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New legislation signed into law by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder on Tuesday makes female genital mutilation a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. The laws apply both to doctors who conduct the procedure and parents who transport a child to undergo it. "Those who commit these horrendous crimes should be held accountable for their actions, and these bills stiffen the penalties for offenders while providing additional support to victims," Gov. Snyder said in a statement. "This legislation is an important step toward eliminating this despicable practice in Michigan while empowering victims to find healing and justice."
The governor also signed a bill allowing for a health professional's license or registration to be revoked if he or she is convicted of female genital mutilation.
Michigan is the 26th state to ban the practice; the state laws go into effect in October. The practice was banned in the United States in 1996, but Michigan's laws impose harsher penalties than the federal law. The package of bills comes amid the federal criminal trial of an emergency room doctor in Michigan, Jumana Nagarwala, charged with performing the procedure on multiple girls at a clinic in suburban Detroit. The Department of Justice says it believes the case is the first to be brought under the federal law. Another doctor and his wife are also charged in the case, the AP reports.
(Score: 3, Informative) by jcross on Sunday July 16 2017, @02:27AM (2 children)
I completely agree it's not the same order of magnitude. What bothers me is that people went to the trouble of passing a law against a very specific custom, when they could have protected the rights of children in a much broader way. For instance what about intersex people whose genitals are surgically altered at birth without their consent? I'm sure this can and does drastically diminish their sexual function in some cases, aside from the problems of being assigned what will later feel like the wrong gender to them. Are they only protected if they have XX chromosomes? What if they're XXY? My guess is this law wouldn't be brought to bear in a case like that because it's not the specific custom it was meant to prevent, and babies are unable to speak up for themselves. I just feel laws protecting human rights should be as comprehensive as possible, and avoid separating people into classes if it can be avoided.
As for the medical argument, it wouldn't be hard to make a case that FGM reduces STD transmission as well. I'm sure the studies haven't been done and hopefully won't be done to show this, but I'd guess a woman without a clitoris is a lot less likely to have sex at all except out of "spousal obligation", and of course with a complete sewing up it's pretty much out of the question. I mean if we're justifying medical procedures by saying they protect people against future risky behavior, where's the limit? Sewing up the nostrils at birth reduces greatly reduces the incidence of cocaine addiction, and you can still breathe through your mouth so "function is not impaired". But as another poster has said, even if there were such a medical benefit, practices like FGM, circumcision, and nose-sewing would still be unjustified.
In my opinion this is a *human* rights issue, and shouldn't be applied to only one kind of human. I'm pretty sure that's not misogyny. It would be misogynistic to say boys get cut and it's no big deal, so it should be okay for girls to get cut too, but I haven't seen anyone saying that so far. Why do we have to keep pitching things as a battle of the sexes, such that speaking up for men somehow means hating women? Especially after feminists have spent decades fighting the accusation that speaking up for women means hating men.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Sunday July 16 2017, @04:55AM (1 child)
I don't really disagree with you.
The law was passed to target Africans as a virtue signal against muslims (especially since this was already a felony), given that most cultures that practice this particular form of torture against women and girls are mostly (althought not exclusively) islamic cultures.
The issues surrounding surgical sexual assignment, as well as circumcision for babies are rather fraught, and are deserving of discussion around appropriateness and consent. However, the former is pretty rare (~1 in 2000 births are even *considered* for such procedures) and the latter, while problematic, especially around questions of consent, have extremely low rates of complications of any kind [circinfo.net].
That said, I'm not advocating either, nor am I saying that these issues shouldn't be discussed.
I do find it interesting that it's often that those who decry the "nanny state" (e.g., attempting to criminalize parents who let their kids walk home alone), yet demand that the same state prevent parents from making health choices for their minor children.
What does disturb me (and moved me to post the comment to which you responded) is that comparing removing the foreskin of the penis with cutting off the clitoris isn't a valid comparison. It's not even close.
As I pointed out in another comment about circumcision vs. cutting off the clitoris [soylentnews.org]:
While there is certainly no reason to ignore the issues surrounding infant gender (re)assignment surgery and male circumcision, the torture of girls and women by cutting off their clitoris, sewing their vaginas closed and other atrocities are orders of magnitude more dangerous and should be treated as such.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by jcross on Sunday July 16 2017, @03:01PM
Thanks for the clarification.
> I do find it interesting that it's often that those who decry the "nanny state" (e.g., attempting to criminalize parents who let their kids walk home alone), yet demand that the same state prevent parents from making health choices for their minor children.
Actually this is no contradiction at all if what you believe in is freedom, and consider the rights of children on an equal footing with the rights of adults as much as possible. I think the most basic reason to have a government at all is to protect the rights of the weak from the strong, because if you don't want that then anarchy will work just fine in many respects. Unfortunately, although US law purports to protect the "natural rights of man", there is a cutoff at age 18 or so below which these rights don't apply. I'm not going to enumerate all the constraints on children's rights, and you may argue they're all necessary in any case, but just consider that a parent assaulting their child is perfectly legal as long as the marks don't last more than 24 hours. So if you believe that freedom is good for children, allowing parents the freedom to grant their children freedom is good (e.g. kids can walk home alone), and so is protecting the freedom of children from their parents in extreme cases (e.g. no elective surgery without consent).