Reply #51: That is exactly wrong.. FGM causes a host of complications including infertility.

[snagglepuss]

FGM doesn't simlpy prevent female sexual pleasure.


Excerpts from the AAP position paper:


"The physical complications associated with FGC may be acute or chronic. Early, life-threatening risks include hemorrhage, shock secondary to blood loss or pain, local infection and failure to heal, septicemia, tetanus, trauma to adjacent structures, and urinary retention.25,26 Infibulation (type 3 FGC) is often associated with long-term gynecologic or urinary tract difficulties. Common gynecologic problems involve the development of painful subcutaneous dermoid cysts and keloid formation along excised tissue edges. More serious complications include pelvic infection, dysmenorrhea, hematocolpos, painful intercourse, infertility, recurrent urinary tract infection, and urinary calculus formation. Pelvic examination is difficult or impossible for women who have been infibulated, and vaginal childbirth can present significant challenges. Scarring may prevent accurate monitoring of labor and fetal descent. Although deinfibulation may facilitate delivery, women who have undergone deinfibulation are at increased risk of complications, including perineal tears, wound infections, separation of repaired episiotomies, postpartum hemorrhage, and sepsis.27

Less well-understood are the psychological, sexual, and social consequences of FGC, because little research has been conducted in countries where the practice is endemic.28 However, personal accounts by women who have had a ritual genital procedure recount anxiety before the event, terror at being seized and forcibly held during the event, great difficulty during childbirth, and lack of sexual pleasure during intercourse.29 Some women have no recollection of the event, particularly if it was performed in their infancy. Other women have described the event in joyful terms, as a communal ritual that inducted them into adult female society.30


snip


"It is tragic that the same procedure that made the daughter marriageable may ultimately contribute to her infertility.21 Parents are often unaware of the harmful physical consequences of the custom, because the complications of FGC are attributed to other causes and are rarely discussed outside of the family.22"



Another point that doesn't get mentioned is that FGM increases male sexual pleasure as the vagina opening is reduced to the width of a pencil.



http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/...