Georganne Chapin

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 common practice of surgically altering (“circumcising”) the genitals of male children.

Growing up with socially aware, college professor parents, exposed to people from many backgrounds, and motivated by an innate sense of justice, Georganne received a BA in Anthropology, magna cum laude, from Barnard College, and a Master’s degree in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University. For 25 years, she served as chief executive officer of Hudson Health Plan, one of New York’s original Medicaid managed care organizations, taking the award-winning nonprofit insurer from a few hundred patients and a handful of staff members in 1989, to 150,000 patients, nearly 350 employees, and annual revenue of nearly $800 million when the company was acquired in 2014. She also founded the nonprofit Hudson Center for Health Equity and Quality, a company that creates software and provides consulting services designed to reduce administrative complexities, streamline and integrate data collection and reporting, and enhance access to healthcare for those in need.

When mid-career Georganne enrolled in an evening program at Pace University School of Law, she set about to explore the legal, ethical, and cultural issues underlying routine male circumcision, a subject that had interested her since witnessing the traumatic aftermath of the surgery conducted on her younger brother. In 2004, she graduated from Pace cum laude, with certificates in Health Law and International Law. Following her graduation, she taught Bioethics and Medicaid and Disability Law at Pace, and Bioethics in Dominican College’s doctoral program for advanced practice nurses.

Mentored by pioneers in the intactivist (anti-circumcision) movement, in 2008, Chapin co-founded Intact America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting boys from the routine amputation of their normal penile foreskins. Under her leadership, Intact America has become the leading voice defending the rights of all children to be free from medically unnecessary genital surgery to which they cannot consent. In addition, Intact America’s nationwide surveys have definitively documented tactics used by U.S. doctors and healthcare facilities to pathologize the male foreskin, pressure parents into circumcising their sons, and forcibly retracting the foreskins of intact boys—all of this creating potentially lifelong, iatrogenic harm. 

Chapin has published many articles and op-ed essays and has been interviewed widely on local, national and international television, radio and podcasts about ways the U.S. healthcare system exploits vulnerable patients, prioritizing profits over people’s basic healthcare needs. She cites routine, non-therapeutic infant circumcision as a glaring example of a practice that wastes money, harms boys and the men they will become, and compromises the well-being of their family members and intimate partners. This Penis Business: A Memoir is her first book.