In 1996, it became illegal in the United States to perform the
operation commonly called “female genital mutilation” (FGM). That
law makes it clear that surgery is allowable only for specific
medical conditions. Appallingly, the American Academy of
Pediatrics (AAP) now wants to “compromise” the legal prohibition
and allow physicians to perform a ceremonial “nick” on the
genitalia of baby girls whose parents request the procedure.
Clearly, the AAP capitulated their principles for political
expediency. They excused their “nuanced” and “culturally
sensitive” decision on the basis that “some families might take
their daughters to other countries” for the entire
“circumcision,” so their “compromise” is meant to “avoid greater
harm.”
It is an open secret that the procedure is meant for baby
girls born into families among the 10 million Islamic followers
in the United States. As Mark Steyn put it: FGM is a “key pillar
of institutional misogyny in Islam: Its entire purpose is to deny
women sexual pleasure.”
The brutal FGM procedure is not a medical procedure;
instead it is a cultural, religious, or social practice. The
underground practice of altering or removing the female genital
organs is common in some African, Asian, and/or Islamic countries
such as Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, and Mali. Actually, the procedure
is prohibited in Africa, “in order to eradicate” the practice.
The African Protocol on the Rights of Women prohibits “in all
states” all forms of “female genital mutilation, scarification,
medicalisation and para-medicalisation in order to eradicate
them.”
How ironic that those living where the practice is most
common are trying to “eradicate” the procedure, while here in the
United States where the practice is rare, there is a move to
downplay the serious nature of the practice by introducing a
lesser degree of the procedure. How ironic, too, that
international progress condemning the procedure has expanded,
while here in the U.S. a medical association recommends
compromising our revulsion against the practice.
The World Health Organization estimates that about 140
million girls and women have endured clitoridectomies (typically
performed between infancy and 15 years old) and live with the
consequences — which, in addition to the immediate dangers of
infection and severe bleeding, can include long term problems
such as repeated urinary tract infections and childbirth
complications. The procedures are sometimes done under less than
ideal circumstances and with crude implements — without
anesthesia and without sterilized instruments.
The supposedly intelligent physicians in the AAP are
endorsing a policy for a brutal, sexist, non-medical procedure
that is universally condemned. Their own 1998 statement
recognized FGM as a human rights violation, and they opposed
“perpetuating a social practice with cultural implications for
the status of women.” Today, however, AAP members are more
enlightened; they no longer use the acronym, FGM, choosing
instead to recommend “female genital cutting (FGC) or ritual
genital cutting.” These terms are meant to be “neutral” and
“descriptive” rather than culturally insensitive. Ironically,
they oppose only those forms of FGM which “pose the risk of
physical or psychological harm” — as if ritual “nicks” have no
such risks. One writer described the “harm reduction” as similar
to “the difference between amputation and laceration.”
In other words, instead of protecting infants, children,
and young girls, the AAP employs a “philosophical equivocation”
to accommodate an inhumane Islamic practice that disfigures and
subjugates its women and denies them normal lives as wives and
mothers. Worse, the AAP accommodation gives legitimacy to a
barbaric and illegal practice and ensures its continuation as a
cultural rite of passage.
As a countermeasure — and, on the same day that the AAP
issued its statement — Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-New York) and Rep.
Mary Bono Mack (R-California) introduced H.R. 5137, The Girls
Protection Act, a bill that will expand the current federal law
by making it illegal to take a girl to another country to be
circumcised.
In addition to the legal prohibitions against FGM, mothers
have been a formidable obstacle to the procedure because they
don’t want their daughters to suffer through the same procedure
and its aftermath that they have endured. Decent people around
the world have joined with those mothers to decry the inhumanity
of FGM. How sad that the AAP is choosing to weaken the case of
those mothers by providing an alternative for their daughters
that will perhaps weaken those mothers’ valid concerns and
strengthen the case of those who want to continue the brutality
of the practice.
What will the AAP recommend next? Perhaps, as Equality Now
suggested, they can come up with a less binding way of “foot
binding”!
