcision.
Why was it me who picked up the banner to crusade against the routine practice of circumcision? How could anyone witness a baby’s reaction to genital cutting and not react to the excruciating physical pain and trauma the baby obviously was enduring?
Why me? I didn’t have a choice. I could not turn away, could not close my eyes—and I certainly could not keep my mouth shut!
I recently asked a nursing-student colleague and long-time friend, Cynthia O’Keeffe, what she remembered about that first circumcision that we attended as students. Her perception was very much like mine and just as intense.
I think none of us was truly prepared for the ordeal we witnessed. The baby’s cries, the pediatrician’s comment that circumcision is medically unnecessary…and the poor infant, screaming until he checked out. You were the only one who took action to comfort the baby. I was transfixed with horror. I think I was truly afraid to move. The Clinical Group was silent and quite subdued during our debriefing, however, as we found our voices again, I think we found it both traumatic and completely irrational that anyone would voluntarily inflict so much pain and anguish on another, especially a newborn baby. The men, Michael, Eli, and Tony were quite upset; I remember Michael saying there was no way he would ever want that done to his child. I believe the majority of the group verbalized rejection of the surgery/mutilation.
I know my reaction—I promised no child of mine would ever be subjected to circumcision, ever. As if the attack on a newborn’s body isn’t bad enough, my eyes and rational judgment told me the result of circumcision HAS to be deformity, dysfunction, and lasting emotional trauma.
All newborn penises are tiny! How could a surgery on a small body part be anything but absolutely disastrous? Considering the size of a surgeon’s hands, and the tiny, essential structures in a penis, I find it incredible that no doctor has condemned the practice due to extreme risk of hemorrhage and death.
On reflection, the most telling response of the poor baby was his unconsciousness after repeated screams of pain. His tears were still wet on his cheeks as his sobs became little double breaths. This, I thought, is the so called “sleep” described by doctors when they insist “the surgery causes minimal pain.” Instead, what I saw was a response to excruciating pain. The mind cannot cope with physical damage and blocks the input by succumbing to an unconscious state. No wonder most babies cry when they are brought to the pediatrician’s office! The conscious mind may forget, but the BODY remembers!
I appreciate Cynthia sharing her viewpoint, which validates my own. Maybe I was the only one who stepped forward to comfort the baby because I was the oldest student and a mother of three sons. I had never witnessed or understood this horrific surgical “procedure” to which my sons had been subjected based on the doctors’ explanations and my husbands’ consent. Maybe it was horror that led me to fight for the baby’s right to an intact foreskin and against a purely cultural, non- medical, unethical practice to change nature’s design. But it was love of these miraculous and perfect tiny human beings that sustained me.
It took stamina to withstand the reactions to my stance on circumcision during the early years, but I always knew I had right on my side. That didn’t mean being rebuked, taunted, or losing friends didn’t hurt, but it did not stop me. Nothing could have.
In addition, I have been blessed with a playful sense of humor that has allowed me to laugh my way through some of the most preposterous, crazy, illogical, and irrational pronouncements you will ever encounter. Can you imagine not having a sense of humor when your life’s passion is protecting newborn foreskins? I have fallen into the arms of friends and colleagues in fits of laughter as many times as I have collapsed from fatigue and a momentary feeling of failure. I could not have gotten through the last 40-plus years without laughing at myself (and others), and acknowledging the absurdity of many situations, while at the same time being driven to action by the gravity of the consequences of doing nothing.