ARC Activities - Projects

• Boldt v. Boldt case

• Legal Support and Legal Representation

• United Nations Project

• Medicaid Project

• Hospital Risk Managers Project

• State Lawsuits over Misappropriation of Taxpayer Funds

• Co-founding of PR Network

• Research Projects

• Letter Writing Projects

Legal Support and Legal Representation

ARC maintains a bodily integrity legal defense fund and is preparing to expand its activity in direct litigation to protect babies. We have been actively participating as both attorneys of record and a legal support center on circumcision issues in cases chosen to advance the struggle to secure equal protection for, and broaden judicial and public recognition of, children's legal and human rights to bodily integrity and self-determination. One important case is still in progress. This case pits an Armenian man against his doctor who, when he went in for a vasectomy, instead erroneously circumcised him. The error has seriously harmed the plaintiff's sexuality, directly causing a recent separation from his wife. We were forced to delay the mediation due to the need to object to a serious conflict of interest that became evident with the original mediator. Trial is scheduled for September 2005. Co-counsel in this case is ARC Advisory Board Member Paul Garner, and Marc Angelucci, a 2000 graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles Law School, and Director of the National Coalition of Free Men-Los Angeles.

In a recently concluded case, the Armatas v. Elmhurst Hospital civil rights case, was filed in Federal Court over discrimination against Spanish speakers in provision of unconsented-to circumcisions, took us to Brooklyn for one month in July-August 2003. The child plaintiff in the case was circumcised despite his parents' repeated requests that he be left intact after a consent form signature was extracted from the mother while she was still upset following delivery and without an explanation to her in her native language, Spanish. Despite the dedicated work of our team that included Charles Bonner, Paul Garner, and myself, a highly biased Jewish visiting judge from Michigan managed to forestall justice through a series of startlingly arrogant maneuvers.

One of our main roles is strategizing on legal approaches to protecting bodily integrity in consultation with other activist individuals and organizations. Preparation continues for a possible qui tam action over state expense of taxpayer money for medically unnecessary and harmful procedures, such as circumcision.

We regularly receive requests from plaintiffs for referrals to attorneys familiar with genital mutilation issues. We refer each of these cases to appropriate attorneys for case evaluation. Often this results in lawsuits being filed. ARC maintains a bodily integrity legal defense fund and is preparing to expand its activity in direct litigation to protect babies.

ARC maintains a bodily integrity legal defense fund and is preparing to expand its activity in direct litigation to protect babies. We have been actively participating as both attorneys of record and a legal support center on circumcision issues in cases chosen to advance the struggle to secure equal protection for, and broaden judicial and public recognition of, children's legal and human rights to bodily integrity and self-determination. We regularly receive requests from plaintiffs for referrals to attorneys familiar with genital mutilation issues. We refer each of these cases to appropriate attorneys for case evaluation. Often this results in lawsuits being filed. We remain active in many of these cases as a resource and legal strategist in consultation with the attorney and the plaintiff.

United Nations Project

From July 29 through August 15, 2001, we were in Geneva, Switzerland, working independently and with a team we assembled to lobby the Sub-Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights of the United Nations to acknowledge male circumcision as a human rights violation. We presented a well-received seven-minute oral talk to the Sub-Commission on August 14, 2001 and also submitted a "written intervention" which is an official United Nations document, UN Document No. E/CN.4/Sub.2/2002/NGO/1 (March 23, 2002), the first one addressing male circumcision as a human rights violation. We met individually with a number of Sub-Commissioners as well as many other representatives of the United Nations and other organizations and countries and discussed our concerns with them, predictably receiving a range of responses. We distributed to all Sub-Commissioners as well as to a number of other attending countries, inter-governmental organizations, and non-governmental organizations a range of items including donated videotapes and CD's of a circumcision (the video was shot by Lawrence Barichello of INTACT), books, and articles. We also issued a press release announcing our work. Plans are underway to return with other organizations to present a unified front to the Sub-Commission. Thanks to the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers (NOCIRC) for allowing us to use its UN roster status to make this venture possible.

Medicaid Project

Our Medicaid project in consultation with the International Coalition for Genital Integrity (ICGI) has been highly successful. Amber Craig and Rio Cruz presented the project's findings in their talk entitled, "Stopping Wasteful Tax Funding for Circumcision" at the conference "Genital Integrity: A New Awareness" in Washington, D.C. on April 1, 2001. Our work has so far resulted in six more states" Arizona, Missouri, North Carolina, Montana, Utah, and most recently Florida" joining the six states which did not pay for Medicaid circumcisions as of January 1, 2001.

Hospital Risk Managers Project

Our joint project with Doctors Opposing Circumcision and ICGI has already resulted in scores of letters of warning being sent to circumcising hospitals informing them of possible adverse medical and legal consequences of their continuation of this practice, as well as a mailing to every hospital risk manager in the United States.

State Lawsuits over Misappropriation of Taxpayer Funds

We are currently preparing to file qui tam actions in a number of states regarding state expenditure of taxpayer money for medically unnecessary and harmful procedures, such as circumcision.

Co-founding of PR Network

Under Al Fields' leadership, ARC and NOCIRC worked together to create a PR Network (originally known as the "Fax Network") which should prove invaluable to the movement. The Fax Network already has more than 50 members in 31 states and several Canadian provinces. As the Fax Network's premier project, over 1,000 copies of an ARC Press Release announcing the publication of the Journal of Law and Medicine article were mailed out to leading print, radio and television media sites around the world.

Research Projects

We are hard at work on two projects which when completed will be posted in part on ARC's web site. We are preparing a fully updated version of a comprehensive annotated bibliography of cases and articles related to legal action over circumcision. We prepared the initial version of this bibliography in November 1999 to assist in a circumcision-related lawsuit. We maintain an ongoing compilation of all successful circumcision-based lawsuits in which the amount of the award or settlement is known. The results are available to interested and appropriately qualified parties. Our third project, the compilation and organization of a compendium of all anti-sexual-mutilation statutes throughout the world, was largely completed before being shelved due to the superseding publication of a similar list relating to FGC laws only in the book by Rahman and Toubia entitled Female Genital Mutilation: A Guide to Laws and Policies Worldwide.

Letter Writing Projects

A letter we wrote along with Doctors Opposing Circumcision to the Association of Texas Midwives may have played a role in its cancellation of its astonishing plan to stage a circumcision at its conference. Our letter to the Oakland Tribune corrected misstatements regarding the American Academy of Pediatrics' policy statement was published in the March 12, 1999 issue.

Preserving Physicians' Accountability - Letter dated June 19, 1998 to American Medical Association urging indefinite tabling of Resolution No. 224, which would mandate that the AMA "devise effective methods to protect Physicians from the criminalization of medicine," potentially helping to insulate doctors from liability for medically unjustified procedures such as childhood genital surgery.

Contesting Illegal Appropriation of Harvested Foreskins - Filed letter dated January 20, 1998 formally contesting the Food and Drug Administration's then pending consideration of an application to use baby boys' foreskins as a principal component of wound dressings without any consent from the patient.