Many years ago, during my training in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at a busy East London hospital that served a large Muslim community, I saw horrors that haunt me to this day and formed my unshakable belief that Female Genital Mutilation is abuse, by men, imposed on women, often carried out by women who have been through it themselves.
I saw women in relentless agony, struggling to urinate, crippled by monthly periods so painful they doubled over, ravaged by recurrent infections that potentially turned deadly as they aged.
Childbirth was an unspeakable nightmare: endless labour, massive tearing, torrents of blood, sepsis, and mothers dying needlessly unless doctors intervened to undo the closed vaginal opening.
None of this was fate or bad luck, just the mutilation of little girls that blighted their lives. Deliberate, non-medical butchery inflicted on girls, usually babies to teenagers, without anaesthetic. Barbarism with lifelong consequences.
The WHO is blunt: it has zero health benefits, only harm, which includes chronic pain, infections, infertility, sexual ruin, and psychological wreckage.
Girls die from it — one every 12 minutes in the worst-affected countries. That's why, in 1996, they ditched gentle euphemisms like "female circumcision" for genital mutilation. Words matter when the damage is this severe.
FGM has been banned in the UK since 1985 — not cultural imperialism, but basic moral and medical decency. Some abuses can't hide behind "tradition” or “culture”.
Witnessing the horrors of genital mutilation still haunts me. It's not racist to say so - Renee Hoenderkamp
|Getty Images
But now, in the UK in 2025, the Journal of Medical Ethics, part of the BMJ group, published a paper by 25 authors, led by anthropologist Fuambai Sia Ahmadu (who chose adult FGM and spends her career downplaying it), mostly non-doctors, slamming the ‘harms’ of the global anti-FGM campaign.
They contest that calling it mutilation is "reductive and stigmatising," rooted in "racialised stereotypes" and "Western sensationalism". They push rebranding to "traditional female genital practices" for "cultural complexity". In plain English, they want us to stop calling child abuse abuse.
Girls' bodies apparently matter less than cultural feelings. This is a grotesque moral contortion. Sickening. A medical ethics journal apparently focuses on ethics, platforms that apologists who trivialise carving up children's genitals.
It is unsurprising to me, though. The BMJ/BMA, like much of the NHS, is gripped by ideology that puts ‘cultural narratives’ over biology, identity politics over evidence-based medicine.
We saw it last year when the BMA plotted to sabotage the Cass Review, exposing puberty blocker risks to kids. The same rotten logic: ideology trumps harm, protecting belief over protecting children.
We've seen the fallout of this approach; grooming gangs ignored for decades lest anyone cry racism. Now it's FGMs: opposition allegedly violates ‘cultural parental rights’ and ‘community privacy’. Rubbish.
We ban kids from drinking, smoking, and working dangerous jobs because harm overrides parental rights when those decisions are as dangerous and wicked as FGM is. Relativise it, and the floodgates open: honour killings? Forced marriage? What next?
The paper sneers that FGM trauma is “presumed, not investigated", suffering "imposed" by Western views stripping agency. As an actual doctor, unlike most authors, I can tell you that the agony I saw was real.
Women so embedded in the cultural suffering they endured, begged doctors to re-stitch their vagina’s after childbirth (which is illegal in the UK) to stay "acceptable" to husbands. That's not agency, it's brainwashed patriarchy that sees mutilated mums mutilating their daughters.
The authors equate FGM with Western vaginoplasty? This is obscene. An adult consenting to surgery, under anaesthetic, without being condemned to lifelong torment when done. Intellectually fraudulent, morally bankrupt.
Anyone supporting this should question their licence. This isn't an intelligent debate; it's endangerment. Publishing this paper stains medicine. The Journal of Medical Ethics must retract now, or forfeit all credibility.
Girls' lives hang in the balance. We doctors who know the truth, frontline and hands-on, must roar louder. No more silence while ideology sanitises savagery. Protect the vulnerable. Call mutilation what it is. End it. Full stop.
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