This morning’s NYT reports on an Italian doctor who is proposing a small symbolic cut to replace female genital mutilation, offering a procedure that really is roughly analagous to male circumcision (which the usual forms of female genital cutting are not). The question is, soughly, whether the substitution of a relatively humane procedure performed hygenically for a monstrous one performed unhygenically outweighs the cost, i.e. undermining the attempt to stamp out female genital cutting and the attitudes that generate it.
I note that this is not the first time this kind of thing has come up. A Seattle hospital considered doing precisely the same thing a number of years ago, until it was bullied out of it by activists and by Patricia Schroeder. I discuss the case, and suggest that the hospital might have been in the right, in The Multiculturalism of Fear (see pp. 53-56 and the surrounding chapter).
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