Medical paper calls for 'compromise solution' for female genital mutilation

Two American OB-GYNs — Kavita Shah Arora, MD, and Allan J. Jacobs, MD — have called for a compromise solution to the unremitting practice of female genital mutilation in a paper published in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

In the paper, the authors argue that many years of advocacy and legislation has achieved little to quell the practice of FGM. The authors suggest what they describe as a more "nuanced" approach. They assert that in order to protect female children from the serious harm of nontherapeutic "female genital alteration," procedures that generally do not carry long-term medical risks should labeled as culturally sensitive and accepted as an equivalent to male circumcision in order to curtail the harm done by more extreme procedures.

The paper cites an anecdote from 1996 as an example of the type of utilitarian considerations for which they are advocating. At Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, physicians offered the Somali patient population an alternative procedure to what was customary in their culture. The physicians believed that if they didn't perform such a procedure, the girls would have likely been taken to Somalia and would have been subjected to barbarous FGM, consisting of the excision of the clitoris, labia minora and majora and the stitching closed of most of the vagina.

The paper has sparked some controversy, including an interrogative CNN piece and critique from medical peers that suggests the history of female circumcision has always been linked to patriarchal control of the female population and is no equivalent to male circumcision.

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