Do we really want this in America? I’d say that people who do this are incompatible with our civilization.
New York Times in 2015: DENVER — One immigrant woman told of visiting five gynecologists in recent months, each of whom gasped audibly at her anatomy.
Another went to see a doctor, only to become the subject of a gawking crew of medical residents.
And a third said she had never visited a gynecologist, despite experiencing abdominal pain since age 10, when her genitals were cut in her native Gambia. “I feel ashamed,” said the woman, Mariama Bojang, 25. “The doctor has probably never seen anything like this. How am I supposed to explain it?”
As the number of African immigrants in the United States has grown, so has the number of women living in this country who have undergone genital cutting. About half a million women in the United States have experienced the procedure or are likely to be subjected to it by their families, according to a preliminary report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That figure is about three times the last government estimate, made in 1997.
A study to be released Friday by the Population Reference Bureau is expected to show similar numbers.
Public health officials, however, are warning that some doctors and nurses are not prepared to deal with the physical and emotional complications associated with the procedure — sometimes called female genital mutilation or F.G.M./C — and in some cases may unintentionally traumatize the women they are trying to help.
“More and more health providers are going to be taking care of women who’ve undergone F.G.M./C,” said Dr. Nawal Nour, the director of the African Women’s Health Center in Boston, considered by many to be the leading clinic in the United States for women who have undergone genital cutting. Many of her patients, she said, describe “a humiliating time with health providers.”
Female genital cutting is an ancient tradition concentrated in 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East. It is on the decline in some communities but still the norm in others, with more than 90 percent of women cut in Somalia and Guinea. The cutting can be as limited as a small incision or as extensive as an infibulation, which can involve removing the clitoris and repositioning the labia to form a seal with a small opening.
The practice remains a respected tradition in some cultures, linked to purity and community acceptance, though it has no medical benefits and is commonly described as excruciatingly painful, as it is usually conducted without anesthesia.
It is outlawed in United States, and it is also illegal to send a girl abroad to undergo the process. But the country has had a surge of African immigrants in the last two decades, at least some of whom experienced it before they arrived. And some families flout the law and send their daughters abroad to be cut.
