A Passion for Birth by Sheila Kitzinger

Author:Sheila Kitzinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pinter & Martin Ltd

Mutilating Sexual Surgery

When I became Co-Chairperson with Baroness Caroline Cox of The Foundation for Women’s Health Research and Development (FORWAD) in 1983, it was not with the idea of attacking a tradition that is a rite of passage in the culture of many African societies, including Somalia, Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, the Sudan, Mali and Ethiopia. For me there was an imperative to challenge genital mutilation in western culture too, and assert the rights of women everywhere to control what is done to our bodies.

Western campaigners against female circumcision often talk about clitoridectomy and infibulation (removal of the labia minora and labia majora) as if genital mutilation were practices of an alien culture. In fact, routine episiotomy in childbirth is our western way of female genital mutilation, and cosmetic operations to reshape the vagina and labia, sought by women who are convinced that their genitals are ugly, are on the increase. In the United States ‘designer laser vaginoplasty’ and laser vaginal ‘rejuvenation’ are one of the fastest growing forms of plastic surgery.

In Victorian times, in Britain, and the United States, excision of the clitoris was performed to stop women masturbating and in the belief that it cured, among other things, mental illness, insomnia, infertility and ‘nymphomania’. Isaac Baker Brown, an eminent surgeon, published his book On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy and Hysteria in the Female in 1886. Earlier, his paper in the British Medical Journal of 1867 describes how to cut out the clitoris using two hooked forceps and a hot iron.

The Swedish Save the Children Fund wanted to make it possible for women in large areas of North and East Africa to choose not to submit their daughters to female circumcision. It is done on little girls, not only Muslim, but often Christian families too, usually between four or five and 11 years old.

In may seem that female ‘circumcision’ is a minor operation. But it is not a matter of lopping off a piece of skin, but usually excising the whole of the clitoris, and in much of the Sudan, the Somali Republic, the Gambia and Mali, cutting away the labia as well, and stitching the wound so that only a tiny hole remains, through which urine and blood can be passed. Though in cities anaesthesia may be used, in country areas the operation is usually done without anaesthetic. It is believed that it makes the girl ‘clean’ and that if she does not have it she will be dirty, smell objectionable, be too highly sexed, and may not be able to bear children. Infection is common and she may not be able to pass urine for days or weeks after the surgery. She may haemorrhage and become anaemic. Abscesses and urinary tract and pelvic infections lead to infertility. Every now and then a child dies. After a man has tried to open up his bride using a knife, razor or acid, she is often rushed to hospital bleeding heavily and in terrible pain.

The practice persists in Britain, and some Harley Street surgeons specialise in it.

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