A Very Special Day: Bloodstained Men and My Son’s 24th Birthday

Today was a very special day. Several different strands of my activist life came together today.

I am always privileged to be able to participate in donning the bloodstained suit to graphically demonstrate with the Bloodstained Men (www.bloodstainedmen.com) regarding everyone’s right to an intact body. Today, February 4, 2026, is the day that BSM demonstrated in Berkeley including on the Sproul Steps in Sproul Plaza in front of the main administration building. Back in the spring of 1985, It was on these very steps that about 60 other folks and I went to sleep every night for a month in protest over the University of California’s [UC’s] investments in the apartheid regime of South Africa. (Our protest along with other protests did succeed in inducing the UC Regents to divest from South Africa the following year, in 1986.)

Today is the 24th birthday of my son, Eli Svoboda. He and I played tennis today (as we regularly do) as shown in the attached photo. He is much better than I but I do occasionally manage to sneak in a win here and there (not very often though).

Eli was born in Guam actually during the playing of that year’s Super Bowl on February 4, 2002. (Below is a photo of me holding him a few days or weeks after he was born.) In an article that I wrote just 2.5 years ago (https://www.arclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/Svoboda_When-the-Political-Becomes-Personal.pdf), I recount the story of events before his birth that enabled him to grow up as an intact young adult.

On April 4, 2002, NOCIRC awarded ARC its Human Rights Award. I had no information in advance about the award and Paula Brinkley, Eli’s mom and I stumbled into the location of Genital Integrity Awareness Week (GIAW) 2002 having just arrived on a virtually interminable series of plane flights from Guam. So although there may be a possibly staged appearance to the attached photos taken of me just as Marilyn was announcing our award, while I was stumbling into the GIAW hall holding Eli, and receiving the award for ARC appear possibly staged, they were actually the precise opposite and all of us were barely conscious at that point.

So today I was able to revisit the Sproul steps and joyfully join in the Bloodstained Men protest, play tennis with my son, and celebrate his birthday with an evening dinner.

What a day.

Steven Svoboda
Attorneys for the Rights of the Child