About Us

Nurses for the Rights of the Child is a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the rights of infants and children to bodily integrity.  As health professionals, we specifically seek to protect non-consenting infants and children from surgical alteration of their healthy genitals.

Nurses for the Rights of the Child was founded in June 1995 by a group of nurses who had become R.N. Conscientious Objectors to infant circumcision at St. Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Read the story of the courageous nurses of St.Vincent Hospital here.

Our work includes:

  • Empowering, supporting, and advising nurses who want to help stop the genital cutting of infants and children, whether as conscientious objectors or as change agents.
  • Advocating for babies and children by educating the public that the forced amputation of a healthy body part of a non-consenting person – whether in the name of medicine, religion, or social custom – is a human rights violation.
  • Providing information to parents and parents-to-be about circumcision and the intact penis.
  • Educating health professionals about circumcision, the intact penis, and the ethics of neonatal circumcision, and promoting curriculum change in the training of health professionals.
  • Taking leadership in cooperating with others working in this country and abroad to promote the rights of children to bodily integrity.
  • Promoting the human rights principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989).

Contact Nurses for the Rights of the Child