Female genital mutilation in the United States
[1] While the practice is most common in Islamic populations in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, FGM is also widespread in immigrant communities and metropolitan areas in the United States, and was performed by some doctors regularly until the 1980s.
[2] CDC reports using information from the early 2010-2013 have shown a decrease in FGM in the United States, although growing levels of immigration cause numbers to appear higher.
[2] In addition to its prevalence in immigrant communities in the US, FGM was considered a standard medical procedure in America for most of the 19th and 20th centuries.
[7][6] With the passage of the federal law ban, the Female Genital Mutilation Act, in 1996, performing FGM on anyone under age 18 became a felony in the United States.
In early 2014, Equality Now campaigned with survivor and activist Jaha Dukureh, Representatives Joseph Crowley (D-NY) and Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), and The Guardian to petition the Obama Administration to conduct a new prevalence study into the current state of FGM in the U.S. as the first step towards its elimination.
Additionally, 40% of those reported are concentrated in 5 major metropolitan areas: New York, Washington, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Los Angeles, and Seattle.
[2] FGM in the United States is commonly associated with African and Asian migrants with an Islamic cultural background,[21] including the small Dawoodi Bohra Muslim community that has its roots in India.
[22] It has also anecdotally been found to occur in some local white conservative Christian communities in the American Midwest (as of June 2019, two white women from conservative Christian homes in North Dakota and Kentucky had come forward[22]), where female sexual pleasure is believed to be a "sin against God", and FGM is employed as a way to make women "obedient to God" and their husbands.
[25] Female sexuality was typically thought of only within the constructs of heterosexual marriage, and behaviors that strayed from this schema, such as masturbation, were deemed symptomatic, and often resulted in operation on the clitoris.
[4] Characterized by excessive nervous stimulation, this condition could often manifest in an overstimulation of the clitoris that women would attempt to quell with masturbation.
[29] This continued well into the 1970s, when a former co-worker served witness to several of Burt's victims, and he was fired and cast out of the medical community.
[3] The U.S. Congress required the Department of Health and Human services to provide information for medical students about treatment recommendations.
[32] The IIRARA mandated that visa recipients from 28 high-risk countries receive culturally appropriate information on the personal and legal repercussions of FGM in the United States at or before the time of entry.
[34][35] The Female Genital Mutilation Act included education and community outreach programs that provide information about the physical and emotional harm caused by FGM.
[8][34][36] On November 20, 2018, Federal Judge Barnard A. Friedman ruled the Female Genital Mutilation Act of 1996 unconstitutional because it exceeds the enumerated powers of Congress and cannot be justified by the commerce clause.
He was found guilty of aggravated battery and cruelty to children by the State of Georgia, which had no specific law on FGM at the time.
[41] In April 2017, Jumana Nagarwala, a doctor working at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, was charged with allegedly performing FGM at the Burhani Medical Clinic in Livonia, Michigan.
[45][42] But when the 1996 federal law that criminalized female genital mutilation was declared unconstitutional in 2018, all charges against the Attars and Nagarwala other than conspiracy and obstruction were dismissed.
[49] In 2010, the American Academy of Pediatrics came under fire for advising doctors to consider offering patients the option of "a ritual nick as a possible compromise to avoid greater harm".
The organization also subsequently clarified in a statement released in May 2010 that it "opposes all types of female genital cutting", and "counsels its members not to perform such procedures".
